Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Participant Observation

Item

Title

Participant Observation

Author

Jorgensen, Danny L.

Research Area

Methods of Research

Topic

Research Methods ‐ Qualitative

Abstract

Investigating the meanings of human existence as they are constructed and enacted by people in everyday life situations and settings presents serious challenges for all forms of human studies. Participant observation, whereby the researcher interacts with people in everyday life while collecting information, is a unique method for investigating the enormously rich, complex, conflictual, problematic, and diverse experiences, thoughts, feelings, and activities of human beings and the meanings of their existence. Use of this distinctive method emerged with the professionalization of anthropology and sociology where it gradually was formalized and later spread to a full range of human studies fields. Its practice nevertheless remains artful, requiring creative decision making about problems and questions to be studied, appropriate settings and situations for gathering information, the performance of membership roles, establishing and sustaining trusting relationships, ethics, values, and politics, as well as record making, data analysis and interpretation, and reporting results. This essay provides a brief sketch of the method of participant observation and an overview of a few of the more central issues of its practice, including its location historically within the framework of different views of social scientific methodology.

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Identifier

etrds0247

extracted text

Participant Observation
DANNY L. JORGENSEN

Abstract
Investigating the meanings of human existence as they are constructed and enacted
by people in everyday life situations and settings presents serious challenges for all
forms of human studies. Participant observation, whereby the researcher interacts
with people in everyday life while collecting information, is a unique method for
investigating the enormously rich, complex, conflictual, problematic, and diverse
experiences, thoughts, feelings, and activities of human beings and the meanings of
their existence. Use of this distinctive method emerged with the professionalization
of anthropology and sociology where it gradually was formalized and later spread to
a full range of human studies fields. Its practice nevertheless remains artful, requiring
creative decision making about problems and questions to be studied, appropriate
settings and situations for gathering information, the performance of membership
roles, establishing and sustaining trusting relationships, ethics, values, and politics,
as well as record making, data analysis and interpretation, and reporting results.
This essay provides a brief sketch of the method of participant observation and an
overview of a few of the more central issues of its practice, including its location
historically within the framework of different views of social scientific methodology.

INTRODUCTION
Participant observation is a unique method for investigating human existence whereby the researcher more or less actively participates with people in
commonplace situations and everyday life settings while observing and otherwise collecting information. By participating in human life, the researcher
acquires direct access to not only the physically observable environment
but also its primary reality as humanly meaningful experiences, thoughts,
feelings, and activities. Through participation, in other words, it is possible
to observe and gather many forms of data that often are inaccessible from the
standpoint of a nonparticipating external observer. Participant observation
consequently is one of the premier methods for conducting investigations

Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of the realities of human existence in their totality as they exhibit external,
physical characteristics and internal, subjective, and personal features as
well as intersubjectively and socially meaningful properties. The form of the
researcher’s participation and the character of the human settings studied
further specify what is distinctive and unique about this method of scholarly
investigation.
Participation may range along a continuum from passive to active; although
it often is difficult to discriminate unambiguously between these poles. Passive participation suggests that the researcher is present at some human scene
but not otherwise engaged directly with people or their activities. Active participation implies that the researcher is joined with people—their thoughts,
feelings, and activities—and, thereby, connected to their lives. The participant observer typically performs some socially available role or roles, even if
only nominally, in the study setting. The investigator may be a mostly passive
participant in some situations and/or a more or less active participant in others. It is the more active aspect of participation in the lives of the people studied
that differentiates this research method from other forms of observational
inquiry.
The settings of participant observational investigations are ones characterized by whatever it is that people ordinarily think, feel, and do in the course of
their lives. These situations consequently are not concocted or shaped by the
researcher. In other words, they are the natural settings of human existence,
complete with the reality of daily life as it appears to members of these situations and settings. Furthermore, these situations usually are not controlled by
the researcher—or, at least, they are not manipulated beyond whatever forms
of human management ordinarily transpire. Participant observation consequently differs noticeably from methods of inquiry, such as experiments or
surveys, whereby the researcher artificially creates and controls the study
conditions more extensively. It thereby is a more “natural” and much less
intrusive, reactive, or unnatural form of inquiry than many other forms of
research.
Participant observation is closely related to “qualitative” and “ethnographic” methods of research as well as those involving “field research” or
“field work.” These forms of research increasingly have become legitimate
and tremendously popular in a broad range of fields. Besides the disciplines
of anthropology and sociology where formal methods of participant observation originated, these methods of investigation—commonly involving
some participant observation—are being employed widely today in all of
the social sciences, communication, education, management and business,
criminology and criminal justice, and many other fields, such as social work
and human services, medicine, nursing, health, and other areas of scholarly
study involving people.

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FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Travelers and merchants collected information while participating with
people from the obscurest beginnings of human record keeping. Explorers,
missionaries, and civil servants—especially with worldwide colonialization
by Europeans and Americans—also recorded their observations on this
basis. Social reformers and political activists later adopted a method of
recording facts while participating among disadvantaged or powerless
populations. These instances of participating while observing influenced
the subsequent development of participant observation as a disciplined,
scholarly method of investigation.
The methodology of participant observation emerged gradually in both
anthropology and sociology with their professionalization—notwithstanding
the imperialistic claims of one or the other to this method exclusively. Both
disciplines were founded on grand theoretical scenarios stressing social evolutionary naturalism. The founding figures of anthropology and sociology
often depended on the observations of others—particularly missionaries, civil servants, and world travelers—but they rarely collected data
themselves. One of the earliest deployments of participant observation
for professional purposes probably was Frank Hamilton Cushing’s 1880s
ethnography of the Zuni Indians of the American southwest.
Franz Boas’ early twentieth century opposition to the dominant social
evolutionary paradigm revolutionized early American anthropology by
emphasizing the descriptive, ethnographic study of local cultures. He also
aimed to rescue anthropology from the many amateurs working in this area
and provide it with a sound scientific basis. This image of “science” was
grounded in the idiographic (specific or particular) approach of the cultural
sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), however, rather than the nomothetic
(generalizing or law-like) approach of the physical or natural sciences
(Naturwissenschaften). These differing methodological approaches also
are referred to commonly a “humanistic” and “positivistic,” respectively.
Anthropologists employed participant observation primarily for describing
non-Western cultures and particular aspects of them, such as language,
family, and kinship or religion. Boas students such as Alfred Kroeber, Clark
Wissler, John Swanton, Fay Cole, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, Paul Radin,
Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead (also including novelist Zora Neale
Hurston) dominated the field into at least the 1940s. Their work established
ethnography conducted by participant observation as the research standard
in North American social and cultural anthropology.
Bronislaw Malinowski and students—such as E. E. Evans-Pritchard,
Hortense Powdermaker, Raymond Firth, and Edmund Leach—exerted a
similar ethnographic influence over British and European anthropology.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Malinowski used participant observation during extended trips into the
field, recording his thoughts and feelings in a diary, and he later wrote extensively about these field experiences. He especially exhibited a self-conscious
concern for the relationships between participant observational methods
of research and the resulting data. This particularizing approach and its
concern for the natives’ (or insiders’) perspective sometimes is characterized
as an “emic” one as opposed to the generalizing, “etic” concern of theorizing
from an external (or outsiders’) viewpoint.
During the early twentieth century in American sociology, W. I. Thomas
likewise challenged grand theorizing by engaging in an informal participant
observation and gathering documents and records of human life. Stressing
the empirical quality of his observations and other research materials along
with theory construction, Thomas explicitly advocated a more positivistic
methodology (a nomothetic one modeled after the natural sciences). Robert
Park, who replaced Thomas as the leading figure of the early Chicago School
of sociology during the 1920s, expanded upon this methodological program.
In collaboration with Ernest Burgess, Park turned the city of Chicago into
a sociological laboratory. They trained several generations of sociologists,
many of them producing famous studies of the city and its varied ways
of human life using an eclectic array of empirical approaches. Qualitative
methods, including an informal participant observation, were employed to
describe distinctive ways of life, much of this in response to urbanization.
They studied American subcultures, gangs and delinquency, vice, deviance,
and crime, ethnic groups, communities, and much more.
From the 1920s onward, American sociologists debated the respective
merits of qualitative and quantitative methods, oftentimes expressed as
case studies versus statistics and/or subjectivism versus objectivism. The
dominant sociological methodology favored quantitative approaches, especially the newly developed techniques of survey interview or questionnaire
research. Many nevertheless stood firm on the necessity of descriptive, qualitative data and methods such as participant observation. Both sides more or
less accepted a positivistic view of methodology. A notable minority, however, advocated a more thoroughly humanistic approach, one holding that
the logic and techniques of research must be uniquely adapted to the human
character, especially meanings, of social life. This viewpoint especially
is evident in Charles H. Cooley’s notion of “sympathetic introspection,”
Florian Znaniecki’s “humanistic coefficient,” Robert MacIver’s “sympathetic
reconstruction,” and the celebrated Neo-Kantian concept of “verstehen” (a
humanly empathetic form of understanding) drawn especially from Max
Weber, the classical German sociologist. Participant observation is especially
valuable for intuitively and empathically apprehending human realities,

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beyond what is accessible by sensation or reason, and it therefore was often
seen as central to humanistic methodologies.
Several generations of Chicago sociologists, such as Herbert Blumer,
Everett Hughes, Louis Wirth, E. Franklin Frazer, and Robert Redfield, supported, used, or advocated qualitative methods (forming a
more humanistically oriented Second Chicago School). Hughes and his
collaborators—including Howard S. Becker, Blanche Greer, and Anselm
Strauss, among others such as Erving Goffman, Julius Roth, Gerald Suttles,
Elliot Liebow, and William F. Whyte—published studies exemplifying
and defending participant observation. From the early 1930s onward,
sociological and anthropological approaches to qualitative methods were
intermingled in the United States. The publication of textbooks on participant observation and related qualitative, ethnographic field methods mostly
came later.
In the positivistic climate of American social science from the 1940s to the
1960s, participant observation sometimes was deemed to be nonscientific.
More commonly, however, it was viewed as useful during the preliminary
stages of scientific inquiry for exploration and description. Qualitative
descriptions generated by participant observation are helpful from this
vantage point in formulating concepts for measurement and hypotheses
which, with further testing and verification, may be employed to construct
explanatory theories. Yet, participant observation was not seen as especially
useful for the ultimate scientific goal of explanatory (nomothetic) theorizing.
There were, however, efforts to establish inductive theorizing, based on participant observation and other qualitative methodologies, as legitimate in
their own right, independently of positivist conceptions of theory and theorizing. More inductive, “grounded theory” approaches, such as those pioneered by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, increasingly tended to ignore
positivistic imagery. Many proponents of participant observation and other
qualitative methods eventually would reject the positivistic goals of explanatory (nomothetic/emic) theorizing entirely in favor of interpretative (idiographic/etic) theorizing as envisioned from a humanistic standpoint.
Following World War II, sociologists and anthropologists increasingly
found variations of Marxist thinking, phenomenology, existentialism, linguistics, and analytic philosophy of special interest. Many of them contained
sharp critiques of positivism, resulting in theoretical and methodological
innovations. This included social constructionism (Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckmann), the symbolic interactionist emphasis on social meanings (Hebert
Blumer), viewing social life as a drama (Erving Goffman’s dramaturgy), and
a focus on how members of society accomplish social life (Harold Garfinkel’s
ethnomethodology). The synthesis of these perspectives along with features
of phenomenology and existentialism by Jack Douglas, John Johnson, David

