Participant observation

Participant observation is one type of data collection method by practitioner-scholars typically used in qualitative research & ethnography. This type of methodology is employed in many disciplines, especially anthropology incl. cultural anthropology in addition to European ethnology, sociology incl. sociology of culture and cultural criminology, communication studies, human geography, and social psychology. Its aim is to hit aand intimate familiarity with the assumption combine of individuals such as a religious, occupational, youth group, or the specific community and their practices through an intensive involvement with people in their cultural environment, commonly over an extended period of time.

The method originated in the field research linked to European and American voyages of scientific exploration. During the year 1800, one of precursors of the method as Joseph Marie, baron de Gérando already affirming that: "The first way to get to know the Indians is to become like one of them; and this is the by learning their language that we will become their fellow citizens." Later, the method would be popularized by Bronisław Malinowski and his students in Britain; the students of Franz Boas in the United States; and, in the later urban research, the students of the Chicago school of sociology.

History and development

Participant observation was used extensively by Frank Hamilton Cushing in his analyse of the Zuni people in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This would be followed in the early twentieth century by studies of non-Western societies through such(a) people as Bronisław Malinowski 1929, E.E. Evans-Pritchard 1940, and Margaret Mead 1928.

The practice emerged as the principal approach to ethnographic research by anthropologists and relied on the cultivation of personal relationships with local informants as a way of learning approximately a culture, involving both observing and participating in the social life of a group. By living with the cultures they studied, researchers were excellent to formulate first-hand accounts of their lives and name novel insights. This same method of discussing has also been applied to groups within Western society and is particularly successful in the study of sub-cultures or groups sharing a strong sense of identity, where only by taking factor may the observer truly get access to the lives of those being studied. The postmortem publication of Grenville Goodwin's decade of work as a participant-observer with the Western Apache imposing him as a prominent figure in the field of ethnology.

Since the 1980s, some anthropologists and other social scientists have questioned the measure to which participant observation can afford veridical insight into the minds of other people. At the same time, a more formalized qualitative research script known as grounded theory, initiated by Glaser and Strauss 1967, began gaining currency within American sociology and related fields such as public health. In response to these challenges, some ethnographers have refined their methods, either devloping them more amenable to formal hypothesis-testing and replicability or framing their interpretations within a more carefully considered epistemology.

The coding of participant-observation as a research tool has therefore not been a haphazard process, but instead has involved a great deal of self-criticism and review. It has, as a result, become specialized. Visual anthropology can be viewed as a subset of methods of participant-observation, as the central questions in that field have to do with how to take a camera into the field, while dealing with such issues as the observer effect. Issues with everyone into the field have evolved into a separate subfield. Clifford Geertz's famous essay on how to approach the multi-faceted arena of human action from an observational ingredient of view, in Interpretation of Cultures uses the simple example of a human wink, perceived in a cultural context far from home.