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This analysis considers HIV/AIDS care policy and practice in relation to Indiana's alternative Medicaid expansion plan. Since enactment of the Ryan White CARE Act in 1990, federally-funded HIV/AIDS programs have been crucial to the American public health care landscape. However, Medicaid expansion provisions of the 2010 Affordable Care Act have prompted new questions concerning the need for a vertical HIV/AIDS health program, how best to coordinate access to HIV/AIDS care, services eligibility criteria, and standards of best practice. Drawing from participant observation and ethnographic interviews among HIV-positive women and care providers, I document women's barriers to health insurance access and consider how the work of insurance enrollment and bureaucratic navigation were shifted onto HIV/AIDS care providers. I argue that neoliberal logics of “personal responsibility” underpinning Indiana's expansion plan saddled women and care providers with new financial and social obligations that ultimately dimi...

This article examines survival among homeless persons (“pavement dwellers”) in Delhi, India. In particular, we explore the role of formal and informal relationships in meeting the demands of daily existence and how and when public social welfare programs assist pavement dwellers. Over fifteen months, beginning in 2013, participant observation was conducted, and approximately 200 individuals (homeless persons, government officials, and NGO representatives) were interviewed in Hindi or English. Triangulated data including documents, interviews, and fieldnotes were subjected to thematic analyses. Results produced five themes: persistent illegality, dependence on charitable others, personhood and worthiness, migration and social isolation, and precarious relationships and distrust. Based on the research findings, we make recommendations for legal inclusion, decriminalization, access to health care, and income support for parents with dependent children. Broader concerns about global homelessness are also disc...

Indigenous populations worldwide endure disparities in access to biomedical health care. This article suggests that institutional bureaucracy is an important and underexamined barrier to health care for indigenous Maya people in Guatemala. Based on interviews, participant observation, and seven years of experience with a non-governmental organization's patient advocacy program, we examine how biomedical institutions' administrative systems impede indigenous patients' abilities to obtain specialty medical treatments. Particularly, we examine the roles that street-level bureaucrats such as security guards and nurses play in restricting access to health care as well as how bureaucratic adherence to procedure can override clinical concerns in ways that actively harm patient health. We also highlight how indigenous Maya patients with limited Spanish language abilities and low literacy tend not to have the cultural capital to successfully navigate hospital environments. As such, bureaucracy in biomedical instit...

Increasingly, immigrants are settling in rural “new destinations,” where low-wage, low-skilled jobs have been created as part of a broad restructuring of the United States economy. This trend has spurred not only the rapid growth of many small towns but also their demographic, linguistic, and cultural transformation. Nowhere is this more evident than in Garden City, Kansas, a micropolitan community Stull has studied for three decades. This changing geography of immigration is manifest in its public schools, where four of five students are members of so-called minorities, many of them recent immigrants or refugees, and three of four are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. Studying educators' experiences in this unique district can enrich the otherwise generic notions of diversity that so often inform teacher educators and educational policy makers. This article is based on a five-month ethnographic study involving participant observation and in-depth interviews with administrators and teachers in G...

This paper explores a deceptively simple question: why do peasant farmers participate in Fair Trade coffee networks? Campaigns touting Fair Trade often suggest that farmers are incentivized to participate due to price premiums and social development benefits. However, a growing literature documenting development outcomes in coffee farming communities suggests that farmers do not reap the benefits of Fair Trade in the way they are presented in the global North. I draw upon ethnographic research in a community that is one the earliest suppliers of Fair Trade in Nicaragua. Combining participant observation, political economic analysis, and oral history interviews, I explore a conflict over out-of-network coffee sales in 2005 that threatened to undermine supplies of high quality coffee critical to the growth of the producer organization and by extension the Fair Trade network. The conflict and its aftermath reveal place-based moral economic entanglements between farmers and producer organizations in Nicaragua that shape whether farmers deliver the goods. I argue that farmers participate in Fair Trade networks in spite of low household incomes and cycles of indebtedness because of the ability of the producer organization to maintain a sense of solidarity linking coffee contracts to a longer agrarian struggle.

