Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

436 Chapter 15
You may feel awkward about walking around with a clipboard (and perhaps
a stopwatch) and writing down what people are doing—or with beeping people
and asking them to interrupt what they’re doing to help you get some data.
This is a reasonable concern, and direct observation is not for everyone. It’s
not a detached method, like sending out questionnaires and waiting for data to
be delivered to your doorstep.
It is not a fun method, either. Hanging out, participating in normal daily
activities with people, and writing up field notes at night is more enjoyable
than monitoring and recording what people are doing.
But many fieldworkers find that direct observation allows them to address
issues that are not easily studied by any other method. Grace Marquis (1990)
studied a shantytown in Lima, Peru. Children in households that kept chickens
were at higher risk for getting diarrhea than were other children. The chickens
left feces in the homes, and the feces contained an organism that causes diarrhea.
Continuous monitoring showed that children touched the chicken droppings
and, inevitably, touched their mouths with their hands. It was hard,
tedious work, but the payoff was serious.
Direct observation is time consuming, but random spot-checking of behavior
is a very cost effective and productive way to use some of your time in any
field project. When you’re studying a group that has clear boundaries (a village,
a hospital, a school), you can get very fine-grained data about people’s
behavior from a TA study, based on random spot checks. More importantly,
as you can see from table 15.2, with proper sampling you can generalize to
large populations (whole school districts, an entire aircraft manufacturing
plant, even cities) from spot checks of behavior, in ways that no other method
allows.
You may be concerned that a strictly observational approach to gathering
data about human behavior fails to capture the meaning of data for the actors.
This, too, is a legitimate concern. A classic example is Geertz’s (1973:6–7)
observation that a wink can be the result of getting a speck of dust in your eye
or a conscious act of conspiracy. And that’s just a wink. People can engage in
any of thousands of behaviors (skipping a class, wearing a tie, having their
navel pierced . . .) for many, many different reasons. Knowing the meaning of
behavior to others is essential to understanding it ourselves.
On the other hand, one of our most important goals in science is to constantly
challenge our own ideas about what things mean. That’s how theories
develop, are knocked down, and gain in their power to explain things. Why
shouldn’t we also challenge the theories—the explanations—that the people
we study give us for their own behavior?
Ask people who are coming out of a church, for example, why they just
spent 2 hours there. Some common responses include ‘‘to worship God,’’ ‘‘to