Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Direct and Indirect Observation 439
But if you think deceiving landlords or realtors or the staff of mental hospitals
is something, read on.
The Tearoom Trade Study
Without telling people that he was studying them, Laud Humphreys (1975)
observed hundreds of homosexual acts among men in St. Louis, Missouri.
Humphreys’s study produced very important results. The men involved in this
tearoom trade, as it is called, came from all walks of life, and many were married
and living otherwise straight lives. Humphreys made it clear that he did
not engage in homosexual acts himself, but played the role of the ‘‘watch
queen,’’ or lookout, warning his informants when someone approached the
restroom. This deception and unobtrusive observation, however, did not cause
the storm of criticism that accompanied the first publication of Humphreys’s
work in 1970.
That was caused by Humphreys having taken his research a step further. He
jotted down the license plate numbers of the men who used the restroom for
quick, impersonal sex, and got their names and addresses from motor vehicle
records. He waited a year after doing his observational work, and then, on the
pretext that they had been randomly selected for inclusion in a general health
survey, he interviewed 100 of his research subjects in their homes.
Humphreys was careful to change his car, his hairstyle, and his dress.
According to him, his informants did not recognize him as the man who had
once played watch queen for them in public toilets. This is what made Humphreys’
research the focus of another debate, which is still going on, about the
ethics of nonreactive field observation.
Five years after the initial study was published, Humphreys himself said
that he had made a mistake. He had endangered the social, emotional, and
economic lives of people he studied. Had his files been subpoenaed, he could
not have claimed immunity. He decided at the time that he would go to jail
rather than hurt his informants (Humphreys 1975).
Humphreys was an ordained Episcopal priest who had held a parish for
more than a decade before going to graduate school. He was active in the Civil
Rights movement in the early 1960s and spent time in jail for committing
crimes of conscience. His credentials as an ethical person, conscious of his
responsibilities to others, were in good order. Everyone associated with him
agreed that Humphreys was totally committed to protecting his informants.
But listen to what Arlene Kaplan Daniels had to say about all this, in a letter
to Myron Glazer, a sociologist and ethnographer:
In my opinion, no one in the society deserves to be trusted with hot, incriminating
data. Let me repeat, no one. . . . We should not have to rely on the individual