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Altheide, and Peter and Patti Adler, among others, was especially important
for emphasizing a methodology of participant observation.
Anthropology, during this period, provided a different intellectual context,
a much less positivistic one in which ethnography still was under the powerful influence of Boas and Malinowski. Even so, the work of Clifford Geertz
and David Schneider and Europeans such as Mary Douglas, Victor Turner,
and even Claude Levi-Strauss show many of these same influences. Some
of these innovations also were manifest in the United Sates with cognitive
anthropology, ethnoscience, and the “new ethnography.” Since the 1970s,
there has been a good deal of cross-fertilization among like-minded sociologists and anthropologists, especially with respect to theories of symbolic
meanings, humanistic methodologies, as well as ethnography, participant
observation, and related qualitative approaches.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
By the 1980s, there was a growing social scientific consensus that human realities are socially constructed by way of interactional processes with meaning
as a central feature. This perspective dissented significantly from naturalism,
realism, and other objectivist viewpoints. Human meanings are “subjective”
in the sense that they are internalized by individuals, but they more accurately are “intersubjective” (and thereby collective or social) in that meanings
are expressed in language. As meanings are shared with other members of
the linguistic community, they consequently are available to others (they are
not private or “subjective” in the more ordinary sense), thereby resolving the
standard objections to the so-called subjectivist approaches.
Moving even further from earlier theorizing, meanings were envisioned as
always problematic and conflictual. Human reality therefore is composed of
diverse and pluralistic meanings constituting a multiplicity of realities. Some
researchers focused on the more cognitive aspects of meanings, leading to
innovations in sociolinguistics, and studies of different forms of knowledge,
such as religious or scientific. Others emphasized that cognitions always are
colored by emotions, resulting in an emphasis on not entirely “rational” (even
irrational) qualities of human meanings and existence. Feminist thinking,
moreover, called attention to the monumental significance of gender differences for human constructions of meaning as well as related social roles and
interactions.
Altogether, then, human realities came to be seen as emotional in addition
to being cognitive, gendered, conflictual and problematic, complex and
multiple, intersubjectively meaningful, as well as produced and internalized
by human beings through social interaction. These realities, contrary to
reflection and correspondence theories of truth (rationalism/empiricism),

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7

always are relative to intersubjective human construction. They do not exist
independently of human construction; they have no objectivity independently of human existence; and they never can be apprehended exhaustively
or absolutely.
Human studies consequently require special methods and procedures, such
as participant observation, suited to the description of these human meanings and realities. The aim of such humanistic methodologies is to describe
human meanings and experiences, even though such descriptions always
will be incomplete and partial. Likewise, no explanation of human meanings and experiences is possible (in the positivist sense), and all interpretation inevitably will be partial and incomplete. It, nevertheless, is possible to
provide interpretations of human meanings and experiences from the standpoint of particular scholarly issues and problems. This viewpoint also reflects
the influences of American pragmaticism—including such influential figures
as William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, G. H. Mead, and C. Wright
Mills—running through much of this work. Hence, within such a delimited
theoretical context, it is possible to make judgments—based on reasons and
evidence—about different, even rival, interpretations.
This methodological viewpoint also emphasized the necessity of
self-conscious reflection about the relationship between the practices of
the researcher and the products of research. In other words, research
reflexivity became a central methodological obligation for all humanistic
studies, especially participant observation. Much attention has focused on
the researchers’ social location and how research practices influence what
is discerned and described by way of participant observation as well as
how these human realities are analyzed, interpreted, and reported. This
emergent framework for understanding human studies was reinforced
greatly by Thomas Kuhn’s extraordinarily influential work in the history
and philosophy of science. It confirmed for methodological humanists
that the workings of the physical and biological sciences were much less
positivistic than previously described and subject to many of the same
interpretative difficulties as the human sciences.
The earliest uses of participant observation were highly artful. A form of
research that is informal and dependent on the intuition and interpersonal
abilities of the researcher and therefore not something that is mechanically
reproducible based on a formula by just anyone. Students commonly were
told to review exemplary studies and then proceed into the field to do likewise. Gradually, during the 1960s and 1970s, a few textbooks endeavored to
describe strategies, techniques, and pitfalls more formally. Throughout the
late 1970s and 1980s, studies based on a method of participant observation

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

proliferated, and spread to other human studies fields, and this trend has continued to the present. Today, participant observation is employed extensively
in most all human studies fields, including medicine, nursing, and health.
Previously heated battles over quantification and positivistic methodologies versus qualitative and humanistic methodologies have waned substantially as methods such as participant observation have gained widespread
popularity and respectability. The legitimacy of participant observation is no
longer seriously questioned. Textbooks, guides, resource works, and journal
articles outlining and describing specific methods, strategies, and techniques
of participant observation also have proliferated. This research method consequently has been subject to considerable formalization, even if it still retains
powerful vestiges of its former artfulness.
There is considerable consensus that participant observation is most appropriate when certain minimal study conditions are present.
•

•

•

•

•

•

A central interest of the research is some concern for human meanings,
feelings, and interactions viewed from the perspective of the native
members of those situations and settings.
The phenomenon to be investigated is observable in some natural, everyday life situation or setting.
The researcher is able to acquire reasonable access to people and their
activities in an appropriate setting.
The phenomenon of study is sufficiently limited in scope, size, and location to be examined by way of a case study design.
The questions or problems to be addressed are appropriate for case
study.
Suitable information can be collected by direct observation, participant
observation, interviews, documents and related materials, and other
means and sources available in some field setting.

Participant observation frequently is used in an open-ended manner to
explore and examine research questions that emerge with investigation
rather than preconceived hypotheses; although nothing prohibits its use for
hypothesis testing. Working inductively by way of a “logic of discovery”
offers advantages in research validity, being dependent on accessing the
insiders’ realities. Yet, it also places special demands on the researcher.
The definition of study questions, issues, and problems, as well as the
formulation of concepts and development of appropriate indicators often
must be refined during the course of the investigation while participating
and observing in the field.
Participant observation, moreover, requires the researcher to find and
select a setting or settings appropriate for study, and identify features or

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9

aspects of situations in the larger setting for investigation. What is observed
often is selective, requiring some strategy for sampling. Those strategies
usually are based on opportunistic techniques, such as snowball samples,
or those involving judgments or rationales other than probability sampling.
The study problem and setting often suggest and delimit sensible sampling
strategies.
Gaining access to a research setting and situations presents the participant
observer with a host of complex decisions. It often times requires some negotiation or reason for being present, and the participant observer must decide
how to account for being present, when and where to disclose research interests, and how much information to supply. It is possible to participate and
observe in many human settings overtly or covertly; that is with or without disclosing the research intentions. Much debate surrounds the ethics of
covert participant observation and it sometimes is deemed to be unacceptable
under all circumstances. Yet, many human situations, such as those involving illegal activities, are difficult or impossible to investigate when research
interests are explicitly revealed in those settings. Covert research sometimes
involves lying and deliberately deceiving people about the research interests.
It is possible, however, to participate and observe in many situations, particularly highly public ones, without deceiving people even if the researcher does
not reveal an interest in conducting research. A great deal of overt human
research is done without informing everyone involved that research is underway or disclosing the precise character of the investigation. The complexity of
many research problems, moreover, makes it unlikely that subjects fully comprehend the study or their involvement in it, even when they are informed
more fully.
Many research settings provide the participant observer with a wide range
of possible roles from being a mostly passive outsider to becoming an actively
involved insider. It is common for the participant observer to perform multiple roles along this continuum during the course of a prolonged investigation. The researcher may define the participant role as that of mostly an
outsider, an investigator, nominally present to observe what people are doing
in some setting or situation. Alternatively, the participant role may be defined
by insiders based on those ordinarily available in the setting or a particular
situation.
Early participant observers were warned not to cross the rather arbitrary line between passive participation as a nominal member and active
membership, something known as “going native” or “becoming the phenomenon.” Actually, participant observers—notably Frank Cushing, Zora
Neale Hurston, and others such as Howard S. Becker—had been crossing
this line to considerable advantage in acquiring insight into the natives’
world of meaning all along. By the mid-1970s, participant observers, such

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as Bennetta Jules-Rosette, were challenging this traditional taboo and
demonstrating that the strategic, reflexive performance of membership
roles often times provides unique and invaluable access to insider realities.
Such participant observational studies demonstrated moreover that the
performance of insider roles could be enacted without any loss of objectivity,
impartiality or other aspects of disciplined, scholarly rigor. Participant
observers, such as people in daily life, are able to switch back and forth
between various social roles, fully participating at times while engaging in
reflection, analysis, and interpretation at other times, rather deftly. Some
researchers also increasingly began employing team strategies of participant
observation in order to gather data from the standpoint of multiple roles
and perspectives in various settings.
Collecting truthful information requires considerable skill in cultivating
rapport, making friends, and sustaining trusting relationships with people
in the field. Simply put, people who do not know you or trust you are not
likely to be cooperative in providing much data, especially truthful information about the deepest meanings and inner workings of their daily lives.
In most settings, it is possible to collect different forms of data by way of a
wide variety of means. Observations, for instance, may range from largely
unfocused efforts to overview the action to more focused attempts to gather
detailed information about specific feelings, meanings, and activities. Participant observers usually ask a lot of questions, many of them causal and
informal, in the course of an investigation. Some studies also profitably make
use of more formal interviewing techniques and even structured questionnaires. In-depth interviews and life histories also may be collected. Many
settings and situations provide access to a vast array of other human communications, documents, and relevant artifacts. Notes and journals recording
personal experiences usually provide still another valuable source of data.
Making notes, keeping records, and creating files of information gathering in the field are extremely important and all of these activities present
the participant observer with challenges. It is tempting but mistaken to put
off record keeping, hoping to recall significant details and events at some
later time. Record keeping strategies range from the dependence on handwriting and computer (typewriting) processing to photography and audio
or audio-video recording. Analysis and interpretation of participant observational materials is like that of other forms of qualitative data. It commonly
involves coding and filing, sorting, sifting, constructing, and reconstructing
the data while looking for types, features, characteristics, classes, and patterns. Interpretation of the data necessarily depends on what scholarly issue
and problem have been identified for investigation.
Participant observation may be used in a limited manner to acquire snapshots of social life or describe particular slices or aspects of human existence.

