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outliers or anomalies. Cognitive mapping is also useful in eliciting the insider's
perspective. Asking a student to map out his or her walk to school with vari-
ous landmarks—for example, a route that identifies gang territories by
block—provides insight into how that individual sees the world.
As with projective techniques, the ethnographer requires some baseline
knowledge of the community before he or she can design and use such tech-
niques. Additional work is necessary after administering these devices to com-
prehend fully what the responses mean. These techniques can achieve the same
findings that interviews with structural and attribute questions yield—the
insider's perception of reality.
UNOBTRUSIVE MEASURES
I began this chapter on methods and techniques by stating that ethnographers
are human instruments, dependent on all their senses for data collection and
analysis. Most ethnographic methods are interactive: They involve dealing
with people. The ethnographer attempts to be as unobtrusive as possible to
minimize the effects on the participant's behavior. However, data collection
techniques—except for questionnaires—fundamentally depend on that human
interaction.
A variety of other measures, however, do not require human interaction and
can supplement interactive methods of data collection and analysis. These
methods require only that the ethnographer keep eyes and ears open. Ranging
from outcroppings to folktales, these unobtrusive measures allow the ethnog-
rapher to draw social and cultural inferences from physical evidence (Webb,
Campbell, Schwartz, & Sechrest, 2000).
Outcroppings
Outcropping is a geological term referring to a portion of the bedrock that
is visible on the surface—in other words, something that sticks out.
Outcroppings in inner-city ethnographic research include skyscrapers, burned-
out buildings, graffiti, the smell of urine on city streets, yards littered with
garbage, a Rolls Royce, and a syringe in the schoolyard. The researcher can
quickly estimate the relative wealth or poverty of an area from these outcrop-
pings. Initial inferences are possible without any human interaction. However,
such cues by themselves can be misleading. A house with all the modern con-
veniences and luxuries imaginable can signal wealth or financial overextension
verging on bankruptcy. The researcher must place each outcropping in a larger
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