Are you studying me right now?
One of the first things people ask me when they find out I’m a sociologist is ‘Are you studying me right now?’ And if I’m being honest, the answer is usually ‘yes.’ I think people are fascinating and I wonder why everyone doesn’t people watch, all the time. There are so many people data points to ‘study’ in fact, that even if I collected data 24 hours a day, every day for the rest of my life, I would never run out of things to note. So obviously, I can hardly afford to take time off.
When I was in high school and college, I had a part time job at a local grocery store. The store was located in a neighborhood with lots of socio-economic, racial, and ethnic diversity. One of the things that I loved about the job was the opportunity to meet and ‘watch’ so many different people. As I look back on that experience, I realize that I was essentially doing participant observation every day. I wish I had taken field notes!
I learned a lot about people by being a cashier. I got to peek into customer’s daily lives and got to know what happened in their kitchens without ever visiting their homes. Being a teenager who had a working mom who didn’t cook much, I was amazed at the variety of foods that people bought and apparently cooked and ate. During my first several months on the job, I was forever asking customers what a particular produce item was because there were so many things I had never seen or heard of (jicama, kumquats, etc)! And many times as I was introduced to a new food, I was also introduced to a new dish or a new way of cooking or eating. Many of my customers took the time to explain to me how they prepared a particular food or where they had learned about or gotten a particular recipe. Many of these stories told me a lot about the person’s history, subculture, and family traditions.
But it wasn’t just produce, there were tons of other clues to household norms that passed through the grocery store each day. For example, there was a lot of variance in the amount of food people purchased and the frequency with which they visited the store. Some customers came grocery shopping virtually every day and others tried hard to keep their shopping confined to weekly, if not monthly visits. These habits obviously effected what they bought and therefore what they ate. But their habits were often grounded in ideas and values about food and about time. Some customers always came in in a rush and others seemed to never be in a hurry. Some customers bought the same items each visit and others varied their purchasing according to season or occasion. Some customers paid via food stamps and others paid with cash. All of these data points told a story about daily life, routine and ritual.
And each time I interacted with each customer, I learned a little bit more about who they were, where they came from, and what was going on in their lives. Although I had received very little training in sociology at the time, I was always trying to put together their ‘story’ by using the pieces of data that I got during our conversations and also the clues that I got from seeing what they purchased and what their shopping habits were. It was then that I realized how much you could learn about a person by just listening to what they were saying, and paying attention to what they were doing. I was fascinated by their stories and also a little bit surprised by how much I could learn by showing a little interest. I often asked a simple question about a particular produce item and got a very descriptive narrative about daily life.
People tell me a lot that I’m intuitive, but I think it is closer to the truth to say that I’m really curious and a pretty good observer. It is amazing what you can see when you are really looking, and what you can hear when you are really listening. So, if we ever met and you wonder if I’m studying you, the answer is probably yes. BUT don’t be offended, instead ask yourself, ‘when was the last time I had such a captive audience interested in me?’
Getting real: Life IS messy!
Remember a few years ago when Bissell came out with the tag line ‘Life is messy, clean it up’? I LOVED that campaign and also the sentiment behind it. Because the truth is, life IS messy. And consequently, real answers to questions about daily life are often not very cut and dry.
I’m sometimes asked about how ‘reliable’ or ‘valid’ ethnographic research is. Validity is easy to address because you can’t get more ‘valid’ than real life. Sure, people don’t always act EXACTLY like they would if you weren’t there. Almost all research impacts how people behave, and ethnography is no exception. But, over the years, we have collected lots of evidence (participants yelling at each other, people telling us about things even their spouse didn’t know about them, etc.) that we do get closer to real life than most other research methodologies.
But when it comes to reliability, ethnographers approach the issue a little bit differently. For example, think about the last 10 times you went grocery shopping. There were probably some patterns in the way that you did it. You probably went to the same place (at least most of those times), you probably started at the same end of the store, you probably had a list (or didn’t have a list), etc. But, there was probably a good deal of variation too, and a lot of the variation was probably attributable to the context of the trip. For example, did you go shopping alone or with someone else? Did you go shopping on a Tuesday evening or a Saturday afternoon? Where you stopping by to pick up an ingredient you had forgotten or were you going to the store for the first time in a month? All of these trips to the store can constitute ‘typical’ grocery shopping within a single household, but each can demonstrate very different types of patterns, and therefore can produce results that can appear a little bit unreliable. But that is because real life is complex and variable.
There are actually very few behaviors that get routinized to the degree that there is little or no variation in the way they are done. So for me, the question is not ‘is your ethnographic project reliable’, it is ‘how well does your ethnographic project capture the way(s) this thing is done’? It is obviously important to make sure we get to see what is typical, but we also want to make sure we get to see variation and why it exists. And this is important to try to understand both within and between households/people.