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11

It more often is used to provide fairly comprehensive descriptions of cultures,
particular forms of human life, subcultures, and ways of human existence.
Participant observation, even when used in a limited way to acquire a slice
of life, tends to be a relatively time-consuming method of investigation. It is
possible to collect information by way of participant observation over brief
periods of time; however, most studies require a year and sometimes two
or more for satisfactory completion; moreover, some participant observers
devote entire careers to the investigation of the rich and tremendous complexity of human existence.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
In spite of the greater formalization of participant observation over the
past 30 some years, its practice remains artful, rather than mechanical or
formulistic, and open to individual creativity. Particular studies regularly
have explored and innovated with most of the basic steps, strategies,
techniques, and procedures of participant observational investigation.
Reporting, participant roles, values, ethics, and closely related matters all
have drawn considerable attention.
Many of these discussions have been in response to challenges and debates
over “postmodernism.”
The meanings of postmodernism are ambiguous and elusive. Nevertheless, this notion as it applies to participant observational methods generally
concerns claims to knowledge and truth. Postmodern ethnography—as
advocated, for example, by Stephen Tyler, George Marcus, Michael Fisher,
Paul Rabinow, James Clifford, Norman Denzin, Laurel Richardson, and
others—refuses to accord special privilege (or authority) to any knowledge
claim (religious, scientific, political, or whatever) beyond the subjective
experience of the individual in its more radical manifestations. All claims to
knowledge in other words are supposed to derive from subjective interests,
values, and experiences, with no knowledge claim having any privilege or
authority of any other claim. All claims to knowledge therefore are equal to
all others and every resulting expression of reality is equally “real.”
Distinguishing and separating facts and values is a persistent problem for
participant observation and human studies. Some think that as it ultimately is
impossible for the researcher to avoid the influence of values, making explicit
value commitment is required, usually to liberal or radical political values.
Others hold that it is possible to be reflexive about the influence of values
on the participant observer, while maintaining some reasonable separation
of facts and values and without making particular value commitments. It
seems likely that participant observers will continue to exercise sensitivity
and reflexivity about the influence of values and politics on their research.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

At the same time, it also seems unlikely that they will abandon traditional
commitments to the ideals of value neutrality and efforts to provide more or
less impartial descriptions and interpretations of social life.
The ethics of participant observation are governed by various professional
associations and especially the dictates of federally mandated Institutional
Review Boards (IRBs). These IRBs generally have imposed models of
biomedical ethics on most human studies fields. Objections commonly have
been voiced about the inappropriateness of such models for participant
observation and related forms of human studies. Following cursory review,
participant observational studies often are subjected to modest subsequent
review or exempted from further review. Alternative models, such as
feminist, relational, and contextual ethics, have been suggested as more
appropriate for participant observation and other human studies field.
IRBs sometimes are aware of the inappropriateness of biomedical ethics for
much of human studies, but there have been few serious efforts to make
significant changes. Until that happens, the basic strategy seems to be to
comply minimally with IRB requirements, secure the necessary approvals,
and proceed on the basis of more humanistic ethics.
Participant observers have continued to exhibit tremendous creativity in
the performance of membership roles, including cultivating and exploiting
personal experiences to research advantage. Taking advantage of roles and
experiences as a societal member for research purposes has resulted in innovations including “autoethnography.” This strategy takes the researcher’s
self, identity, roles, activities, and personal experiences, as the central focus
of investigation or as an important part of the inquiry. It remains unclear as
to whether or not autoethnography is a distinctive method of research, as
some claim, or a special form and extension of the cultivation of the insider
membership roles that some participant observers explicitly embraced some
40 years ago. Positivistic preoccupations with objectivism precluded many
early participant observers from explicitly cultivating personal experience
as source of data. Yet, many earlier participant observers—from Frank Cushing and Bronislaw Malinowski to John Johnson, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, and
Paul Rabinow, among others—depended on personal experiences and made
critical use of them in describing and interpreting human realities.
Greater appreciation for the complexities of human realities—cognitive,
emotional, gendered, conflictual, problematic, and multiple characteristics—
presents serious challenges for reporting the findings of participant observation. No description of human realities, even in restricted settings and
situations, will be literally exhaustive, and multiple interpretations from
the standpoint of various theories always are possible. Some scholars
consequently abandoned efforts to construct ordinary reports of what
people in everyday life think, feel, or do. Instead, they have experimented

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13

with different forms and styles of presentation, sometimes writing fiction
as the most appropriate means for presenting the results of participant
observation, as insightfully discussed recently by Dominika Ferens. Many
of Zora Neale Hurston’s now famous works of fictions benefitted from her
participant observation as a student of Boas in the 1920s, although these
pioneering efforts in ethnography remain unacknowledged and unexplored
for the most part. There now are many significant discussions of reflexivity,
such as Shulamit Reinharz’s recent study of the kibbutz in Israel. In spite
of the challenges, participant observation is a highly respected scholarly
method of inquiry in most human studies fields today.
The artful character of participant observation makes it difficult to predict future developments. Recent examples of participant observation are
exceptionally diverse, and they exhibit continued innovation. Such studies,
to mention just a few, include Brown’s discussion of Black female legislators,
Burgess’s work on shamanism in Scotland, Clark’s studies of children, Flores’
research on the recovery of Hispanic gang members, Howe’s ethnography of
Kuna culture in South America, Luhrmann’s participant observation with
American evangelicals, Sanders’ and Hardy’s research on the erotic entertainment industry in Britain, Thiel’s examination of the American construction industry, and Alexander’s theorizing about politics based on the Obama
presidential campaigns.
FURTHER READING
Adler, P., & Adler, P. A. (1987). Membership roles in field research. Beverly Hills, CA:
Sage.
Alexander, J. C. (2010). The performance of politics. New York, NY: Oxford University
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Brown, N. E. (2014). Sisters in the statehouse. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Burgess, M. (2008). A new paradigm of spirituality and religion. New York, NY: Continuum.
Clark, C. D. (2011). In a younger voice. Oxford: New York, NY.
Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2005). The Sage handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage.
Douglas, J. D. (1976). Investigative social research. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Ferens, D. (2010). Ways of knowing small places. Wroclaw, Poland: Wydawn. Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego.
Flores, E. O. (2014). God’s gangs. New York: New York University Press.
Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for
qualitative research. Chicago, IL: Aldine.
Howe, J. (2009). Kuna culture from inside and out. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Hurston, Z. N. (1942). Dust tracks on a road: An autobiography. Philadelphia, PA: J.B.
Lippincott.

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Jorgensen, D. L. (1989). Participant observation: A methodology for human studies. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Junker, B. (1960). Field work: An introduction to the social sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Luhrmann, T. M. (2012). When god talks back. New York, NY: Knopf.
Reinharz, S. (2010). Observing the observer. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Sanders, T., & Hardy, K. (2014). Flexible workers. New York, NY: Routledge.
Spradley, J. P. (1980). Participant observation. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Thiel, D. (2012). Builders. New York, NY: Routledge.
Van Maanen, J. (1988). Tales of the field: On writing ethnography. Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press.
Warren, C. A. B. (1988). Gender issues in field research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Wax, R. H. (1971). Doing fieldwork: Warnings and advice. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.

DANNY L. JORGENSEN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Danny L. Jorgensen is Professor (and former Chair) of Religious Studies at
the University of South Florida, Tampa, where he has been employed since
1978 (initially in sociology until 1991). His academic background and degrees
are in sociology: BS, Northern Arizona University, 1972; MA, Western Kentucky University, 1974; and PhD, The Ohio State University, 1979. Jorgensen’s
teaching and research is in the areas of participant observation, ethnography,
and qualitative research; the sociology of religion; and new religions in America, including Mormonism, Neopaganism and Witchcraft, Scientology, and
Old Order Anabaptists (Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, and Brethren). He
is the author of several books, edited books, and an extensive array of book
chapters and journal articles—many of them based on participant observation and other qualitative, ethnographic methods—in these areas. He and
spouse, June, reside part of the year in Tampa and part of the year near
Lebanon, in southern Missouri, on a hundred-acre horse farm.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Jorgensen
USF Religious Studies: http://religious-studies.usf.edu/faculty/data/
djorgensen_cv.pdf
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Ethnography in the Digital Age (Methods), Alan Howard and Alexander
Mawyer

Participant Observation

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How Brief Social-Psychological Interventions Can Cause Enduring Effects
(Methods), Dushiyanthini (Toni) Kenthirarajah and Gregory M. Walton
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Wiedermann
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Participant Observation
DANNY L. JORGENSEN

Abstract
Investigating the meanings of human existence as they are constructed and enacted
by people in everyday life situations and settings presents serious challenges for all
forms of human studies. Participant observation, whereby the researcher interacts
with people in everyday life while collecting information, is a unique method for
investigating the enormously rich, complex, conflictual, problematic, and diverse
experiences, thoughts, feelings, and activities of human beings and the meanings of
their existence. Use of this distinctive method emerged with the professionalization
of anthropology and sociology where it gradually was formalized and later spread to
a full range of human studies fields. Its practice nevertheless remains artful, requiring
creative decision making about problems and questions to be studied, appropriate
settings and situations for gathering information, the performance of membership
roles, establishing and sustaining trusting relationships, ethics, values, and politics,
as well as record making, data analysis and interpretation, and reporting results.
This essay provides a brief sketch of the method of participant observation and an
overview of a few of the more central issues of its practice, including its location
historically within the framework of different views of social scientific methodology.

INTRODUCTION
Participant observation is a unique method for investigating human existence whereby the researcher more or less actively participates with people in
commonplace situations and everyday life settings while observing and otherwise collecting information. By participating in human life, the researcher
acquires direct access to not only the physically observable environment
but also its primary reality as humanly meaningful experiences, thoughts,
feelings, and activities. Through participation, in other words, it is possible
to observe and gather many forms of data that often are inaccessible from the
standpoint of a nonparticipating external observer. Participant observation
consequently is one of the premier methods for conducting investigations

Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of the realities of human existence in their totality as they exhibit external,
physical characteristics and internal, subjective, and personal features as
well as intersubjectively and socially meaningful properties. The form of the
researcher’s participation and the character of the human settings studied
further specify what is distinctive and unique about this method of scholarly
investigation.
Participation may range along a continuum from passive to active; although
it often is difficult to discriminate unambiguously between these poles. Passive participation suggests that the researcher is present at some human scene
but not otherwise engaged directly with people or their activities. Active participation implies that the researcher is joined with people—their thoughts,
feelings, and activities—and, thereby, connected to their lives. The participant observer typically performs some socially available role or roles, even if
only nominally, in the study setting. The investigator may be a mostly passive
participant in some situations and/or a more or less active participant in others. It is the more active aspect of participation in the lives of the people studied
that differentiates this research method from other forms of observational
inquiry.
The settings of participant observational investigations are ones characterized by whatever it is that people ordinarily think, feel, and do in the course of
their lives. These situations consequently are not concocted or shaped by the
researcher. In other words, they are the natural settings of human existence,
complete with the reality of daily life as it appears to members of these situations and settings. Furthermore, these situations usually are not controlled by
the researcher—or, at least, they are not manipulated beyond whatever forms
of human management ordinarily transpire. Participant observation consequently differs noticeably from methods of inquiry, such as experiments or
surveys, whereby the researcher artificially creates and controls the study
conditions more extensively. It thereby is a more “natural” and much less
intrusive, reactive, or unnatural form of inquiry than many other forms of
research.
Participant observation is closely related to “qualitative” and “ethnographic” methods of research as well as those involving “field research” or
“field work.” These forms of research increasingly have become legitimate
and tremendously popular in a broad range of fields. Besides the disciplines
of anthropology and sociology where formal methods of participant observation originated, these methods of investigation—commonly involving
some participant observation—are being employed widely today in all of
the social sciences, communication, education, management and business,
criminology and criminal justice, and many other fields, such as social work
and human services, medicine, nursing, health, and other areas of scholarly
study involving people.