Literature on collaborative planning and adaptive co-management often proclaims that well-managed processes of discovering shared interests enable consensus among conflicting groups on resource management plans. However, fundamental differences in identity-based values can derail such agreements. Through participant observation, we examine the Clearwater Basin Collaborative (CBC), a voluntary group representing 24 divergent interests in the management of the Nez Perce and Clearwater National Forests and surrounding areas. Despite renowned success at civic discourse and relationship building, the CBC has yet to reach consensus on wilderness designations and solutions to county economies affected by timber sales. The paper demonstrates how concepts from economic anthropology for gifting and exchange increase the understanding of how collaborative processes address intractable conflicts through social relationships, thus contributing to collaborative and communicative planning theory and practice.

Media accounts on debates around immigration reform in the United States have framed a range of arguments from supporting tougher immigration enforcement to providing amnesty to the large numbers of unauthorized immigrants currently living in the country. The main objective of this article is to discuss the potential social and economic impacts of the Georgia anti-immigration bill House Bill (HB) 87 as framed by newspaper stories leading up to the bill's passage in 2011. The second objective is to examine differences in argument framing of the media coverage between major metropolitan newspapers compared to bilingual (English and Spanish) newspapers in Georgia. The third objective is to report on participant observation of political advocacy meetings held in rural Georgia to advise distressed Latino immigrants about the bill's implications. A content analysis was conducted of four months of newspaper articles from three major metropolitan newspapers and two bilingual newspapers. The metropolitan newspaper...

Few anthropologists or other ethnographers discuss incorporating focus groups into long-term fieldwork. This article demonstrates how they can be a surprisingly enriching addition by attending to their strategic use as supplements to participant observation, surveys and interviews in long-term, mixed method research on gender-based violence and changing codes of masculinity in Northeast Brazil. The author argues two principal points: 1) that shortcomings of focus groups can be offset by using them in conjunction with other research techniques, and 2) that when so employed, focus groups can potentially improve the depth, validity, and collaborative aspects of interpretivist ethnographic work in counter-intuitive ways.

This purpose of this research is to understand how young adult homeless working men experience homelessness in an oil boom and prosperous city, Calgary, Alberta. Following a period of participant observation, five purposively selected working homeless men aged 20-28 years participated in in-depth individual interviews, which were initiated around their daily food routine. We found that the men experienced moderate to severe food insecurity and reported negative physical health effects, including weight loss, related to their inability to acquire sufficient food to meet work demands. The interviews led to other findings: the men accepted full responsibility for their homelessness, internalized hegemonic ideologies of self-blame, and praised Calgary as a great city, in dissonance with their experience of discrimination and privation. The working homeless men also negotiated their identity through unspoken honour rules and through the construction of an informal system of resources and social networks. Altho...

This paper reports on changing inter-generational relations among long-term Liberian refugees in the Buduburam settlement camp in Ghana. Four months of fieldwork were conducted in the settlement, using a range of qualitative methods to elicit emic understandings of the nature and causes of changes in inter-generational relations: focus groups, individual interviews, participant observation, and diary-keeping by refugees. Various aspects of the refugee experience, in particular the strategies used by young people to cope with long-term livelihood insecurity, are seen by camp inhabitants to have led to a reconfiguration of relationships between older and younger people and even to the blurring of generational categories. There is a powerful discourse linking economic impotence of older people with the erosion of inter-generational relations of authority and deference. This is seen to have encouraged both a devaluation of old age and experience within the community and an increase in tensions between young and old. In response, some older people choose to transgress generational boundaries by adopting aspects of youth culture and style, while younger people express considerable ambivalence about their own ability to make the transition from youth to adulthood. We argue that the camp and policy context of Buduburam diminishes the ability of refugees to become full social and economic adults in their own terms, as well as pushing young people in particular into risky livelihoods strategies. This has important implications for the ability of everyone, both young and old, to cope with the demands of refugee life.

