Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
“what-if ” games with the data. For example, the ethnographer can exchange
or substitute figures on a departmental spreadsheet to determine the effects of
different assumptions and conditions. Electronic mail is often less inhibited
than general correspondence and thus quite revealing about office interrela-
tionships, turf, and various power struggles.
School records tell where the school has been, is, and plans to be in the
future (or at least what the party line says are the school goals). Lesson plans,
homework assignments, essays, and report cards (or the absence of any of
these outcroppings) are revealing sources of information about students, teach-
ers, parents, and administrators. Minutes from board of education and faculty
meetings provide useful retrospective information. The fieldworker needs per-
mission to gain access to these types of records, particularly the more sensi-
tive data. The number of written records stored in old file cabinets or files on
flash drives, hard drives, and servers can be staggering, however. Proper use of
this type of information can save the ethnographer years of work.
Proxemics and Kinesics
Proxemics and kinesics were discussed briefly in Chapter 2 in an explanation
of the difference between micro- and macrolevel studies. Briefly,
proxemics
is
the analysis of socially defined distance between people, and
kinesics
focuses on
body language (Birdwhistell, 1970; Hall, 1974). Students who remain physically
distant from their teachers may feel a tenuous relationship with them. In
American culture, a salesperson speaking about a product who is 2 inches away
from a prospective buyer's face has probably intruded on the buyer's sense of pri-
vate space. A skillful use of such intrusion may overwhelm the customer and
make the sale, but it is more likely to turn the customer off. Seating arrange-
ments at meetings have social meaning. At an advisory panel meeting in the
dropout study, the power brokers trying to control the meeting sat at one end of
the table, and their opponents established their own territory at the other end.
Shifts in the seating arrangements during the meeting evidenced shifts in power
and allegiance. The relative status and social distance between interviewer and
interviewee are often evident in the physical distance between them during the
interview. The interviewer who sits behind a desk throughout an interview is
sending a different message from the interviewer who comes around the desk
and sits alongside the interviewee. This seating arrangement may indicate how
the interviewer feels about dominant and subordinate relationships or it may
indicate the interviewer's level of comfort or unease in this type of stressful
social situation. The fieldworker should record these observations, and—as with
many of the techniques in this chapter—put them in a larger context for inter-
pretation and to cross-check the findings with other data.