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FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Travelers and merchants collected information while participating with
people from the obscurest beginnings of human record keeping. Explorers,
missionaries, and civil servants—especially with worldwide colonialization
by Europeans and Americans—also recorded their observations on this
basis. Social reformers and political activists later adopted a method of
recording facts while participating among disadvantaged or powerless
populations. These instances of participating while observing influenced
the subsequent development of participant observation as a disciplined,
scholarly method of investigation.
The methodology of participant observation emerged gradually in both
anthropology and sociology with their professionalization—notwithstanding
the imperialistic claims of one or the other to this method exclusively. Both
disciplines were founded on grand theoretical scenarios stressing social evolutionary naturalism. The founding figures of anthropology and sociology
often depended on the observations of others—particularly missionaries, civil servants, and world travelers—but they rarely collected data
themselves. One of the earliest deployments of participant observation
for professional purposes probably was Frank Hamilton Cushing’s 1880s
ethnography of the Zuni Indians of the American southwest.
Franz Boas’ early twentieth century opposition to the dominant social
evolutionary paradigm revolutionized early American anthropology by
emphasizing the descriptive, ethnographic study of local cultures. He also
aimed to rescue anthropology from the many amateurs working in this area
and provide it with a sound scientific basis. This image of “science” was
grounded in the idiographic (specific or particular) approach of the cultural
sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), however, rather than the nomothetic
(generalizing or law-like) approach of the physical or natural sciences
(Naturwissenschaften). These differing methodological approaches also
are referred to commonly a “humanistic” and “positivistic,” respectively.
Anthropologists employed participant observation primarily for describing
non-Western cultures and particular aspects of them, such as language,
family, and kinship or religion. Boas students such as Alfred Kroeber, Clark
Wissler, John Swanton, Fay Cole, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, Paul Radin,
Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead (also including novelist Zora Neale
Hurston) dominated the field into at least the 1940s. Their work established
ethnography conducted by participant observation as the research standard
in North American social and cultural anthropology.
Bronislaw Malinowski and students—such as E. E. Evans-Pritchard,
Hortense Powdermaker, Raymond Firth, and Edmund Leach—exerted a
similar ethnographic influence over British and European anthropology.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Malinowski used participant observation during extended trips into the
field, recording his thoughts and feelings in a diary, and he later wrote extensively about these field experiences. He especially exhibited a self-conscious
concern for the relationships between participant observational methods
of research and the resulting data. This particularizing approach and its
concern for the natives’ (or insiders’) perspective sometimes is characterized
as an “emic” one as opposed to the generalizing, “etic” concern of theorizing
from an external (or outsiders’) viewpoint.
During the early twentieth century in American sociology, W. I. Thomas
likewise challenged grand theorizing by engaging in an informal participant
observation and gathering documents and records of human life. Stressing
the empirical quality of his observations and other research materials along
with theory construction, Thomas explicitly advocated a more positivistic
methodology (a nomothetic one modeled after the natural sciences). Robert
Park, who replaced Thomas as the leading figure of the early Chicago School
of sociology during the 1920s, expanded upon this methodological program.
In collaboration with Ernest Burgess, Park turned the city of Chicago into
a sociological laboratory. They trained several generations of sociologists,
many of them producing famous studies of the city and its varied ways
of human life using an eclectic array of empirical approaches. Qualitative
methods, including an informal participant observation, were employed to
describe distinctive ways of life, much of this in response to urbanization.
They studied American subcultures, gangs and delinquency, vice, deviance,
and crime, ethnic groups, communities, and much more.
From the 1920s onward, American sociologists debated the respective
merits of qualitative and quantitative methods, oftentimes expressed as
case studies versus statistics and/or subjectivism versus objectivism. The
dominant sociological methodology favored quantitative approaches, especially the newly developed techniques of survey interview or questionnaire
research. Many nevertheless stood firm on the necessity of descriptive, qualitative data and methods such as participant observation. Both sides more or
less accepted a positivistic view of methodology. A notable minority, however, advocated a more thoroughly humanistic approach, one holding that
the logic and techniques of research must be uniquely adapted to the human
character, especially meanings, of social life. This viewpoint especially
is evident in Charles H. Cooley’s notion of “sympathetic introspection,”
Florian Znaniecki’s “humanistic coefficient,” Robert MacIver’s “sympathetic
reconstruction,” and the celebrated Neo-Kantian concept of “verstehen” (a
humanly empathetic form of understanding) drawn especially from Max
Weber, the classical German sociologist. Participant observation is especially
valuable for intuitively and empathically apprehending human realities,

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beyond what is accessible by sensation or reason, and it therefore was often
seen as central to humanistic methodologies.
Several generations of Chicago sociologists, such as Herbert Blumer,
Everett Hughes, Louis Wirth, E. Franklin Frazer, and Robert Redfield, supported, used, or advocated qualitative methods (forming a
more humanistically oriented Second Chicago School). Hughes and his
collaborators—including Howard S. Becker, Blanche Greer, and Anselm
Strauss, among others such as Erving Goffman, Julius Roth, Gerald Suttles,
Elliot Liebow, and William F. Whyte—published studies exemplifying
and defending participant observation. From the early 1930s onward,
sociological and anthropological approaches to qualitative methods were
intermingled in the United States. The publication of textbooks on participant observation and related qualitative, ethnographic field methods mostly
came later.
In the positivistic climate of American social science from the 1940s to the
1960s, participant observation sometimes was deemed to be nonscientific.
More commonly, however, it was viewed as useful during the preliminary
stages of scientific inquiry for exploration and description. Qualitative
descriptions generated by participant observation are helpful from this
vantage point in formulating concepts for measurement and hypotheses
which, with further testing and verification, may be employed to construct
explanatory theories. Yet, participant observation was not seen as especially
useful for the ultimate scientific goal of explanatory (nomothetic) theorizing.
There were, however, efforts to establish inductive theorizing, based on participant observation and other qualitative methodologies, as legitimate in
their own right, independently of positivist conceptions of theory and theorizing. More inductive, “grounded theory” approaches, such as those pioneered by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, increasingly tended to ignore
positivistic imagery. Many proponents of participant observation and other
qualitative methods eventually would reject the positivistic goals of explanatory (nomothetic/emic) theorizing entirely in favor of interpretative (idiographic/etic) theorizing as envisioned from a humanistic standpoint.
Following World War II, sociologists and anthropologists increasingly
found variations of Marxist thinking, phenomenology, existentialism, linguistics, and analytic philosophy of special interest. Many of them contained
sharp critiques of positivism, resulting in theoretical and methodological
innovations. This included social constructionism (Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckmann), the symbolic interactionist emphasis on social meanings (Hebert
Blumer), viewing social life as a drama (Erving Goffman’s dramaturgy), and
a focus on how members of society accomplish social life (Harold Garfinkel’s
ethnomethodology). The synthesis of these perspectives along with features
of phenomenology and existentialism by Jack Douglas, John Johnson, David

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Altheide, and Peter and Patti Adler, among others, was especially important
for emphasizing a methodology of participant observation.
Anthropology, during this period, provided a different intellectual context,
a much less positivistic one in which ethnography still was under the powerful influence of Boas and Malinowski. Even so, the work of Clifford Geertz
and David Schneider and Europeans such as Mary Douglas, Victor Turner,
and even Claude Levi-Strauss show many of these same influences. Some
of these innovations also were manifest in the United Sates with cognitive
anthropology, ethnoscience, and the “new ethnography.” Since the 1970s,
there has been a good deal of cross-fertilization among like-minded sociologists and anthropologists, especially with respect to theories of symbolic
meanings, humanistic methodologies, as well as ethnography, participant
observation, and related qualitative approaches.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
By the 1980s, there was a growing social scientific consensus that human realities are socially constructed by way of interactional processes with meaning
as a central feature. This perspective dissented significantly from naturalism,
realism, and other objectivist viewpoints. Human meanings are “subjective”
in the sense that they are internalized by individuals, but they more accurately are “intersubjective” (and thereby collective or social) in that meanings
are expressed in language. As meanings are shared with other members of
the linguistic community, they consequently are available to others (they are
not private or “subjective” in the more ordinary sense), thereby resolving the
standard objections to the so-called subjectivist approaches.
Moving even further from earlier theorizing, meanings were envisioned as
always problematic and conflictual. Human reality therefore is composed of
diverse and pluralistic meanings constituting a multiplicity of realities. Some
researchers focused on the more cognitive aspects of meanings, leading to
innovations in sociolinguistics, and studies of different forms of knowledge,
such as religious or scientific. Others emphasized that cognitions always are
colored by emotions, resulting in an emphasis on not entirely “rational” (even
irrational) qualities of human meanings and existence. Feminist thinking,
moreover, called attention to the monumental significance of gender differences for human constructions of meaning as well as related social roles and
interactions.
Altogether, then, human realities came to be seen as emotional in addition
to being cognitive, gendered, conflictual and problematic, complex and
multiple, intersubjectively meaningful, as well as produced and internalized
by human beings through social interaction. These realities, contrary to
reflection and correspondence theories of truth (rationalism/empiricism),

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7

always are relative to intersubjective human construction. They do not exist
independently of human construction; they have no objectivity independently of human existence; and they never can be apprehended exhaustively
or absolutely.
Human studies consequently require special methods and procedures, such
as participant observation, suited to the description of these human meanings and realities. The aim of such humanistic methodologies is to describe
human meanings and experiences, even though such descriptions always
will be incomplete and partial. Likewise, no explanation of human meanings and experiences is possible (in the positivist sense), and all interpretation inevitably will be partial and incomplete. It, nevertheless, is possible to
provide interpretations of human meanings and experiences from the standpoint of particular scholarly issues and problems. This viewpoint also reflects
the influences of American pragmaticism—including such influential figures
as William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, G. H. Mead, and C. Wright
Mills—running through much of this work. Hence, within such a delimited
theoretical context, it is possible to make judgments—based on reasons and
evidence—about different, even rival, interpretations.
This methodological viewpoint also emphasized the necessity of
self-conscious reflection about the relationship between the practices of
the researcher and the products of research. In other words, research
reflexivity became a central methodological obligation for all humanistic
studies, especially participant observation. Much attention has focused on
the researchers’ social location and how research practices influence what
is discerned and described by way of participant observation as well as
how these human realities are analyzed, interpreted, and reported. This
emergent framework for understanding human studies was reinforced
greatly by Thomas Kuhn’s extraordinarily influential work in the history
and philosophy of science. It confirmed for methodological humanists
that the workings of the physical and biological sciences were much less
positivistic than previously described and subject to many of the same
interpretative difficulties as the human sciences.
The earliest uses of participant observation were highly artful. A form of
research that is informal and dependent on the intuition and interpersonal
abilities of the researcher and therefore not something that is mechanically
reproducible based on a formula by just anyone. Students commonly were
told to review exemplary studies and then proceed into the field to do likewise. Gradually, during the 1960s and 1970s, a few textbooks endeavored to
describe strategies, techniques, and pitfalls more formally. Throughout the
late 1970s and 1980s, studies based on a method of participant observation