One of the things that concerns me a lot about my discipline (business/corporate ethnography) is that many people are now doing ‘ethnographic research’ without any real attention to the importance of context and the range of complexity that context brings to behavior. They assume that ‘context’ is covered by being there and watching people do something. But for me, context is so much more than that. Obviously the place where the thing happens is an important context to see and understand, but there are generally hundreds if not thousands of other contextual variables that come into play around any particular behavior. The skilled ethnographer will be cataloging and trying to understand as many of those as possible. And as you can see, this can get very messy, very quickly. But there is no reason to panic, the skilled ethnographer is also really good at systematically organizing those variables into an understandable story. I believe that the REAL value of ethnography is in its ability to explain the messiness of life and human behavior and to pull out the patterned similarities AND the patterned differences in how a thing is done.
Reconstructing Reality: What do you see?
Social scientists and philosophers have been arguing about ‘reality’ for a while now. There are generally two approaches to how reality is understood and measured by social scientists. Those taking a positivistic approach believe that although people may ‘see’ things differently, there is an objective reality. On the other hand, those taking a phenomenological approach assume multiple realities to any given situation. As an ethnographer, I generally skew toward the phenomenological viewpoint. I realize that not all versions of reality hold up equally well, but I have seen many instances of people creating their own reality around their experiences and around products/services.
I usually use the classic film ‘The Gods Must be Crazy’ to help illustrate this concept. So, in the film, there is a pilot that is flying over the Kalahari Desert and he drinks a coke and then throws the bottle out of the window of his plane. A man named Xi finds the coke bottle and assumes that it is a gift from the gods and he and his tribe find TONS of uses for the bottle—it is a tool, it is a toy, it is a musical instrument, etc. In other words, they construct an alternate reality around the bottle. And so the movie is a parable to illustrate how one man’s trash can become another man’s treasure.
This is one way in which the social construction of reality comes to life in my work. I do see many instances of people finding all kinds of interesting (but unintended) uses for products. They might fashion an expensive piece of electronic equipment into a workbench or they might use a medical device in ways that are not consistent with instructions, but which fit better into their particular needs. In these situations, my job becomes one in which I help my client understand not only WHAT they are doing, but WHY. This often requires me to walk a delicate line. Generally, my client has given a lot of thought to design and they have created a product that does what it is designed to do pretty well. However, sometimes I have to help them understand that it isn’t all about what this product does. Sometimes it is more important to understand the social world in which the product lives and how their vision of what the product should be might not be consistent with the reality in which the product lives.
For example, many years ago, we were hired by a manufacturer of high-end electronic equipment. This company had given A LOT of thought to their product line and were really, really proud of all of the bells and whistles their products had. But after spending a few weeks in the field, observing and talking to the people who used their products, I realized that the bells and whistles were not only NOT appreciated by the customers, they were often feared! Many consumers lived in constant fear that someone else would change some of the settings on this device and then they would have to spend hours trying to figure out how to reset it. There was clearly a disconnect in the ‘reality’ of what this thing was and especially around what the expectations of it were. For my client, the real VALUE of their product and what they believed really differentiated their brand from others were the bells and whistles (this was evidenced by their advertising, but also by the angry response we got from designers and engineers when we presented our findings)! But for the consumer, the value of the thing was that it turned on when it was supposed to and allowed them to do their job without being too complicated or distracting them from their real task.
As I said before, not all versions of ‘reality’ are tolerated equally, but it does pay to try to understand how your product might fit into the reality of daily life and how your customer might be constructing their own story about exactly what your product is and especially how (and for what) it is valued.
Why I like hanging with the frogs
I always tell clients that one of the benefits of an ethnographic approach is that you get really close to the action or the ‘thing’ that you want to learn about. And I do mean REALLY close. I often compare an ethnographic research study to a telephoto snapshot. Imagine you are at a football game and you want to capture an understanding about what is happening in the stadium. You have a couple of options at your disposal. You can take a wide-angle photo and capture the entire stadium. In this photo you will see EVERYTHING, but you won’t be able to see ANYTHING very clearly. Or you can take a telephoto picture and capture a specific area of the stadium. In this photo you will see only a small portion of what is going on in the stadium, but you will see that in detail and with clarity. The wide-angled photo is the kind of picture you get with large quantitative studies, and the telephoto picture is what you get with an ethnographic study. Both representations of the stadium are accurate and useful. In fact, they are complimentary. Ideally you would consult both before coming to any conclusions about what is happening at the football stadium.
I have a lot of respect for my statistics gathering colleagues (in fact I used to teach statistics). I like to know what they are learning because it helps to provide context for my fieldwork and sometimes even provides a framework for project design or analysis. But I really get excited about capturing that telephoto image.
