Week 10

Erik OBrien
Class
One of my biggest takeaways from this class has been all the advice on
writing. While I am still not very confident in my writing I have taken a screw it,
just write damnit! approach with lots of revising and editing later. The latest advice
in class of looking for a story before starting to write the words is very valuable,
especially since the next two weeks will be dedicated to ethnography. While it is
contrary to previous writing advice in this class, I personally find writing an outline
before doing any writing is really helpful. It makes something that seems so abstract
more grounded when I apply my systematic approach. That being said I went home
and built a kind of story outline to go along side the outline I wrote for my Org
Comm class. After identifying the probable narrative elements and formation in my
paper I ended up rearranging some sections so they would be more cohesive and
form as much as a narrative that you can have in a masters level academic paper.
A bit unrelated but in response to Dr. Andersons story about when he was
studying in Austria and observed just how orderly Austrians were when setting a
table and how he thought it was quite funny, and how it is in these moments that
you can tell when further questioning is needed in order to learn a thing or two. I
had the good fortune to have the opportunity to study German in Germany for a
summer during my undergrad (not quite the same prestige of a Fulbright
scholarship but I take what I can get.). I noticed that whenever I was out and about
with my host family or simply observing other people eating I noticed that without

fail people always cleaned their plates. I am not saying they ate all the main food and
left some stuff behind, every plate was perfectly clean, every last morsel of food was
scraped off and eaten no matter how much food they had been served. There is no
such thing as leftovers. I eat a lot so it did not stand out really as I usually was
always able to clean my plate no problem but I did think it was unusual that for the
first time in my life everyone else around me always ate every last bit of food on
their plates1. Towards the end of my stay I asked my host sister why this was and
that it was abnormal in the states. She said she did not really know and then after
thinking about it for a while she made an educated guess and said it was probably
tradition left over from the war times when food was scarce. This makes a lot of
sense since we were in Kiel, which was basically leveled in WW2 and is known for
eating disgusting fish uncooked because there was so little food (the fish is called
Kieller Sprotten and it is on flags and insignia all over the city).
The last lesson learned from this weeks lecture is the critical thinking
quote provided by doctor Andersons slides. What do I need to believe to make the
arguments that something is true. I wrote down the quote and put it on the wall in
my office it resonated so much with me. I feel that this basically allows for any
position to be interrogated and highlights that everything stems from some sort of
belief system. Truth only exists within the context of our own beliefs, even in
I have always been a stickler for making sure every bit of food was eaten. In my
middle and high school years up at the ski resorts I would wait for the ski schools to
go to lunch and then follow them in and grab a seat next to the garbage can where it
was inevitable that most of the tiny little children would eat one bite of their
hamburger then throw it away because they were too full. Just before they would
throw away their food I would stop them and ask if I could eat the rest of their food.
None of the kids seemed to mind but the staff was surely not pleased.
1

science. If I continually ask myself this question through out my thesis I think it will
ensure that I write something of quality.
Centerpiece Goals:
For my centerpiece I want to accomplish the following steps and I will be
writing on my experience of completing these process goals each week.
Step 1: Construct research question about DJ Identity and popular media examples.
Step 2: Create asynchronous interview question guide.
Step 3: Do email interview of 3 participants.
Step 4: Code in NVivo
Step 5 Analyze and write small response and implement into my thesis.
If this is agreeable please confirm and I will begin the process immediately.
Hammersley & Atkinson:
First things first I am so glad I chose this book for presentation. In the wake
of Tracy and Saldana it is refreshing to read something that is not a cookbook. I love
that this book is more like a giant toolbox filled with lots of different experiences
and examples from different researchers. It is more of a guide rather than
something that dictates any kind of action. Additionally this reading made me
realize just how boring my study is and how boring most peoples studies are in the
Comm field. After reading about infiltrating biker gangs and exploring sexy bath
houses it made me feel like maybe I should have chosen to study something more

exciting not because I think it will yield better information but rather because I
think it would be beneficial for my own sanity to have some excitement in my life.
What makes so many of these studys so exciting however is the covert
nature of many of them. They discuss this in the book on page 53 and to be honest I
am not sure where I personally fall on the deception vs. no deception front. Though
their discussion talks about how sometimes it is necessary to deceive to gain access
to valuable information I am not sure if it is ethically permissible. For one I am fairly
certain the IRB would not be fond of deception and nor would your subjects be. On a
larger scale, if we believe that ethnographic research is inherently manipulative
then we at least owe it to research participants to tell them they are a part of a
study. When deception is used, those the researcher is exploiting do not even get to
decide if they want to be a part of the exploitative process. There is no informed
consent. Good work obviously gets done when deceiving but I cant help but shake
the idea that it is unethical in some regard. Is there ever something that can be
considered unethical but permissible?
Building on this, being deceitful also makes exiting the scene more difficult
for the researcher. That is assuming that the researcher has built up emotional
bonds with those they study. It is likely that if they ever confess to their deceit they
will not be trusted or welcomed back into the groups good grace. That all being said
I think it is easier said than done to avoid deception. There are plenty of times I am
sure we deceive those we study even though we are telling them what we plan to do.
For example while I am clear about what I am studying with my research

participants I doubt they are expecting me to do an analysis of what they say and
even their identities in what could be a critical way. I am only as truthful about my
process as long as it wont affect my results, which is deceitful in a sense. Maybe
avoiding deception is a lot like avoiding subjectivity in interpretive research. We
strive to be honest and objective but we can never really separate ourselves form
the subjectivity and deception we must simply accept it.
Outside Reading.
In my recent outside reading for my organizational class as well as my thesis
reading I have not run into very many things that bill themselves as using
ethnography as a method. However, I contend that a lot of data the researchers will
include seem consistent with the hammersly and Atkinson definition of
ethnography. What I have gathered from the book as well as my other outside
readings is that it seems that ethnography is a bit of a gray line. Sometimes it is hard
to tell if one is engaged in ethnography or just a qualitative research project. It
seems that out of the studies I have been reading where they seem to be
implementing the ethnographic method time seems to be the big factor in weather
or not they consider it ethnography or not. For example Castors study of the
language used at school board meetings they state they are doing communicative
ethnography but at the end of the article they explain that one of their limitations is
that they only went to ONE meeting. One meeting is not enough to be considered
ethnography. I cant stop at the Nepal airport and then say that I did ethnographic
research on Nepal. Yes the author includes that this in their limitations section but it

is kind of crap. It was less of a limitation and more of laziness. Yes they could still do
the discourse analysis they conducted but calling it communicative ethnography is
quite the stretch.
After doing a lot of outside reading similar to the Caster article that I now
think abuse the term ethnography I made a mistake in proposing to my committee
that I was doing ethnography (I had not yet done reading in this class). The biggest
critique I got on my committee was from my method committee member. They
restructured what I was doing and we decided that what I actually was doing
because of time restrains and so forth was a combination qualitative methods
project. I was hanging around, taking notes, making observations, but also
conducting interview over a short period of time. I have been speaking with this
same committee member now and we talked about the element of time in
ethnographic research and after being given some literature that demonstrates
actual ethnography rather than the semi ethnography that I was exposed to we
came to the conclusion that maybe in the future during a PhD program I could
expand on the work from my thesis and make it an ethnographic study that is if I
continue. Maybe someday.