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

proliferated, and spread to other human studies fields, and this trend has continued to the present. Today, participant observation is employed extensively
in most all human studies fields, including medicine, nursing, and health.
Previously heated battles over quantification and positivistic methodologies versus qualitative and humanistic methodologies have waned substantially as methods such as participant observation have gained widespread
popularity and respectability. The legitimacy of participant observation is no
longer seriously questioned. Textbooks, guides, resource works, and journal
articles outlining and describing specific methods, strategies, and techniques
of participant observation also have proliferated. This research method consequently has been subject to considerable formalization, even if it still retains
powerful vestiges of its former artfulness.
There is considerable consensus that participant observation is most appropriate when certain minimal study conditions are present.
•

•

•

•

•

•

A central interest of the research is some concern for human meanings,
feelings, and interactions viewed from the perspective of the native
members of those situations and settings.
The phenomenon to be investigated is observable in some natural, everyday life situation or setting.
The researcher is able to acquire reasonable access to people and their
activities in an appropriate setting.
The phenomenon of study is sufficiently limited in scope, size, and location to be examined by way of a case study design.
The questions or problems to be addressed are appropriate for case
study.
Suitable information can be collected by direct observation, participant
observation, interviews, documents and related materials, and other
means and sources available in some field setting.

Participant observation frequently is used in an open-ended manner to
explore and examine research questions that emerge with investigation
rather than preconceived hypotheses; although nothing prohibits its use for
hypothesis testing. Working inductively by way of a “logic of discovery”
offers advantages in research validity, being dependent on accessing the
insiders’ realities. Yet, it also places special demands on the researcher.
The definition of study questions, issues, and problems, as well as the
formulation of concepts and development of appropriate indicators often
must be refined during the course of the investigation while participating
and observing in the field.
Participant observation, moreover, requires the researcher to find and
select a setting or settings appropriate for study, and identify features or

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9

aspects of situations in the larger setting for investigation. What is observed
often is selective, requiring some strategy for sampling. Those strategies
usually are based on opportunistic techniques, such as snowball samples,
or those involving judgments or rationales other than probability sampling.
The study problem and setting often suggest and delimit sensible sampling
strategies.
Gaining access to a research setting and situations presents the participant
observer with a host of complex decisions. It often times requires some negotiation or reason for being present, and the participant observer must decide
how to account for being present, when and where to disclose research interests, and how much information to supply. It is possible to participate and
observe in many human settings overtly or covertly; that is with or without disclosing the research intentions. Much debate surrounds the ethics of
covert participant observation and it sometimes is deemed to be unacceptable
under all circumstances. Yet, many human situations, such as those involving illegal activities, are difficult or impossible to investigate when research
interests are explicitly revealed in those settings. Covert research sometimes
involves lying and deliberately deceiving people about the research interests.
It is possible, however, to participate and observe in many situations, particularly highly public ones, without deceiving people even if the researcher does
not reveal an interest in conducting research. A great deal of overt human
research is done without informing everyone involved that research is underway or disclosing the precise character of the investigation. The complexity of
many research problems, moreover, makes it unlikely that subjects fully comprehend the study or their involvement in it, even when they are informed
more fully.
Many research settings provide the participant observer with a wide range
of possible roles from being a mostly passive outsider to becoming an actively
involved insider. It is common for the participant observer to perform multiple roles along this continuum during the course of a prolonged investigation. The researcher may define the participant role as that of mostly an
outsider, an investigator, nominally present to observe what people are doing
in some setting or situation. Alternatively, the participant role may be defined
by insiders based on those ordinarily available in the setting or a particular
situation.
Early participant observers were warned not to cross the rather arbitrary line between passive participation as a nominal member and active
membership, something known as “going native” or “becoming the phenomenon.” Actually, participant observers—notably Frank Cushing, Zora
Neale Hurston, and others such as Howard S. Becker—had been crossing
this line to considerable advantage in acquiring insight into the natives’
world of meaning all along. By the mid-1970s, participant observers, such

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

as Bennetta Jules-Rosette, were challenging this traditional taboo and
demonstrating that the strategic, reflexive performance of membership
roles often times provides unique and invaluable access to insider realities.
Such participant observational studies demonstrated moreover that the
performance of insider roles could be enacted without any loss of objectivity,
impartiality or other aspects of disciplined, scholarly rigor. Participant
observers, such as people in daily life, are able to switch back and forth
between various social roles, fully participating at times while engaging in
reflection, analysis, and interpretation at other times, rather deftly. Some
researchers also increasingly began employing team strategies of participant
observation in order to gather data from the standpoint of multiple roles
and perspectives in various settings.
Collecting truthful information requires considerable skill in cultivating
rapport, making friends, and sustaining trusting relationships with people
in the field. Simply put, people who do not know you or trust you are not
likely to be cooperative in providing much data, especially truthful information about the deepest meanings and inner workings of their daily lives.
In most settings, it is possible to collect different forms of data by way of a
wide variety of means. Observations, for instance, may range from largely
unfocused efforts to overview the action to more focused attempts to gather
detailed information about specific feelings, meanings, and activities. Participant observers usually ask a lot of questions, many of them causal and
informal, in the course of an investigation. Some studies also profitably make
use of more formal interviewing techniques and even structured questionnaires. In-depth interviews and life histories also may be collected. Many
settings and situations provide access to a vast array of other human communications, documents, and relevant artifacts. Notes and journals recording
personal experiences usually provide still another valuable source of data.
Making notes, keeping records, and creating files of information gathering in the field are extremely important and all of these activities present
the participant observer with challenges. It is tempting but mistaken to put
off record keeping, hoping to recall significant details and events at some
later time. Record keeping strategies range from the dependence on handwriting and computer (typewriting) processing to photography and audio
or audio-video recording. Analysis and interpretation of participant observational materials is like that of other forms of qualitative data. It commonly
involves coding and filing, sorting, sifting, constructing, and reconstructing
the data while looking for types, features, characteristics, classes, and patterns. Interpretation of the data necessarily depends on what scholarly issue
and problem have been identified for investigation.
Participant observation may be used in a limited manner to acquire snapshots of social life or describe particular slices or aspects of human existence.

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It more often is used to provide fairly comprehensive descriptions of cultures,
particular forms of human life, subcultures, and ways of human existence.
Participant observation, even when used in a limited way to acquire a slice
of life, tends to be a relatively time-consuming method of investigation. It is
possible to collect information by way of participant observation over brief
periods of time; however, most studies require a year and sometimes two
or more for satisfactory completion; moreover, some participant observers
devote entire careers to the investigation of the rich and tremendous complexity of human existence.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
In spite of the greater formalization of participant observation over the
past 30 some years, its practice remains artful, rather than mechanical or
formulistic, and open to individual creativity. Particular studies regularly
have explored and innovated with most of the basic steps, strategies,
techniques, and procedures of participant observational investigation.
Reporting, participant roles, values, ethics, and closely related matters all
have drawn considerable attention.
Many of these discussions have been in response to challenges and debates
over “postmodernism.”
The meanings of postmodernism are ambiguous and elusive. Nevertheless, this notion as it applies to participant observational methods generally
concerns claims to knowledge and truth. Postmodern ethnography—as
advocated, for example, by Stephen Tyler, George Marcus, Michael Fisher,
Paul Rabinow, James Clifford, Norman Denzin, Laurel Richardson, and
others—refuses to accord special privilege (or authority) to any knowledge
claim (religious, scientific, political, or whatever) beyond the subjective
experience of the individual in its more radical manifestations. All claims to
knowledge in other words are supposed to derive from subjective interests,
values, and experiences, with no knowledge claim having any privilege or
authority of any other claim. All claims to knowledge therefore are equal to
all others and every resulting expression of reality is equally “real.”
Distinguishing and separating facts and values is a persistent problem for
participant observation and human studies. Some think that as it ultimately is
impossible for the researcher to avoid the influence of values, making explicit
value commitment is required, usually to liberal or radical political values.
Others hold that it is possible to be reflexive about the influence of values
on the participant observer, while maintaining some reasonable separation
of facts and values and without making particular value commitments. It
seems likely that participant observers will continue to exercise sensitivity
and reflexivity about the influence of values and politics on their research.

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At the same time, it also seems unlikely that they will abandon traditional
commitments to the ideals of value neutrality and efforts to provide more or
less impartial descriptions and interpretations of social life.
The ethics of participant observation are governed by various professional
associations and especially the dictates of federally mandated Institutional
Review Boards (IRBs). These IRBs generally have imposed models of
biomedical ethics on most human studies fields. Objections commonly have
been voiced about the inappropriateness of such models for participant
observation and related forms of human studies. Following cursory review,
participant observational studies often are subjected to modest subsequent
review or exempted from further review. Alternative models, such as
feminist, relational, and contextual ethics, have been suggested as more
appropriate for participant observation and other human studies field.
IRBs sometimes are aware of the inappropriateness of biomedical ethics for
much of human studies, but there have been few serious efforts to make
significant changes. Until that happens, the basic strategy seems to be to
comply minimally with IRB requirements, secure the necessary approvals,
and proceed on the basis of more humanistic ethics.
Participant observers have continued to exhibit tremendous creativity in
the performance of membership roles, including cultivating and exploiting
personal experiences to research advantage. Taking advantage of roles and
experiences as a societal member for research purposes has resulted in innovations including “autoethnography.” This strategy takes the researcher’s
self, identity, roles, activities, and personal experiences, as the central focus
of investigation or as an important part of the inquiry. It remains unclear as
to whether or not autoethnography is a distinctive method of research, as
some claim, or a special form and extension of the cultivation of the insider
membership roles that some participant observers explicitly embraced some
40 years ago. Positivistic preoccupations with objectivism precluded many
early participant observers from explicitly cultivating personal experience
as source of data. Yet, many earlier participant observers—from Frank Cushing and Bronislaw Malinowski to John Johnson, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, and
Paul Rabinow, among others—depended on personal experiences and made
critical use of them in describing and interpreting human realities.
Greater appreciation for the complexities of human realities—cognitive,
emotional, gendered, conflictual, problematic, and multiple characteristics—
presents serious challenges for reporting the findings of participant observation. No description of human realities, even in restricted settings and
situations, will be literally exhaustive, and multiple interpretations from
the standpoint of various theories always are possible. Some scholars
consequently abandoned efforts to construct ordinary reports of what
people in everyday life think, feel, or do. Instead, they have experimented

