ABSTRACT
The work of ethnographers is not always easy, but it’s never dull. Although people may pick their research topics on the basis of theoretical interests or voids in the literature, most qualitative researchers choose their settings out of some personal interest. In fact, it’s not uncommon for people to study things that are near and/or dear, a tendency we noted in Membership Roles in Field Research (Adler and Adler 1987), where we discussed some of the ways that people studied settings in which they had either a peripheral, active, or complete membership role. In this chapter we pause to reflect on one of our major research projects
that culminated with the publication of our book, Peer Power: Preadolescent Culture and Identity (1998). We begin with a discussion of how the choice of the setting occurred, and then examine two important foci of this research, paying particular attention to the way we developed our conceptualization of the data and more abstract theoretical analyses.