This article, and the collection of essays it introduces, discusses the development and use of participatory mapping (PM) in Latin America. The methodology, with roots in participant observation and collaborative research, represents the fullest involvement of local people who are trained to do research or applied work with the researcher, facilitator, or team. PM transforms cognitive spatial knowledge into map and descriptive forms. Two types exist: one type, including participatory action research mapping (PARM) and participatory rural appraisal mapping (PRAM), uses mapping for social action; the other, participatory research mapping (PRM), aims at research. The PM approach developed among geographers and anthropologists studying indigenous populations in Latin America. The articles in the collection detail five different PM projects working with about 20 different indigenous populations, living in some of the region’s most important conservation lands in Mosquitia, Veraguas, Darien, and western Amazonia. The projects show how PM has become a “keystone activity” in a wide range of research and development work. This novel methodology for collecting geographic information is helping to meet a variety of research and societal needs. Indeed, the superior results from some applications challenge even the most deeply rooted norms about the construction of cartographic knowledge.

How do we preserve wide-ranging ethnography, and not retreat to interviews alone, in the dense and increasingly enormous cities of our urbanizing world? Interview-based fieldwork presents several dangers, as well-delineated by Barth. On the other hand, rising demands for historical, political-economic, and theoretical contextualization threaten to overwhelm the distinctive contribution of systematic ethnography. As one solution, several settings for productive urban fieldwork that were utilized in a team study of a multiethnic New York City neighborhood are discussed—commercial locations, houses of worship, secular rituals, and local political fields and arenas. In conclusion, ways are identified in which research in such settings is generative of new fieldwork, more precise contextualization, and more powerful theory.

The social contexts in which drug injection occurs, the social roles drug injectors assume, and associated risk behaviors for infection with blood-borne pathogens remain inadequately understood. This study is based on over 10 years of ethnographic research among drug injectors in Dayton, Ohio. Specifically, fieldnotes from participant observation and semistructured interviews are used to deconstruct what constitutes a "shooting gallery" from the perspective of drug injectors. In addition, the social role of individuals who inject others for a fee—"injection doctors"—is examined. Results demonstrate that shooting galleries differ significantly from the accepted epidemiological concept which highlights the presence of needle renting—a practice that increases risk for infection with HIV, HBV, and HCV. Results suggest that needle renting did not occur in Dayton's shooting galleries after 1989. Shooting galleries differ significantly across geographic space, thereby suggesting that quantitative studies based o...

Jordan is facing a serious problem with regard to its water supply. This problem has implications for the distribution of childhood diarrhea. Previous anthropological studies have related diarrheal illnesses to both water quality and quantity. This project has applied an integrative biocultural model to the study of the cultural responses to the water crisis among Palestinians living in two urban sites in Amman-Jordan. This study was carried out over a one-year period. Research phases included: an ethnographic phase, baseline censuses, morbidity surveys, and collection of water samples for microbial analysis. Participant observation and structured and semi-structured interviews in households provided information about the different cultural and environmental factors that influenced the distribution of diarrhea. These factors covered: mothers' age, educational levels, parity, income, household structure, breastfeeding and gender ideology. The biological factor was investigated by analyzing water specimens taken during family visits. Morbidity data indicated that the occurrence of diarrhea among children under five in Hassan site was two and a half times as great as that in Mahatta. In both sites, females infants accounted for the highest number of diarrheal cases. Income, mother's age, and education showed no significant impact on the spread of diarrhea, while lack of water, parity, breastfeeding, and household structure were significantly associated with the occurrence of diarrhea.

The major methodological enterprise of anthropology — fieldwork — is the result of cooperation between anthropologists and native informants in a process of participant observation and questioning. Informants convey information ("data") to anthropologists in a variety of forms. I would claim that such transfers of information are managed by informants in ways that they perceive as to their benefit. Here I compare the ways in which informants in two cultures, Japanese townspeople and Ethiopian immigrants in Israel, manage their relations with an anthropologist and manage the sorts of information he receives as well. Control of information is maintained through selective approaches to the ethnographer, monitoring his activities via social networks in which he is peripherally embedded, prevarication, procrastination, and rewards for perceived "proper" behaviors. I suggest that both the anthropologist and his informants operate with a dearth of information about one another, and that the sorts of information ...

