ABSTRACT
Participant observation is usually taken as the archetypal form of research employed by ethnographers. It is more properly conceived of as a research strategy than a unitary research method in that it is always made up of a variety of methods. In its classic form participant observation consists of a single researcher spending an extended period of time (usually at least a year) living among the people he or she is studying, participating in their daily lives in order to gain as complete an understanding as possible of the cultural meanings and social structures of the group and how these are interrelated. Clearly such a goal seems more readily achievable if the group selected for study is small and relatively isolated. Stereotypically, members of ‘simple’ societies, in the sense of being preliterate and having a subsistence economy, have been favoured subjects and many classical ethnographic studies deal with subjects of this nature (e.g. EvansPritchard 1940; Firth 1936; Malinowski 1922; Mead 1943; Turnbull 1961). However, participant observation has also been widely employed for community studies in complex industrial societies. Most commonly, the communities selected have either been rural backwaters, usually with a peasant economy (e.g. Arensberg and Kimball 1940; Friedl 1962), or urban ghetto communities, often with a distinctive cultural identity (e.g. Gans 1962; Whyte 1955). Furthermore, a somewhat modified participant observation has frequently been used for studies in institutional settings, such as schools, hospitals or prisons, in complex societies (e.g. Goffman 1961; Myerhoff 1978).