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with different forms and styles of presentation, sometimes writing fiction
as the most appropriate means for presenting the results of participant
observation, as insightfully discussed recently by Dominika Ferens. Many
of Zora Neale Hurston’s now famous works of fictions benefitted from her
participant observation as a student of Boas in the 1920s, although these
pioneering efforts in ethnography remain unacknowledged and unexplored
for the most part. There now are many significant discussions of reflexivity,
such as Shulamit Reinharz’s recent study of the kibbutz in Israel. In spite
of the challenges, participant observation is a highly respected scholarly
method of inquiry in most human studies fields today.
The artful character of participant observation makes it difficult to predict future developments. Recent examples of participant observation are
exceptionally diverse, and they exhibit continued innovation. Such studies,
to mention just a few, include Brown’s discussion of Black female legislators,
Burgess’s work on shamanism in Scotland, Clark’s studies of children, Flores’
research on the recovery of Hispanic gang members, Howe’s ethnography of
Kuna culture in South America, Luhrmann’s participant observation with
American evangelicals, Sanders’ and Hardy’s research on the erotic entertainment industry in Britain, Thiel’s examination of the American construction industry, and Alexander’s theorizing about politics based on the Obama
presidential campaigns.
FURTHER READING
Adler, P., & Adler, P. A. (1987). Membership roles in field research. Beverly Hills, CA:
Sage.
Alexander, J. C. (2010). The performance of politics. New York, NY: Oxford University
Press.
Brown, N. E. (2014). Sisters in the statehouse. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Burgess, M. (2008). A new paradigm of spirituality and religion. New York, NY: Continuum.
Clark, C. D. (2011). In a younger voice. Oxford: New York, NY.
Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2005). The Sage handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage.
Douglas, J. D. (1976). Investigative social research. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Ferens, D. (2010). Ways of knowing small places. Wroclaw, Poland: Wydawn. Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego.
Flores, E. O. (2014). God’s gangs. New York: New York University Press.
Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for
qualitative research. Chicago, IL: Aldine.
Howe, J. (2009). Kuna culture from inside and out. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Hurston, Z. N. (1942). Dust tracks on a road: An autobiography. Philadelphia, PA: J.B.
Lippincott.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Jorgensen, D. L. (1989). Participant observation: A methodology for human studies. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Junker, B. (1960). Field work: An introduction to the social sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Luhrmann, T. M. (2012). When god talks back. New York, NY: Knopf.
Reinharz, S. (2010). Observing the observer. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Sanders, T., & Hardy, K. (2014). Flexible workers. New York, NY: Routledge.
Spradley, J. P. (1980). Participant observation. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Thiel, D. (2012). Builders. New York, NY: Routledge.
Van Maanen, J. (1988). Tales of the field: On writing ethnography. Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press.
Warren, C. A. B. (1988). Gender issues in field research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Wax, R. H. (1971). Doing fieldwork: Warnings and advice. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.

DANNY L. JORGENSEN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Danny L. Jorgensen is Professor (and former Chair) of Religious Studies at
the University of South Florida, Tampa, where he has been employed since
1978 (initially in sociology until 1991). His academic background and degrees
are in sociology: BS, Northern Arizona University, 1972; MA, Western Kentucky University, 1974; and PhD, The Ohio State University, 1979. Jorgensen’s
teaching and research is in the areas of participant observation, ethnography,
and qualitative research; the sociology of religion; and new religions in America, including Mormonism, Neopaganism and Witchcraft, Scientology, and
Old Order Anabaptists (Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, and Brethren). He
is the author of several books, edited books, and an extensive array of book
chapters and journal articles—many of them based on participant observation and other qualitative, ethnographic methods—in these areas. He and
spouse, June, reside part of the year in Tampa and part of the year near
Lebanon, in southern Missouri, on a hundred-acre horse farm.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Jorgensen
USF Religious Studies: http://religious-studies.usf.edu/faculty/data/
djorgensen_cv.pdf
RELATED ESSAYS
To Flop Is Human: Inventing Better Scientific Approaches to Anticipating
Failure (Methods), Robert Boruch and Alan Ruby
Micro-Cultures (Sociology), Gary Alan Fine
Ethnography in the Digital Age (Methods), Alan Howard and Alexander
Mawyer

Participant Observation

15

How Brief Social-Psychological Interventions Can Cause Enduring Effects
(Methods), Dushiyanthini (Toni) Kenthirarajah and Gregory M. Walton
Ethnography: Telling Practice Stories (Methods), Karen O’Reilly
Content Analysis (Methods), Steven E. Stemler
Person-Centered Analysis (Methods), Alexander von Eye and Wolfgang
Wiedermann
Translational Sociology (Sociology), Elaine Wethington


Participant Observation
DANNY L. JORGENSEN

Abstract
Investigating the meanings of human existence as they are constructed and enacted
by people in everyday life situations and settings presents serious challenges for all
forms of human studies. Participant observation, whereby the researcher interacts
with people in everyday life while collecting information, is a unique method for
investigating the enormously rich, complex, conflictual, problematic, and diverse
experiences, thoughts, feelings, and activities of human beings and the meanings of
their existence. Use of this distinctive method emerged with the professionalization
of anthropology and sociology where it gradually was formalized and later spread to
a full range of human studies fields. Its practice nevertheless remains artful, requiring
creative decision making about problems and questions to be studied, appropriate
settings and situations for gathering information, the performance of membership
roles, establishing and sustaining trusting relationships, ethics, values, and politics,
as well as record making, data analysis and interpretation, and reporting results.
This essay provides a brief sketch of the method of participant observation and an
overview of a few of the more central issues of its practice, including its location
historically within the framework of different views of social scientific methodology.

INTRODUCTION
Participant observation is a unique method for investigating human existence whereby the researcher more or less actively participates with people in
commonplace situations and everyday life settings while observing and otherwise collecting information. By participating in human life, the researcher
acquires direct access to not only the physically observable environment
but also its primary reality as humanly meaningful experiences, thoughts,
feelings, and activities. Through participation, in other words, it is possible
to observe and gather many forms of data that often are inaccessible from the
standpoint of a nonparticipating external observer. Participant observation
consequently is one of the premier methods for conducting investigations

Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of the realities of human existence in their totality as they exhibit external,
physical characteristics and internal, subjective, and personal features as
well as intersubjectively and socially meaningful properties. The form of the
researcher’s participation and the character of the human settings studied
further specify what is distinctive and unique about this method of scholarly
investigation.
Participation may range along a continuum from passive to active; although
it often is difficult to discriminate unambiguously between these poles. Passive participation suggests that the researcher is present at some human scene
but not otherwise engaged directly with people or their activities. Active participation implies that the researcher is joined with people—their thoughts,
feelings, and activities—and, thereby, connected to their lives. The participant observer typically performs some socially available role or roles, even if
only nominally, in the study setting. The investigator may be a mostly passive
participant in some situations and/or a more or less active participant in others. It is the more active aspect of participation in the lives of the people studied
that differentiates this research method from other forms of observational
inquiry.
The settings of participant observational investigations are ones characterized by whatever it is that people ordinarily think, feel, and do in the course of
their lives. These situations consequently are not concocted or shaped by the
researcher. In other words, they are the natural settings of human existence,
complete with the reality of daily life as it appears to members of these situations and settings. Furthermore, these situations usually are not controlled by
the researcher—or, at least, they are not manipulated beyond whatever forms
of human management ordinarily transpire. Participant observation consequently differs noticeably from methods of inquiry, such as experiments or
surveys, whereby the researcher artificially creates and controls the study
conditions more extensively. It thereby is a more “natural” and much less
intrusive, reactive, or unnatural form of inquiry than many other forms of
research.
Participant observation is closely related to “qualitative” and “ethnographic” methods of research as well as those involving “field research” or
“field work.” These forms of research increasingly have become legitimate
and tremendously popular in a broad range of fields. Besides the disciplines
of anthropology and sociology where formal methods of participant observation originated, these methods of investigation—commonly involving
some participant observation—are being employed widely today in all of
the social sciences, communication, education, management and business,
criminology and criminal justice, and many other fields, such as social work
and human services, medicine, nursing, health, and other areas of scholarly
study involving people.

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FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Travelers and merchants collected information while participating with
people from the obscurest beginnings of human record keeping. Explorers,
missionaries, and civil servants—especially with worldwide colonialization
by Europeans and Americans—also recorded their observations on this
basis. Social reformers and political activists later adopted a method of
recording facts while participating among disadvantaged or powerless
populations. These instances of participating while observing influenced
the subsequent development of participant observation as a disciplined,
scholarly method of investigation.
The methodology of participant observation emerged gradually in both
anthropology and sociology with their professionalization—notwithstanding
the imperialistic claims of one or the other to this method exclusively. Both
disciplines were founded on grand theoretical scenarios stressing social evolutionary naturalism. The founding figures of anthropology and sociology
often depended on the observations of others—particularly missionaries, civil servants, and world travelers—but they rarely collected data
themselves. One of the earliest deployments of participant observation
for professional purposes probably was Frank Hamilton Cushing’s 1880s
ethnography of the Zuni Indians of the American southwest.
Franz Boas’ early twentieth century opposition to the dominant social
evolutionary paradigm revolutionized early American anthropology by
emphasizing the descriptive, ethnographic study of local cultures. He also
aimed to rescue anthropology from the many amateurs working in this area
and provide it with a sound scientific basis. This image of “science” was
grounded in the idiographic (specific or particular) approach of the cultural
sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), however, rather than the nomothetic
(generalizing or law-like) approach of the physical or natural sciences
(Naturwissenschaften). These differing methodological approaches also
are referred to commonly a “humanistic” and “positivistic,” respectively.
Anthropologists employed participant observation primarily for describing
non-Western cultures and particular aspects of them, such as language,
family, and kinship or religion. Boas students such as Alfred Kroeber, Clark
Wissler, John Swanton, Fay Cole, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, Paul Radin,
Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead (also including novelist Zora Neale
Hurston) dominated the field into at least the 1940s. Their work established
ethnography conducted by participant observation as the research standard
in North American social and cultural anthropology.
Bronislaw Malinowski and students—such as E. E. Evans-Pritchard,
Hortense Powdermaker, Raymond Firth, and Edmund Leach—exerted a
similar ethnographic influence over British and European anthropology.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Malinowski used participant observation during extended trips into the
field, recording his thoughts and feelings in a diary, and he later wrote extensively about these field experiences. He especially exhibited a self-conscious
concern for the relationships between participant observational methods
of research and the resulting data. This particularizing approach and its
concern for the natives’ (or insiders’) perspective sometimes is characterized
as an “emic” one as opposed to the generalizing, “etic” concern of theorizing
from an external (or outsiders’) viewpoint.
During the early twentieth century in American sociology, W. I. Thomas
likewise challenged grand theorizing by engaging in an informal participant
observation and gathering documents and records of human life. Stressing
the empirical quality of his observations and other research materials along
with theory construction, Thomas explicitly advocated a more positivistic
methodology (a nomothetic one modeled after the natural sciences). Robert
Park, who replaced Thomas as the leading figure of the early Chicago School
of sociology during the 1920s, expanded upon this methodological program.
In collaboration with Ernest Burgess, Park turned the city of Chicago into
a sociological laboratory. They trained several generations of sociologists,
many of them producing famous studies of the city and its varied ways
of human life using an eclectic array of empirical approaches. Qualitative
methods, including an informal participant observation, were employed to
describe distinctive ways of life, much of this in response to urbanization.
They studied American subcultures, gangs and delinquency, vice, deviance,
and crime, ethnic groups, communities, and much more.
From the 1920s onward, American sociologists debated the respective
merits of qualitative and quantitative methods, oftentimes expressed as
case studies versus statistics and/or subjectivism versus objectivism. The
dominant sociological methodology favored quantitative approaches, especially the newly developed techniques of survey interview or questionnaire
research. Many nevertheless stood firm on the necessity of descriptive, qualitative data and methods such as participant observation. Both sides more or
less accepted a positivistic view of methodology. A notable minority, however, advocated a more thoroughly humanistic approach, one holding that
the logic and techniques of research must be uniquely adapted to the human
character, especially meanings, of social life. This viewpoint especially
is evident in Charles H. Cooley’s notion of “sympathetic introspection,”
Florian Znaniecki’s “humanistic coefficient,” Robert MacIver’s “sympathetic
reconstruction,” and the celebrated Neo-Kantian concept of “verstehen” (a
humanly empathetic form of understanding) drawn especially from Max
Weber, the classical German sociologist. Participant observation is especially
valuable for intuitively and empathically apprehending human realities,