The consequences of structural change in advanced industrial society are examined with regard to male-female relations at a college that, until recently, admitted only men. Special attention is focused on conflicts which emerge as female and male students attempt to cope with the admission of women. In this regard, the struggle for power, both covert and overt, is studied as the men attempt to maintain their position and the newly arrived women try to establish a niche in this formerly all-male world. Such issues as the relative resource base of males and females and the struggle over the utility of ascriptive and achievement criteria in the treatment of fellow students are examined in detail. Data are drawn from participant observation and from student surveys.

Based on fieldwork conducted in a rural community in south-central Norway from 1988-1990, I provide ethnographic insight into the state agricultural bureaucracy, the influence of the state on agricultural conditions and local cultural constructs of farming, and the interplay between community-based notions of rural identity and modern farming. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and surveys among farmers and state agricultural organizations, I show how the state and its policies create conditions within which farmers make operating decisions and shape their conceptions of farming.

This article utilizes a microlevel analysis to understand employee social relations within the hotel industry in the burgeoning tourism zone of Huatulco, Oaxaca, Mexico. Participant observation and semistructured interviews revealed a series of tensions that were exacerbated by a union/non-union division among workers. In this case workers in non-unionized jobs fared significantly better, both economically and socially, than did their unionized co-workers. The study demonstrates the cyclical patterns of employment which impose union control on workers in less stable and more physically rigorous jobs. Union employees discuss at length their dissatisfaction with the union and reveal the workplace subtleties which hegemonically maintain them in disadvantaged positions. Finally, the article addresses how workers adapt, accommodate and resist—both directly and indirectly—behavioral and ideological workplace pressures.

Focus groups continue to grow in popularity as a method of applied social research. The two authors, anthropologically trained ethnographers, show how a particular focus group with former LSD-using adolescents dovetailed with other ethnographic data. By looking at a focus group transcript using a simplified version of techniques in conversational analysis, and by interpreting the utterances as indexes of more comprehensive "folk-models" derived from other data, focus groups yield richer understandings than a simple stand-alone use can provide.

As US companies strive to compete in the global marketplace, managers who in the past never left the home office must now work with foreign colleagues. This paper provides a theoretical framework integrating culture, total quality, participant observation, and ethnography which has been integrated into a learning process for US-based managers and scientists who work with foreign colleagues. It discusses how Pharmco, a pharmaceutical subsidiary of a major US multinational, developed processes by which US-based managers and scientists learn to operate successfully in Japan and are using the learned processes in other cultures. It discusses the methods used by an anthropologically trained manager to demonstrate the need to learn anthropological tools and to use them to advantage in the business world. Empirical evidence indicates the success of the program.

Although the financial remittances sent by male Mexican migrant workers residing in the United States can result in higher standards of living for their families and home communities, out-migration may lead to increased migrant problem drinking and sexual risk behaviors, which may in turn impact these same communities of origin. Based on semi-structured interviewing (n=60) and participant observation in a migrant sending community in central Mexico and a receiving community in the Northeastern United States, this paper explores the effects of out-migration on HIV risk and problem drinking among United States-based migrants from a small agricultural community in the Mexican state of Puebla. We argue that problem drinking and risky sexual behaviors among these migrant workers have had significant consequences for their home community in terms of diminished remittances, the introduction of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, and loss of husbands or kinsmen to automobile accidents. Moreover, although rumor and gossip between the two communities serve as a form of social control, they may also contribute to increased problem drinking and sexual risk.

