Transcript meth interview

When you are studying people’s
behaviour or asking them
questions, not only the values of
the researcher but the researcher's
responsibilities to those studied
have to be faced (Silverman 2000:
200).
…in terms of the amount of
control the researcher applies in
the interview situation.
Four interview situations
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Informal interviewing
Unstructured interviewing
Semistructured interviewing
Structured interviewing
First:
• Informal interviewing (lack of control
over the informant, environment, topic,
etc.)
• Lack of structure
• Method of choice during the first
phase of research
Second:
• Unstructured interviewing: minimum of
control over the informant’s responses
• Not at all like informal interviewing
• Most widely used technique by
cultural/social anthropologists
• Building initial rapport, access to particular kind
of informants
Unstructured interviewing is
useful for:
• Developing formal guides for semistructured
interviewing to learn what kind of questions to
include.
• Building initial rapport: before moving to more
formal interviews.
• Talking to informants who do not tolerate formal
interviews (semistructured and structured ones)
Third
• Semistructured interviewing: utilise when
the ethnographer has only one chance for an
interview.
• (based on the use of an interview guide
• Effective in projects where the ethnographer
deals with elite members
Fourth:
• Structured interviewing: all informants
are asked the same questions (uniformity)
• Questionnaires
Tape recorder
• Use in all situations
• Different types of transcriptions
• Not a substitute for note taking
Deference and expectancy effects
• 1.when informants tell you what they think
you want to know
• 2. Tendency from experimenters to obtain
results they expect
How do social/cultural
anthropologists collect qualitative
data?
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Video and audiotapes
Photographs
Newspaper clippings
Transcriptions of formal interviews
Notes on formal interviews
Personal letters
Texts written by locals
Field notes
Four types of field notes
• Jottings (“scratch notes”): no detail, general
information, key words, etc.
• The diary: personal, self-reflexive, refuge, copping
with adverse situations, etc.
• The log: running account of how you plan to
spend and how you spent time and money
• The notes: notes on method (M), ethnographic or
descriptive notes, and analytical notes.
notes on method (M)
• Notes about techniques you
discover in the field
ethnographic or descriptive
notes
• Notes on environments,
observation of process,
relationships
analytical notes
• Notes about making sense of
observations, conversations, interviews
Two strategies for observing
behavior
Obvious or reactive and
unobtrusive or nonreactive
Reactive:
• when people know you are observing them
• deference problems corrected by long term
observation
• Produces a lot of data (5 days of
observation produced 75,000 words)
• continuous monitoring (CM)
Nonreactive
• Studying people’s behavior without people
knowing about it.
• Includes all methods: Behavior traced studies,
Archival research, Content analysis, Disguised
observation
Behavior traced studies
• Graffiti study by Flores and Sechrest 1969
• Simultaneous analysis of graffiti in public toilets
of two cities
• Attitudes towards sexuality in two cultures
• Dealing with homosexuality: Chicago 42%,
Manila 2%
Archival research
• Truly nonreactive: no change on behaviour
(records of births and deaths, migration, etc.)
• Possible problems?
Content analysis:
• Fiction, non-fiction, recorded folktales,
newspapers
• Reduce the information of the texts to
patterns, variables and correlations
• Study of personal advertisements: Hirshman
1987
Disguised observation:
• (when the researcher pretends to join a group and
proceeds to record data about the group.)
• The members of the group do not know of
his/her observation and recording
• What are the possible problems with this
type of observation?