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beyond what is accessible by sensation or reason, and it therefore was often
seen as central to humanistic methodologies.
Several generations of Chicago sociologists, such as Herbert Blumer,
Everett Hughes, Louis Wirth, E. Franklin Frazer, and Robert Redfield, supported, used, or advocated qualitative methods (forming a
more humanistically oriented Second Chicago School). Hughes and his
collaborators—including Howard S. Becker, Blanche Greer, and Anselm
Strauss, among others such as Erving Goffman, Julius Roth, Gerald Suttles,
Elliot Liebow, and William F. Whyte—published studies exemplifying
and defending participant observation. From the early 1930s onward,
sociological and anthropological approaches to qualitative methods were
intermingled in the United States. The publication of textbooks on participant observation and related qualitative, ethnographic field methods mostly
came later.
In the positivistic climate of American social science from the 1940s to the
1960s, participant observation sometimes was deemed to be nonscientific.
More commonly, however, it was viewed as useful during the preliminary
stages of scientific inquiry for exploration and description. Qualitative
descriptions generated by participant observation are helpful from this
vantage point in formulating concepts for measurement and hypotheses
which, with further testing and verification, may be employed to construct
explanatory theories. Yet, participant observation was not seen as especially
useful for the ultimate scientific goal of explanatory (nomothetic) theorizing.
There were, however, efforts to establish inductive theorizing, based on participant observation and other qualitative methodologies, as legitimate in
their own right, independently of positivist conceptions of theory and theorizing. More inductive, “grounded theory” approaches, such as those pioneered by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, increasingly tended to ignore
positivistic imagery. Many proponents of participant observation and other
qualitative methods eventually would reject the positivistic goals of explanatory (nomothetic/emic) theorizing entirely in favor of interpretative (idiographic/etic) theorizing as envisioned from a humanistic standpoint.
Following World War II, sociologists and anthropologists increasingly
found variations of Marxist thinking, phenomenology, existentialism, linguistics, and analytic philosophy of special interest. Many of them contained
sharp critiques of positivism, resulting in theoretical and methodological
innovations. This included social constructionism (Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckmann), the symbolic interactionist emphasis on social meanings (Hebert
Blumer), viewing social life as a drama (Erving Goffman’s dramaturgy), and
a focus on how members of society accomplish social life (Harold Garfinkel’s
ethnomethodology). The synthesis of these perspectives along with features
of phenomenology and existentialism by Jack Douglas, John Johnson, David

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Altheide, and Peter and Patti Adler, among others, was especially important
for emphasizing a methodology of participant observation.
Anthropology, during this period, provided a different intellectual context,
a much less positivistic one in which ethnography still was under the powerful influence of Boas and Malinowski. Even so, the work of Clifford Geertz
and David Schneider and Europeans such as Mary Douglas, Victor Turner,
and even Claude Levi-Strauss show many of these same influences. Some
of these innovations also were manifest in the United Sates with cognitive
anthropology, ethnoscience, and the “new ethnography.” Since the 1970s,
there has been a good deal of cross-fertilization among like-minded sociologists and anthropologists, especially with respect to theories of symbolic
meanings, humanistic methodologies, as well as ethnography, participant
observation, and related qualitative approaches.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
By the 1980s, there was a growing social scientific consensus that human realities are socially constructed by way of interactional processes with meaning
as a central feature. This perspective dissented significantly from naturalism,
realism, and other objectivist viewpoints. Human meanings are “subjective”
in the sense that they are internalized by individuals, but they more accurately are “intersubjective” (and thereby collective or social) in that meanings
are expressed in language. As meanings are shared with other members of
the linguistic community, they consequently are available to others (they are
not private or “subjective” in the more ordinary sense), thereby resolving the
standard objections to the so-called subjectivist approaches.
Moving even further from earlier theorizing, meanings were envisioned as
always problematic and conflictual. Human reality therefore is composed of
diverse and pluralistic meanings constituting a multiplicity of realities. Some
researchers focused on the more cognitive aspects of meanings, leading to
innovations in sociolinguistics, and studies of different forms of knowledge,
such as religious or scientific. Others emphasized that cognitions always are
colored by emotions, resulting in an emphasis on not entirely “rational” (even
irrational) qualities of human meanings and existence. Feminist thinking,
moreover, called attention to the monumental significance of gender differences for human constructions of meaning as well as related social roles and
interactions.
Altogether, then, human realities came to be seen as emotional in addition
to being cognitive, gendered, conflictual and problematic, complex and
multiple, intersubjectively meaningful, as well as produced and internalized
by human beings through social interaction. These realities, contrary to
reflection and correspondence theories of truth (rationalism/empiricism),

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7

always are relative to intersubjective human construction. They do not exist
independently of human construction; they have no objectivity independently of human existence; and they never can be apprehended exhaustively
or absolutely.
Human studies consequently require special methods and procedures, such
as participant observation, suited to the description of these human meanings and realities. The aim of such humanistic methodologies is to describe
human meanings and experiences, even though such descriptions always
will be incomplete and partial. Likewise, no explanation of human meanings and experiences is possible (in the positivist sense), and all interpretation inevitably will be partial and incomplete. It, nevertheless, is possible to
provide interpretations of human meanings and experiences from the standpoint of particular scholarly issues and problems. This viewpoint also reflects
the influences of American pragmaticism—including such influential figures
as William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, G. H. Mead, and C. Wright
Mills—running through much of this work. Hence, within such a delimited
theoretical context, it is possible to make judgments—based on reasons and
evidence—about different, even rival, interpretations.
This methodological viewpoint also emphasized the necessity of
self-conscious reflection about the relationship between the practices of
the researcher and the products of research. In other words, research
reflexivity became a central methodological obligation for all humanistic
studies, especially participant observation. Much attention has focused on
the researchers’ social location and how research practices influence what
is discerned and described by way of participant observation as well as
how these human realities are analyzed, interpreted, and reported. This
emergent framework for understanding human studies was reinforced
greatly by Thomas Kuhn’s extraordinarily influential work in the history
and philosophy of science. It confirmed for methodological humanists
that the workings of the physical and biological sciences were much less
positivistic than previously described and subject to many of the same
interpretative difficulties as the human sciences.
The earliest uses of participant observation were highly artful. A form of
research that is informal and dependent on the intuition and interpersonal
abilities of the researcher and therefore not something that is mechanically
reproducible based on a formula by just anyone. Students commonly were
told to review exemplary studies and then proceed into the field to do likewise. Gradually, during the 1960s and 1970s, a few textbooks endeavored to
describe strategies, techniques, and pitfalls more formally. Throughout the
late 1970s and 1980s, studies based on a method of participant observation

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

proliferated, and spread to other human studies fields, and this trend has continued to the present. Today, participant observation is employed extensively
in most all human studies fields, including medicine, nursing, and health.
Previously heated battles over quantification and positivistic methodologies versus qualitative and humanistic methodologies have waned substantially as methods such as participant observation have gained widespread
popularity and respectability. The legitimacy of participant observation is no
longer seriously questioned. Textbooks, guides, resource works, and journal
articles outlining and describing specific methods, strategies, and techniques
of participant observation also have proliferated. This research method consequently has been subject to considerable formalization, even if it still retains
powerful vestiges of its former artfulness.
There is considerable consensus that participant observation is most appropriate when certain minimal study conditions are present.
•

•

•

•

•

•

A central interest of the research is some concern for human meanings,
feelings, and interactions viewed from the perspective of the native
members of those situations and settings.
The phenomenon to be investigated is observable in some natural, everyday life situation or setting.
The researcher is able to acquire reasonable access to people and their
activities in an appropriate setting.
The phenomenon of study is sufficiently limited in scope, size, and location to be examined by way of a case study design.
The questions or problems to be addressed are appropriate for case
study.
Suitable information can be collected by direct observation, participant
observation, interviews, documents and related materials, and other
means and sources available in some field setting.

Participant observation frequently is used in an open-ended manner to
explore and examine research questions that emerge with investigation
rather than preconceived hypotheses; although nothing prohibits its use for
hypothesis testing. Working inductively by way of a “logic of discovery”
offers advantages in research validity, being dependent on accessing the
insiders’ realities. Yet, it also places special demands on the researcher.
The definition of study questions, issues, and problems, as well as the
formulation of concepts and development of appropriate indicators often
must be refined during the course of the investigation while participating
and observing in the field.
Participant observation, moreover, requires the researcher to find and
select a setting or settings appropriate for study, and identify features or

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9

aspects of situations in the larger setting for investigation. What is observed
often is selective, requiring some strategy for sampling. Those strategies
usually are based on opportunistic techniques, such as snowball samples,
or those involving judgments or rationales other than probability sampling.
The study problem and setting often suggest and delimit sensible sampling
strategies.
Gaining access to a research setting and situations presents the participant
observer with a host of complex decisions. It often times requires some negotiation or reason for being present, and the participant observer must decide
how to account for being present, when and where to disclose research interests, and how much information to supply. It is possible to participate and
observe in many human settings overtly or covertly; that is with or without disclosing the research intentions. Much debate surrounds the ethics of
covert participant observation and it sometimes is deemed to be unacceptable
under all circumstances. Yet, many human situations, such as those involving illegal activities, are difficult or impossible to investigate when research
interests are explicitly revealed in those settings. Covert research sometimes
involves lying and deliberately deceiving people about the research interests.
It is possible, however, to participate and observe in many situations, particularly highly public ones, without deceiving people even if the researcher does
not reveal an interest in conducting research. A great deal of overt human
research is done without informing everyone involved that research is underway or disclosing the precise character of the investigation. The complexity of
many research problems, moreover, makes it unlikely that subjects fully comprehend the study or their involvement in it, even when they are informed
more fully.
Many research settings provide the participant observer with a wide range
of possible roles from being a mostly passive outsider to becoming an actively
involved insider. It is common for the participant observer to perform multiple roles along this continuum during the course of a prolonged investigation. The researcher may define the participant role as that of mostly an
outsider, an investigator, nominally present to observe what people are doing
in some setting or situation. Alternatively, the participant role may be defined
by insiders based on those ordinarily available in the setting or a particular
situation.
Early participant observers were warned not to cross the rather arbitrary line between passive participation as a nominal member and active
membership, something known as “going native” or “becoming the phenomenon.” Actually, participant observers—notably Frank Cushing, Zora
Neale Hurston, and others such as Howard S. Becker—had been crossing
this line to considerable advantage in acquiring insight into the natives’
world of meaning all along. By the mid-1970s, participant observers, such