This paper addresses an area largely neglected in the literature on research methods and the experience of fieldwork in anthropology—namely, the methodological and subjective issue of the dangers anthropologists face while in the field. It begins with a brief review of the literature on methods with reference to this issue, and a discussion of some factors that have contributed to the fact that certain problems of physical safety for fieldworkers have become more prominent today than ever before in the past. The second part of the paper illustrates some of these problems by presenting the example of fieldwork/research in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I begin with the experiences of other researchers in Belfast, and then discuss my own experience, focussing on dangerous aspects and how these were managed through a conscious effort at impression management. The third part of the paper returns to a more theoretical or abstract level, presenting recommendations for managing some of the dangers inherent in conduc...

Reviewing feedback toward one's own research is gratifying. Criticism is, of course, at the heart of science and I was in support of seeing the reviews published. The two evaluations of my work on Filipino self-help and peacemaking (Austin 1995) offer a mixed bag of critiques. Some, if not most, of the comments by Paredes represent rather minor complaints. Others, including those by Nadeau and Suminguit are more substantive. Several points are in order in reference to ethnographic methodology which the critics seem to gloss over. First, as any number of methods texts will suggest, qualitative research, and participant observation in particular, may reap findings of highest validity. The researcher looks, listens, directly experiences, and makes an interpretation which at least to the researcher is accurate and true. Unfortunately, the same results may suffer in regards to reliability. This is the fate of ethnography and surely of the lone fieldworker. This is why replication, particularly in the instance of fieldwork, is a hallmark of science. The critics do not refer to their own ethnography in the province of Lanao del Norte (Mindanao) in scolding me for my work. Particularly in regards to Paredes, it appears that she has spent some time in the Philippines and is simply peering through different lenses than I and that some of my findings have stepped on toes. A second methodological note is that the critical points, several from Paredes and most of those from Nadeau and Suminguit, provoke continued interest and dialogue. In such cases, I view the critical comments in a productive light and see numerous opportunities for additional hypothesis construction and testing by future researchers.

For both practical and ethical reasons, ethnographers should convey to the people with whom they work a reasonably accurate notion of who they are and what they are doing (Richardson 1953:34). Although fieldworkers may choose from a variety of different strategies of observation and participation (Gold 1958; Hanna 1965). they have an obligation to represent themselves in a straightforward manner to those whose cooperation they seek (Barnes 1967:204; Jarvie 1969: 506) and this should be one of the first steps in the fieldwork process (Pelto and Pelto 1973:249). However, despite even the most conscientious efforts at explanation, people may not accept ethnographers' accounts of themselves at face value. The role of fieldworkers in the local community is always the mixed result of both their efforts to define it and the natives' interpretation of those efforts (Paul 1953:43 1; Wintrob 1969:69). Moreover, often the researcher's social identity undergoes periodic redefinition throughout the course of fieldwork as observer and observed learn more of each other and adjust their expectations accordingly (Janes 196 1). Given both the negotiative and the developmental nature of the ethnographer's status in the community, gossip concerning his or her identity and motives must be viewed as an almost inevitable feature of the fieldwork enterprise. When anthropologists describe inaccurate characterizations of their identity, they invariably portray them as inimical to developing the kind of rapport which is so vital to successful participant observation (e.g., Wax 1 957: 1 35ff.; Berreman 1962: 17; Agar 1980:58-6 1). If, following Freilich, rapport is defined as "a conditional agreement to communicate" (1970b:540), suspicions about the intentions of the anthropologist certainly may undermine its development in many circumstances (den Hollander 1967: 13). Yet, a rumor about the ethnographer's identity and intentions may also be a form of communication in its own right and its analysis can provide insight into both the culture being studied and the nature of participant observation. A series of rumors about my identity and motives emerged while I was studying a working class neighborhood in the city of Seville, Spain. In this paper I argue that these rumors can be best understood as symbolic markers of the progressive development of rapport and not as obstacles to its establishment. First, I will describe my efforts to explain my task and gain sufficient rapport with the residents of the neighborhood to allow for the collection of rich and reliable data. Then, I will describe the sequence of rumors that developed to account for my presence in Seville. Finally, I will offer an interpretation of the meaning of these rumors.

