ABSTRACT
Participant observation represents an intensive experiential approach to collecting and interpreting qualitative data. While it has been underutilised by the contemporary accounting research community, it offers significant potential for expanding the horizons of accounting research. Standing with its foundations firmly planted in the ethnographic tradition, it primarily presents itself as a methodology employing in-person deep level researcher involvement with actors in the field. At the sites of their day-to-day activities, the researcher shares with them the experience of ‘being there’, thereby opening up opportunities to collect data about ‘the way we do things around here’. As such, the participant facilitates the researcher accessing otherwise hidden or unavailable insights and interpretations about actors’ activities, beliefs, attitudes, interactions, and sense-making. In this way, to an extent not possible through other data collection methods, participant observation allows the researcher an insider’s view of behaviour, conversations, language, and meanings.
