Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Direct and Indirect Observation 441
1996) to the conclusion that research that requires deception is never justified.
(For more on deception in participant observation, see Rynkiewick and Spradley
1976, Cassell 1982, Bulmer 1991, Brymer 1998, and Lauder 2003.)
Grades of Deception
But is all deception equally deceitful? Aren’t there grades of deception?
In the 1960s, Edward Hall and others (Hall 1963, 1966; Watson and Graves
1966) showed how people in different cultures use different ‘‘body language’’
to communicate—that is, they stand at different angles to one another, or at
different distances when engaging in serious vs. casual conversation. Hall
called this different use of space proxemics. He noted that people learn this
proxemic behavior as part of their early cultural learning and he hypothesized
that subcultural variations in spatial orientation often leads to breakdowns in
communication, isolation of minorities, and so on.
This seminal observation by an anthropologist set off a flurry of research
that continues to this day (for a review, see Farnell 1999). Early on, Aiello
and Jones (1971) studied the proxemic behavior of middle-class white and
lower-class Puerto Rican and black schoolchildren. They trained a group of
elementary schoolteachers to observe and code the distance and orientation of
pairs of children to one another during recess periods.
Sure enough, there were clear cultural and gender differences. White children
stand much farther apart in ordinary interaction than do either black or
Puerto Rican children. The point here is that the teachers were natural participants
in the system. The researchers trained these natural participants to be
observers in order to cut out any reactivity that outsiders might have caused
in doing the observation.
For his Master’s degree, Mark House studied shoppers in Nizhny Novgorod,
a city on the Volga River about 400 miles east of Moscow in the Volga
region. As he followed shoppers around, House held his little tape recorder to
his ear, as if he were talking on a cell phone, and dictated notes. Scherer
(1974) studied pairs of children in a schoolyard in Toronto. He used only
lower-class black and lower-class white children in his study, to control for
socioeconomic effects. Scherer adapted techniques from photogrammetry
(making surveys by using photographs). He mounted a camera in a park adjacent
to the schoolyard. Using a telephoto lens, he took unobtrusive shots of
pairs of children who were at least 30 meters away.
This got rid of the reactivity problem. Then Scherer devised a clever way
to measure the average distance between two children and did his analysis on
the quantitative data. Scherer found no significant differences in the distance