Participant Observation Methodology

The Methodology of Participant Observation

• Participant observation is acknowledged in both classical and contemporary sociological research as an important methodology.
• The technique has not been thoroughly assessed in the social sciences
• Some social scientists consider it questionable due to fundamental issues about epistemology and challenges to scientific traditions.
• There is a need to address these questions and challenges with larger perspectives.
• Examines the social role of the participant observer, questions of epistemology, challenges to scientific standards, and the potential for new research perspectives.
• Summary statements about the participant observer's role are made based on existing research to guide the analysis of methodological foundations.

The Social Role

• The participant observer engages in the life activities and shares the feelings of people in face-to-face interactions.
• The goal of participant observation is conscious and systematic sharing in life activities, interests, and concerns of a group, as circumstances allow.
• Researchers have found that although a participant observer changes through participation, they must maintain detachment.
• Some detachment is required as they are not entirely "sharing" the experience
• The role involves both detachment and personal involvement.
• The nature, not the presence, of emotional involvement is key.
• Sympathetic identification involves empathic communication and imaginative participation.
• Interested curiosity and objective inquiry are intended to aid understanding.
• Researchers must adopt a role within the culture being observed.
• It is important to meet the conditions for role selection.
• The social role is shaped both by research design and cultural context.
• Roles can be general or specific, active or passive, complementary, and may be concealed or revealed.
• Scientific interests need cultural context.
• They also should be interdependent with the people being studied.
• The aim is to understand the uniformities of culture, in the existing predictable state.
• Cultural role makes scientific aims achievable.
• Personal connection to the group helps realize scientific objectives.
• Methodologies, hypotheses, experimental design, etc. remain objectively documented but can be adapted.
• Cultural and scientific roles are complementary and interdependent.
• The people's personal lives are vital in active participant observation to avoid distortion.
• Valuing subjects increases the likelihood of true understanding.
• The social role of the researcher becomes integrated into the cultural life of the observed.
• The researcher and observed share the role of reflecting the social process.
• Elements that go into participant observer technique are fundamental to the social act.
• The technique of participant observation refines out of social process.

Epistemological background: Naturalism and Idealism

• A researcher's technique evolves from philosophical traditions and epistemological beliefs about the origin of knowledge.
• Two major traditions behind development of the social sciences are naturalism and idealism.
• Both philosophies have changed since their origins in the seventeenth century.
• Thomas Hobbes conceived all of nature as materialistic.
• All human actions could be reduced to particles of matter in motion.
• Jeremy Bentham believed man's actions could be determined by weighing pleasure/pain consequences.
• Karl Marx based economic determinism into particle theory and physiological theory.
• It can be broadened to include behavior as the base for understanding and predicting actions using neopositivists
• This retains the deterministic-mechanistic image of man and quantifies behavior.

Modern Idealism

• Modern expressions began with Berkeley, who said that the external world had no real existence outside mental processes.
• Since physical properties cannot be known outside the mind, the mind itself is the source of knowledge.
• Later, in Kant and Hegel, physical reality was accepted but the mind was still the source and creator of knowledge.
• Personal idealism focuses upon personality as the source of knowledge.
• The source of knowledge is experience itself with its nuances.
• Early philosophies are interpenetrating as philosophy explores the foundation of science.

The Empirical, Rational, and Intuitive Sources

• Empiricism and rationalism are commonly accepted among social scientists.
• Both have been linked to philosophies, with empiricism associated with naturalism.
• Rationalism relies on concepts and the structure of thought to find/create knowledge.
• The dispute over which is more important is no longer serious; both interplay in experience and are basic to scientific knowledge.
• The intuitive capacity of the mind is an important part of one's work, while the nonrational, nonsensible, affective experience of observation is a must.
• Feelings reveal knowledge alongside rational-empirical sources.
• This position requires persuasion/validation, often through trusted traditions.
• Pragmatism: Test capacity to discard knowledge that withstand the test of time.
• Productiveness should be to predict or anticipate human action.
• Clarifying this position is important to understanding human connections.

Scientific Data

• Data is symbolic as all culture is symbolic.
• Culture studies need a brief review of types of symbols.

The Sign

• Meaning is marked by the symbol beginning of culture.
• Sign: An earlier and direct form of communication expressed in gestures, verbal and non-verbal sounds.

Denotative Symbols

• The denotative symbol is a start which stands for observable objects
• The denotative symbol leads to communication involving not the unique objects
• It becomes the meanings of objects of similar nature.
• Forming Denotative Symbols creates the processes of extraction.
• To know an idea requires learning at the sense reactive level.
• To know a table requires previous learning at the tactile or sense reactive level
• The learner must have had a sense of surface, an impression of solidity, of dimension, etc.
• One can come together to form something new
• One needs general image which has a central figure and peripheral possibilities of form
• Judgement is needed as to whether different meets primary or secondary levels

Abstract Symbols

• Images are from visibility outside of the world.
• Symbolic fundament is out of common experience of which ideas and concepts become the source of references.
• Levels is clearly higher than and constituent parts.
• Symbolic development in people means of standardized procedures that can develop knowledge.
• Primitives do distinguish between subject and object.

Emotive Symbols

• The emotive symbol develops over a period of time
• Expression of pain and surprise call becomes emotional conditions
• These signs and cries can understood without references to conditions.
• These express are talked about and conveyed to other and has a life on need thus the tribe develops a filling of loyalty to an
• Its is a capacity to persist through time so that other can develop fear an anger

Symbology

• There are various symbols that combine with each other, for example, spiritual symbols representing the spirit if man is in his own element.
• Primitive’s emotional experiences have their own, if they ever feel that reference to an outside cause.

Ideological and Substantive Symbols

• In combining the human need for purpose and direction, these form and direct and create variations of needs that can designate other Variations.
• Symbol in the culture is to understand by illustrating comprehending the world.

Perspectives

• The perspective also includes selective abstractions and description.
• Some researchers indicate an inner and outer. The inner states understanding.

Determinism and Cultural Freedom

• All participant must act towards the cultural framework.
• Researchers must respect those which are differences.
• the social.

The Causal and Telic Principle

• All participant must want become part. That they knowledge with mean to achieve.

Analysis and Synthesis.

• To look at separately.
• Analysis if the barrier of the communication. Is to seek certain that comment situation

Types of Concepts: Operational and Sensitizing

• All studies involve the conceptualization of data.

An overview of Participant Observation, an important methodology in sociological research. It examines the social role of the participant observer, questions of epistemology, challenges to scientific standards, and the potential for new research perspectives. Summary statements about the participant observer's role are made based on existing research to guide the analysis of methodological foundations.