Based on participant observation and other qualitative data collected at 15 institutions for the mentally retarded, this study is directed to determining how institutional officials deal with outside criticism of their facilities. Over the past decade and a half, the legitimacy of institutions for the retarded has been challenged by professionals, courts, parent groups, and the media. Officials have reacted to outside criticism by developing new legitimating myths, increasingly sophisticated impression-management techniques, and detailed rationales for the all-too-visible discrepancy between goals and practices. Thus, this paper is concerned with the symbolic nature of the institution's struggle for survival.

This paper concerns the phenomenon of rapport in participant observation. It is divided into two parts. Part one concerns a critical evaluation of the sociological literature on rapport and presents an alternative definition of the subject matter. In particular, rapport is defined as the process whereby the researcher becomes competent to membership by first displaying an awareness that membership is problematic and must be negotiated, and second by demonstrating a salient knowledge of the essential features by which subject members distinguish themselves from nonmembers. This demonstration is a necessary condition for instituting an ongoing relationship of trust within which researcher and subjects can engage in acts of communication and the construction of intersubjective meaning.Part two explores the development of rapport in the author's field work among police. It is suggested that status and gender are the two most basic categories which define membership in the policeman's world. "Real cops" must d...

Behavioral decision research has offered two principal classes of models as candidates for representing human decision processes: compensatory (or linear additive) and noncompensatory (or hierarchical). Experimental research has found evidence for both types of models, and it has been argued that decision processes may depend largely on the context of the decision task being performed. This study takes a fresh look at these competing models by examining behavioral data from a natural decision task: American grocery shopping. The methodology is based upon participant observation and the analysis of verbal protocols recorded in supermarkets. In contrast to some experimental results, very few of the cases examined in this study show clear evidence for compensatory behavior. Shoppers appear to evaluate grocery items in ways that allow them to avoid trade-offs on attributes of quality, quantity, and price.

Sam Fujisaka is presently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. John Grayzel, who holds a J.D. and is a member of the New York State Bar, works for USAID in Mauritania. Fujisaka is presently conducting field research in Bolivia. The authors wish to express their thanks to Hoyt Cupp, Superintendent of the Oregon State Penitentiary, for his gracious cooperation; to the inmates and employees of the institution for their acceptance and assistance; and to Charles Hoff for his continued encouragement of our project. I N 1973 WE COMPLETED an ethnographic study of the Oregon State Penitentiary. In doing separate but coordinated research, each investigator developed relationships with significantly different populations of informants representative of varying subgroups within the overall inmate population. As a result, each investigator arrived at divergent impressions and analyses of prison life. In retrospect, we maintain that each of our personal backgrounds, biases, and attitudes became important field variables. Further, due to the nature of the population studied and the institutional context, an unavoidable determinant of our respective inmate samples was the extent to which particular ranges of inmates were more suited and responsive to each of us as individuals rather than as objective researchers. The point is offered that in social research requiring intensive participant observation, the intentional expression of personal orientation can be methodologically valuable. We believe that this is particularly applicable vis-a-vis the prison milieu, as demonstrated not only by our own experience but that of several other previous workers in this field. T o illustrate these points, we describe the research and its findings, discuss the particular demands of penitentiary research, provide brief samplings of our respective sets of informants, and draw relevant profiles of ourselves. Implications for nonprison research are also considered.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the modes of behavior, demographic composition, social structure, and paths of mobility that characterize organized nudism. The data come from three sources : ( 1 ) two successive summers of participant observation in camps in the United States and Europe, (2) interviews with 101 nudists from the Chicago area, and (3) mailed questionnaires completed by 617 nudists located throughout the United States and Canada.

