The purpose of this midterm is to go out into the field and record your observations by writing detailed field notes, researching your findings and writing a report of your experience. Be sure to follow the guidelines and remember you are writing to a general audience who may not be familiar with your subject. Research your findings and use the APA format. The directions to write a compare/contrast paper is included along with thesis guidelines and APA.
The field notes should be scanned in if they are hand written.
Write your field notes using the included – Guidelines for Observers.
Write a 4 to 5 page (APA) compare/contrast analysis of your observations. Use your field notes and any research your utilized.
Use at least 5 research resources.
**This is not a group project.
Field Notes Guide:
Ethnographers engage in participant observation in order to gain insight into cultural practices and phenomena. These insights develop over time and through repeated analysis of many aspects of our field sites. To facilitate this process, ethnographers must learn how to take useful and reliable notes regarding the details of life in their research contexts. These field notes will constitute a major part of the data on which later conclusions will be based.
Field notes should be written as soon as possible after leaving the field site, immediately if possible.
Even though we may not think so when we are participating and observing, we are all very likely to forget important details.
Plan to leave a block of time for writing just after leaving the research context.
Include in your field notes:
Date, time, and place of observation
Specific facts, numbers, details of what happens at the site
Sensory impressions: sights, sounds, textures, smells, taste
Personal responses to the fact of recording field notes
Specific words, phrases, summaries of conversations, and insider language
Questions about people or behaviors at the site for future investigation
Page numbers to help keep observations in order
There are 4 major parts of field notes, which should be kept distinct from one another in some way when we are writing them:
Jottings are the brief words or phrases written down while at the field site or in a situation about which more complete notes will be written later.
Usually recorded in a small notebook, jottings are intended to help us remember things we want to include when we write the full-fledged notes.
Description of everything we can remember about the occasion you are writing about – a meal, a ritual, a meeting, a sequence of events, etc.
While it is useful to focus primarily on things you did or observed which relate to the guiding question, some amount of general information is also helpful.
This information might help in writing a general description of the site later, but it may also help to link related phenomena to one another or to point our useful research directions later.
Analysis of what you learned in the setting regarding your guiding question and other related points.
This is how you will make links between the details described in section 2 above and the larger things you are learning about how culture works in this context.
What themes can you begin to identify regarding your guiding question?
What questions do you have to help focus your observation on subsequent visits? Can you begin to draw preliminary connections or potential conclusions based on what you learned?
Reflection on what you learned of a personal nature.
What was it like for you to be doing this research? What felt comfortable for you about being in this site and what felt uncomfortable?
In what ways did you connect with informants, an in what ways didn’t you?
While this is extremely important information, be especially careful to separate it from analysis.
GUIDELINES FOR OBSERVERS:
Observers try to uncover and record the unspoken common sense assumptions of the group that they are studying. Look for immediate and local meanings which appear to matter to the people you are observing.
Field notes should include writing; drawing maps and sketching activities is often very useful when trying to remember the details of what you have seen.
Include notes about body language, environment, and noise. What is going on around this context that may be shaping it?
Reflect on your own actions. Ethnographers alter themselves in order to fit into their contexts as unobtrusive observers and as participant observers. How much do you have to adapt yourself in order to learn about the context and culture that you are studying?
Try to find emic categories and terms that the participants themselves use. How do these emic concepts organize the activities that you are observing?
Systematically look for discrepant cases or anomalies. If most people seem to be doing an activity the same way, notice who does it differently. What seems to be going on here?
Try various kinds of observation. Be a silent observer one time, and talk
