SA 255 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Participant Observation

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Sociology and Anthropology
• Course: SA 255
• Professor: Nicholas Scott

Document Summary

Girl running away from vietnam war/ self-immolating monk. Three-year-old syrian boy washed up on shore. Describe how a common practice of making data (photography) is a qualitative method. Come up with a good question about your topic: the qualitative research paradigm, qualitative interviewing and sampling, visual methods. Primary objective: empathy: walk in the shoes of participants, detail: provide rich, ideographic description of phenomena, context: show the impact of context (ex. How you commute revolves around the city: generate new theory as an outcome of research. Key qualitative methods: semi-structured interviews: standard set of questions, reusable, unstructured interviews: conversational interview, ethnography: participant observation, gaining empathy up close. Inductive: relationship between theory and method (research, one gathers or examines data and then tries to derive an explanation from the data. Interpretivist epistemology: how do we know what we know, actions should be viewed from the point of view of the social actors.