A comparison of interethnic drinking patterns demonstrates how the outcome of social revolution differs in two contrasting communities in Bolivia. Drastic social reforms introduced in the 1950's were explicitly intended to weaken the control of mestizo landlords and to give peasants a greater share of wealth and power. Anthropological research conducted between 1956 and 1965, combining directed and non-directed interviews with participant observation in two towns of about the same size and similar agricultural, commercial, and administrative importance, reveals both the pervasiveness and the inconsistency of revolutionary change in that ethnically diverse country. Around Montero, mestizo landlords used to drink occasionally with the Camba tenant farmers on their haciendas, but there is now almost no sociability between the groups. By contrast, around Coroico, where mestizo landlords used to scorn the Aymara tenant farmers as an almost untouchable servile caste, they now symbolize new relationships by drinking together in limited contexts. These diametrically contrasting changes in interethnic drinking reflect significant changes in the political, economic, and other social systems of the communities.

In social research, validation of measurement can best be achieved according to the level of agreement between two or more efforts to measure the same concept through maximally different methods; reliability can be tested through comparison of maximally similar techniques measuring the same phenomenon. The range of techniques which can be brought into play in the various forms of participant observation can be so wide as to provide an excellent basis for measurement validation; also, this breadth of technique can be combined with repetition for reliability assessment. In addition, then, to providing a general context for understanding human behavior, participant observation provides the possibility of effective validation and reliability testing of social measurement.

The writer worked in a midwestern department store as a participant observer for six months; he was a section manager for four and one-half months and a salesman for one and one-half, during the Christmas rush. Because no one was aware that he was a researcher, he could not use one of the open methods of recording and counting interactions among the people in the selling department. This led him to develop a new "gadget," designed particularly for use in participant-observation situations. It took him nine weeks to set it up for use.

This paper has three objectives: ( 1) to describe an application of the hypothetical situation in individual and group interviewing; (2) to modify the concept of "illness referral system" as used by several other investigators; and (3) to contribute to the ethnography of Spanish American culture. The data were gathered from 1959 through 1962 on field trips totaling about seventeen months. The summer of 1959 was spent as a participant observer studying the cultural context of health behavior in Abajo (a fictitious name), a village of approximately 600 persons in northern New Mexico. The summers of 1960 and 1961 were utilized to interview acculturated urban migrants and parteramedicas (midwife-health specialists) in or near two cities of 5,000 and 35,000 population within 100 miles of the village. Finally, seven months of 1962 were spent in Abajo investigating factionalism and social structure. Although all of the material gathered on these occasions contributed to the overall understanding of health action...

One of the first, as well as classic, statements on techniques of participant observation is that of Florence Kluckhohn, who defines participant observations as a …… conscious and systematic sharing, in so far as circumstances permit, in the life activities and, on occasion, in the interests and effects of a group of persons.

Although recent essays about participant observations have extended our understanding of that research method and its problematic aspects, few methodologists have scrutinized intensively the processes by which roles are developed in this type of fieldwork or the relationship of role development to the data gathered. Our purpose in reviewing our own experiences as participant observers in a longitudinal study of baccalaureate student nurses is to explore these questions. We have also studied reports of the encounters of other researchers in participant observation. Using information from such experiences, we have tried to outline and interpret the characteristic processes of role defining in this type of research. We have restricted ourselves to consideration of fieldwork situations in which the involved parties are mutually aware of the research, thus avoiding the special problems of role definitions in hidden research.

In the search for meaning and understanding in human relationships a significant number of sociologists in the classical tradition, as well as in contemporary research, have recognized the importance of participant observation in methodology. The place of this technique in the methodology of social sciences has yet to be thoroughly examined. It still remains a questionable technique for some social scientists largely because it raises some of the most fundamental questions about epistemology and challenges the traditions of science.

British social and American cultural anthropology have both long been based on field work, and it can be argued that no student can become a fullfledged anthropologist without an extended sojourn as a participant observer among a people whose culture differs from his own. Such a requirement may set the standards of apprenticeship a bit too high. Nevertheless, participant observation results in an outlook that makes anthropologists anthropologists and distinguishes them in some important respects from most sociologists, political scientists, economists, and psychologists. The outlook is hard to gain except through personal, firsthand experience. It would appear therefore that, if undergraduate anthropology students and graduates minoring in anthropology are to appreciate this special feature, they are as much in need of field experience as graduate majors in anthropology. The student who plans to become a professional anthropologist must of course ultimately carry out a piece of original research, but there is no reason why his early training need differ radically from that of other anthropology students who have no such professional plans. For this initial training, a field work laboratory that is easily accessible to all students seems desirable for the reasons outlined in the following paragraphs.

