Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

424 Chapter 15
the public rooms of several households in New York City. Families gave their
permission, of course, and were guaranteed legal control over the cameras during
the study and of the videotapes after the cameras were removed. Teams of
observers monitored the equipment from remote locations. Later, the continuous
verbal and nonverbal data were coded to study regularities in interpersonal
relations in families.
Anna Lou Dehavenon (1978), for example, studied two black and two white
families for 3 weeks and coded their nonverbal behavior for such things as
compliance with requests and the distribution and consumption of foods in the
households. Dehavenon’s data showed that the amount of authoritarianism in
the four families correlated perfectly with income differences. The lower the
family income, the more superordinate behavior in the home (1978:3).
One would hypothesize, from participant observation alone, that this was
the case. But testing this kind of hypothesis requires the sort of quantified data
that straightforward, direct observation provides. (See Sharff [1979] and Reiss
[1985] for two more studies of households using the Harris videotapes.)
As video cameras have gotten smaller, easier to use, and less expensive,
more field researchers have been using this technology for close examination
of behavior streams. Brigitte Jordan, for example, used videotape in her study
of birthing events across cultures (1992a; also Jordan and Henderson 1993).
Video is now used routinely in studies by anthropologists of consumer
behavior. Observers at Planmetrics, a marketing research firm, videotaped 70
volunteer parents, for over 200 hours, as the volunteers diapered their babies.
The research was done on contract with Kimberly-Clark, manufacturer of
‘‘Huggies,’’ a brand of disposable diapers. The cameras were not hidden, and
after a while people just went about their business as usual, according to Steven
Barnett, the anthropologist who led the study.
Close observation showed that many parents could not tell whether their
babies needed a diaper change, so the researchers recommended that the diapers
contain an exterior chemical strip that changed color when the baby was
wet. The observers also noticed that parents were powdering their babies’ legs
and that parents were treating the red marks left by the diaper gathers as if the
marks were diaper rash. The firm recommended that the gathers be redesigned
so that there would be no more red marks (Associated Press, 1 October 1985;
The Wall Street Journal, September 4, 1986:29).
CM and Reactivity
Finally, there are two ways to lower reactivity in continuous monitoring.
One of them is participant observation. Once you’ve built up rapport and trust
in a field situation, people are less likely to change their behavior when you’re