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

as Bennetta Jules-Rosette, were challenging this traditional taboo and
demonstrating that the strategic, reflexive performance of membership
roles often times provides unique and invaluable access to insider realities.
Such participant observational studies demonstrated moreover that the
performance of insider roles could be enacted without any loss of objectivity,
impartiality or other aspects of disciplined, scholarly rigor. Participant
observers, such as people in daily life, are able to switch back and forth
between various social roles, fully participating at times while engaging in
reflection, analysis, and interpretation at other times, rather deftly. Some
researchers also increasingly began employing team strategies of participant
observation in order to gather data from the standpoint of multiple roles
and perspectives in various settings.
Collecting truthful information requires considerable skill in cultivating
rapport, making friends, and sustaining trusting relationships with people
in the field. Simply put, people who do not know you or trust you are not
likely to be cooperative in providing much data, especially truthful information about the deepest meanings and inner workings of their daily lives.
In most settings, it is possible to collect different forms of data by way of a
wide variety of means. Observations, for instance, may range from largely
unfocused efforts to overview the action to more focused attempts to gather
detailed information about specific feelings, meanings, and activities. Participant observers usually ask a lot of questions, many of them causal and
informal, in the course of an investigation. Some studies also profitably make
use of more formal interviewing techniques and even structured questionnaires. In-depth interviews and life histories also may be collected. Many
settings and situations provide access to a vast array of other human communications, documents, and relevant artifacts. Notes and journals recording
personal experiences usually provide still another valuable source of data.
Making notes, keeping records, and creating files of information gathering in the field are extremely important and all of these activities present
the participant observer with challenges. It is tempting but mistaken to put
off record keeping, hoping to recall significant details and events at some
later time. Record keeping strategies range from the dependence on handwriting and computer (typewriting) processing to photography and audio
or audio-video recording. Analysis and interpretation of participant observational materials is like that of other forms of qualitative data. It commonly
involves coding and filing, sorting, sifting, constructing, and reconstructing
the data while looking for types, features, characteristics, classes, and patterns. Interpretation of the data necessarily depends on what scholarly issue
and problem have been identified for investigation.
Participant observation may be used in a limited manner to acquire snapshots of social life or describe particular slices or aspects of human existence.

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It more often is used to provide fairly comprehensive descriptions of cultures,
particular forms of human life, subcultures, and ways of human existence.
Participant observation, even when used in a limited way to acquire a slice
of life, tends to be a relatively time-consuming method of investigation. It is
possible to collect information by way of participant observation over brief
periods of time; however, most studies require a year and sometimes two
or more for satisfactory completion; moreover, some participant observers
devote entire careers to the investigation of the rich and tremendous complexity of human existence.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
In spite of the greater formalization of participant observation over the
past 30 some years, its practice remains artful, rather than mechanical or
formulistic, and open to individual creativity. Particular studies regularly
have explored and innovated with most of the basic steps, strategies,
techniques, and procedures of participant observational investigation.
Reporting, participant roles, values, ethics, and closely related matters all
have drawn considerable attention.
Many of these discussions have been in response to challenges and debates
over “postmodernism.”
The meanings of postmodernism are ambiguous and elusive. Nevertheless, this notion as it applies to participant observational methods generally
concerns claims to knowledge and truth. Postmodern ethnography—as
advocated, for example, by Stephen Tyler, George Marcus, Michael Fisher,
Paul Rabinow, James Clifford, Norman Denzin, Laurel Richardson, and
others—refuses to accord special privilege (or authority) to any knowledge
claim (religious, scientific, political, or whatever) beyond the subjective
experience of the individual in its more radical manifestations. All claims to
knowledge in other words are supposed to derive from subjective interests,
values, and experiences, with no knowledge claim having any privilege or
authority of any other claim. All claims to knowledge therefore are equal to
all others and every resulting expression of reality is equally “real.”
Distinguishing and separating facts and values is a persistent problem for
participant observation and human studies. Some think that as it ultimately is
impossible for the researcher to avoid the influence of values, making explicit
value commitment is required, usually to liberal or radical political values.
Others hold that it is possible to be reflexive about the influence of values
on the participant observer, while maintaining some reasonable separation
of facts and values and without making particular value commitments. It
seems likely that participant observers will continue to exercise sensitivity
and reflexivity about the influence of values and politics on their research.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

At the same time, it also seems unlikely that they will abandon traditional
commitments to the ideals of value neutrality and efforts to provide more or
less impartial descriptions and interpretations of social life.
The ethics of participant observation are governed by various professional
associations and especially the dictates of federally mandated Institutional
Review Boards (IRBs). These IRBs generally have imposed models of
biomedical ethics on most human studies fields. Objections commonly have
been voiced about the inappropriateness of such models for participant
observation and related forms of human studies. Following cursory review,
participant observational studies often are subjected to modest subsequent
review or exempted from further review. Alternative models, such as
feminist, relational, and contextual ethics, have been suggested as more
appropriate for participant observation and other human studies field.
IRBs sometimes are aware of the inappropriateness of biomedical ethics for
much of human studies, but there have been few serious efforts to make
significant changes. Until that happens, the basic strategy seems to be to
comply minimally with IRB requirements, secure the necessary approvals,
and proceed on the basis of more humanistic ethics.
Participant observers have continued to exhibit tremendous creativity in
the performance of membership roles, including cultivating and exploiting
personal experiences to research advantage. Taking advantage of roles and
experiences as a societal member for research purposes has resulted in innovations including “autoethnography.” This strategy takes the researcher’s
self, identity, roles, activities, and personal experiences, as the central focus
of investigation or as an important part of the inquiry. It remains unclear as
to whether or not autoethnography is a distinctive method of research, as
some claim, or a special form and extension of the cultivation of the insider
membership roles that some participant observers explicitly embraced some
40 years ago. Positivistic preoccupations with objectivism precluded many
early participant observers from explicitly cultivating personal experience
as source of data. Yet, many earlier participant observers—from Frank Cushing and Bronislaw Malinowski to John Johnson, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, and
Paul Rabinow, among others—depended on personal experiences and made
critical use of them in describing and interpreting human realities.
Greater appreciation for the complexities of human realities—cognitive,
emotional, gendered, conflictual, problematic, and multiple characteristics—
presents serious challenges for reporting the findings of participant observation. No description of human realities, even in restricted settings and
situations, will be literally exhaustive, and multiple interpretations from
the standpoint of various theories always are possible. Some scholars
consequently abandoned efforts to construct ordinary reports of what
people in everyday life think, feel, or do. Instead, they have experimented

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with different forms and styles of presentation, sometimes writing fiction
as the most appropriate means for presenting the results of participant
observation, as insightfully discussed recently by Dominika Ferens. Many
of Zora Neale Hurston’s now famous works of fictions benefitted from her
participant observation as a student of Boas in the 1920s, although these
pioneering efforts in ethnography remain unacknowledged and unexplored
for the most part. There now are many significant discussions of reflexivity,
such as Shulamit Reinharz’s recent study of the kibbutz in Israel. In spite
of the challenges, participant observation is a highly respected scholarly
method of inquiry in most human studies fields today.
The artful character of participant observation makes it difficult to predict future developments. Recent examples of participant observation are
exceptionally diverse, and they exhibit continued innovation. Such studies,
to mention just a few, include Brown’s discussion of Black female legislators,
Burgess’s work on shamanism in Scotland, Clark’s studies of children, Flores’
research on the recovery of Hispanic gang members, Howe’s ethnography of
Kuna culture in South America, Luhrmann’s participant observation with
American evangelicals, Sanders’ and Hardy’s research on the erotic entertainment industry in Britain, Thiel’s examination of the American construction industry, and Alexander’s theorizing about politics based on the Obama
presidential campaigns.
FURTHER READING
Adler, P., & Adler, P. A. (1987). Membership roles in field research. Beverly Hills, CA:
Sage.
Alexander, J. C. (2010). The performance of politics. New York, NY: Oxford University
Press.
Brown, N. E. (2014). Sisters in the statehouse. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Burgess, M. (2008). A new paradigm of spirituality and religion. New York, NY: Continuum.
Clark, C. D. (2011). In a younger voice. Oxford: New York, NY.
Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2005). The Sage handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage.
Douglas, J. D. (1976). Investigative social research. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Ferens, D. (2010). Ways of knowing small places. Wroclaw, Poland: Wydawn. Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego.
Flores, E. O. (2014). God’s gangs. New York: New York University Press.
Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for
qualitative research. Chicago, IL: Aldine.
Howe, J. (2009). Kuna culture from inside and out. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Hurston, Z. N. (1942). Dust tracks on a road: An autobiography. Philadelphia, PA: J.B.
Lippincott.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Jorgensen, D. L. (1989). Participant observation: A methodology for human studies. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Junker, B. (1960). Field work: An introduction to the social sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Luhrmann, T. M. (2012). When god talks back. New York, NY: Knopf.
Reinharz, S. (2010). Observing the observer. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Sanders, T., & Hardy, K. (2014). Flexible workers. New York, NY: Routledge.
Spradley, J. P. (1980). Participant observation. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Thiel, D. (2012). Builders. New York, NY: Routledge.
Van Maanen, J. (1988). Tales of the field: On writing ethnography. Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press.
Warren, C. A. B. (1988). Gender issues in field research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Wax, R. H. (1971). Doing fieldwork: Warnings and advice. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.

DANNY L. JORGENSEN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Danny L. Jorgensen is Professor (and former Chair) of Religious Studies at
the University of South Florida, Tampa, where he has been employed since
1978 (initially in sociology until 1991). His academic background and degrees
are in sociology: BS, Northern Arizona University, 1972; MA, Western Kentucky University, 1974; and PhD, The Ohio State University, 1979. Jorgensen’s
teaching and research is in the areas of participant observation, ethnography,
and qualitative research; the sociology of religion; and new religions in America, including Mormonism, Neopaganism and Witchcraft, Scientology, and
Old Order Anabaptists (Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, and Brethren). He
is the author of several books, edited books, and an extensive array of book
chapters and journal articles—many of them based on participant observation and other qualitative, ethnographic methods—in these areas. He and
spouse, June, reside part of the year in Tampa and part of the year near
Lebanon, in southern Missouri, on a hundred-acre horse farm.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Jorgensen
USF Religious Studies: http://religious-studies.usf.edu/faculty/data/
djorgensen_cv.pdf
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15

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