The time and place of occurrence of that social phenomenon which we call a crisis situation is the focal point in this study of a rehabilitation center. Special attention is given to the factors associated with the occurrence of such crises. The method of participant observation, as delineated by Becker and Geer, was used to gather both qualitative data on the social processes associated with individual crises and quantitative data on the number of crises recorded. The analysis of the quantitative data utilized a time-and-place analytical technique roughly analogous to that of early medical epidemiology. The overall aim is to present a partially "controlled" set of crisis situations and to analyze these in terms of three possible points of view. This kind of ex post facto analysis has admitted disadvantages, but as essentially exploratory research in an unusual setting, this type of approach does offer some advantages.

Three methods of data collection have traditionally been used to investigate human behavior in a social situation: interviewing, participant observation, and the small groups experiment. Each of these methods has been subjected to criticism and has fairly serious disadvantages. The information collected from interviews may be beclouded by the problem of recall. Participant observation is costly because it demands a high ratio of observers to observed. Further, this method presents the problem of the selection of relevant behavior. The small group experiment removes the behavior from its usual context and, hence, leads to a lack of clarity about the importance of effects observed to general behavior.

This case study deals with the proposed construction of a hydroelectric dam in the Dominican Republic and illustrates some of the problems facing the anthropologist who undertakes fieldwork in a modern, industrialized, complex society. In participant observation, the anthropologist frequently finds himself adopting the value position of that segment of the population with whom he is working. Obviously, when working with multiple segments of a complex society, conflicting value positions will present themselves.This paper deals with the frustrations which may arise when the anthropologist attempts to view a problem from the perspective of several different, often conflicting, interests. It is suggested, however, that the broadest possible viewpoint is a valuable tool in uncovering many of the elements critical to an overall understanding of the event or institution being examined. The conclusion is that the hydroelectric dam, now being built in the Dominican Republic, is not likely to fulfill the dreams an...

The most complete form of the sociological datum, after all, is the form in which the participant observer gathers it: An observation of some social event, the events which precede and follow it, and explanations of its meaning by participants and spectators, before, during, and after its occurrence. Such a datum gives us more information about the event under study than data gathered by any other sociological method. Participant observation can thus provide us with a yardstick against which to measure the completeness of data gathered in other ways, a model which can serve to let us know what orders of information escape us when we use other methods.

Insofar as the paper by Becker and Geer says: "Participant observation is a very useful way of collecting data, and here are some illustrations to show how useful we found it in one study," I can take no issue with them. On the contrary, I profited from their discussion of the method and their illustrations of its use.

This paper describes the results of the first systematic investigation of ex-mental patients residing in a large Manhattan Single Room Occupancy hotel. Utilizing a "Network Profile" questionnaire, personal interviews, and participant observation, the study focuses on the relationship of social networks to the degree of personality disturbance and the chances of remaining in a nonhospitalized environment. The findings indicate that: (1) schizophrenics have significantly fewer numbers of personal contacts than nonpsychotics; however, even the most impaired schizophrenics are not totally isolated; (2) within the schizophrenic spectrum, there are differences regarding network size, multiplexity, directionality of relationships, and degree of connectedness; these findings are correlated with the ability of schizophrenics with minimal residual deficits to become important members of the hotel community; (3) small, nonmultiplex networks with a low degree of connectedness are correlated with more frequent rehospitalizations.

We read Martin Trow's "Comment"1 on our "Participant Observation and Interviewing: A Comparison"2 with interest and profit. An unfortunate ambiguity in key terms led Trow to misinterpret our position radically. We would like to clear up the confusion briefly and also to discuss a few interesting questions raised in his argument.