Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

442 Chapter 15
between pairs of white or black children. (For more on proxemics, see Ardener
1981, Kendon 1981, and Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003.)
Levine (1997) used casual, unobtrusive observation to study the walking
speed of people in different size cities and Rotton et al. (1990) tested whether
people walk faster in a climate-controlled mall or in open-air shopping. Contrary
to popular wisdom, heat didn’t slow down urban shoppers of either sex.
And Sykes et al. (1990) sat unobtrusively in bars, counting the number of
drinks people consumed. Confirming popular wisdom, people drink faster and
spend less time in bars when they are in groups of two or more than when
they’re alone.
I don’t consider these field studies of shoppers, children, pedestrians, and
drinkers in bars to be unethical. The people being studied were observed in
the course of their ordinary activities, out in the open, in truly public places.
Despite making unobtrusive observations, or taking surreptitious pictures, the
deception involved was passive—it didn’t involve ‘‘taking in’’ the subjects of
the research, making them believe one thing to get them to do another. I don’t
think that any real invasion of privacy occurred.
The Micturition Study
You can’t say that about the work of Middlemist et al. (1976). They wanted
to measure the length of time it takes for men to begin urinating, how long
men continue to urinate, and whether these things are affected by how close
men stand to each other in public toilets. (Why they wanted to know these
things is another story.)
At first, the researchers pretended to be combing their hair at the sink in a
public toilet at a university. They tracked the time between the sound of a fly
being unzipped and urine hitting the water in the urinal as the time for onset;
then they noted how long it took for the sound of urine to stop hitting the
water in the urinal, and counted this as the duration of each event. They noted
whether subjects were standing alone, next to someone, or one or two urinals
away from someone.
In general, the closer a man stood to another man, the longer it took him to
begin urinating and the shorter the duration of the event. This confirmed laboratory
research showing that social stress inhibits relaxation of the urethral
sphincter in men, thus inhibiting flow of urine.
Middlemist et al. decided to control the independent variable—how far
away another man was from each subject. They placed ‘‘BEING CLEANED’’
signs on some urinals, and forced unsuspecting men to use a particular urinal
in a public toilet. Then a confederate stood next to the subject, or one urinal
away, or did not appear at all. The observer hid in a toilet stall next to the