Another way to think about this difference in perspective is to use the analogy of a frog’s eye view versus a bird’s eye view. Statistics give us a high level view of what is happening, from far away. Whereas an ethnographic approach gives us a frog’s eye view. In order to get the frog’s eye view, you usually need to get down in the thick of things and that is why I love being an ethnographer. I think it is so exciting to see things happen in real time and to be able to understand it all in the context in which it occurs. Real life is often unpredictable, messy, exciting, and frustrating, and ethnography helps to bring all of this to life. Over the course of my career I’ve had a frog’s eye view of so many interesting things and this has proven invaluable to me and my clients because it allows me to uncover insights and perspective that just can’t be obtained in any other way. For example, there is just no better way to understand the world of teenage gamers than to hang out with them for a summer and to try to get into their world. Yep, I got to do that! Or to hear the first hand stories and experience the daily life routines and rituals of people who are living with chronic pain and literally SEE how their world has shrunk into their living room or kitchen. Sure sometimes I get a little mud on me, but that is part of the experience and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Keeping our balance in a world of rapid change: Lessons from ‘Fiddler on the Roof’
When I used to teach introduction to sociology and sociology of marriage and family, I always had my classes watch the movie “Fiddler on the Roof”. It was a great way to bring to life many of the sociological concepts that we were learning in class. In that one movie, there are probably more than 100 sociological lessons, and the music is pretty fantastic too.
My favorite part of the whole movie is the opening sequence. The main character, Tevye, asks and answers the question: “How do we keep our balance?” “That I can tell you in one word.” “Tradition.” “Here in Anatevka, we have traditions for everything.” “How to sleep, how to eat, how to work, how to wear clothes.” “You may ask, ‘how did this tradition get started?’’ “I’ll tell you. . . .I don’t know” “But it’s a tradition, and because of our traditions, every one of us knows who he is, and what God expects him to do.”
Truer words were never spoken, and in my line of work, I see Tevye’s observation in action all the time. We could easily replace the word ‘tradition’ with the word ‘norm.’ No matter who the person, or what the context, behavior and ideas are driven and ruled by norms. And this is the case, long after we have forgotten (or perhaps even before we have learned) the reason for the norm. Norms are powerful forces that let each of us know who we are and what is expected of us. The number and diversity of norms that each person follows every day is staggering.
My job as an ethnographer is to try to get a handle on the norms driving the thing I’m hired to understand. Whether it is how people cook dinner or how one reacts to being diagnosed with a chronic disease, norms are ever present in determining how people think and behave. There are often well-established patterns in how things are done and even in how people think about and place value upon things, so many norms are obvious and often slap us in the face as soon as we spend a little time watching and listening. However, other norms are a little more subtle, and the patterns are not always so obvious until we see someone doing it differently or spend some time in analysis, really breaking down and organizing observations.
But the thing is, even the most obvious norms are often not so obvious unless you train yourself to look for them. Although we all follow cultural norms each day, for the most part, we do it on automatic pilot. The classic sociological example used to bring this concept to life is to ask people to think about what they do when they enter an elevator. There are some very rigid rules for behavior on elevators. You must face the front, go to the alternate corner if someone else is already on the elevator, keep conversation to a minimum, etc. Most of us do not remember reading a manual on elevator etiquette, but very few people ever violate these norms. And why do you think that is? T-R-A-D-I-T-I-O-N!
I learned a lot about the power of tradition a few years ago when I was in the Philippines studying how moms took care of their babies. I had spent the afternoon with a young mom (who also happened to be a biologist) and her one-year old son. We had spent a lot of our time talking about what was important to her as a mother, and how she made decisions about how to care for her son. She told me that she was very modern, but her own mother was very old-fashioned, and this often caused conflict when they were negotiating how her son was to be cared for. One of the things that they didn’t agree on was whether he should be seen by a pediatrician or a traditional healer when he was ill. My participant told me that because she was a scientist, she knew that modern medicine was based on scientific principals and that traditional medicine was based on superstitions and that she didn’t put much stock in superstitions.
I had been playing with the little boy, but after a few hours, it was time for me to leave, and when I walked out the door, the little boy started to cry. Because I’m a Western mom, I thought I should walk away as quickly as possible because I had been taught the ‘get out of sight, and you will be out of mind’ approach to dealing with crying children. As I rounded the corner, the mom came running after me and explained that she needed me to come back to her house. She told me that her son was very upset and she was concerned that he would get sick, so she needed me to place some of my saliva on her son’s tummy. Saliva from the offending person was the antidote to ward off potential illness. I of course obliged and then said goodbye again.
At first I thought maybe I had misunderstood the conversation with the mom and her seemed rejection of traditional practices and beliefs. But after seeing some other mothers, I realized there was a pattern when it came to western versus traditional medicine and that these norms were interlocked with rapid change and younger women’s desires to be more ‘modern.’ This all resulted in a complicated system of ideals, values, and behaviors that actually contained several seeming contradictions. In a nutshell, times were a-changing BUT many of the behavioral norms were lagging behind the changes in ideals. And so it turned out that the mother who seemed to WANT to reject traditional medicine, but who didn’t want to take a chance on her son getting ill, wasn’t unusual and wasn’t really a contradiction once the puzzle was put together and the power of TRADITION was factored in.
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