What themes can you begin to identify regarding your guiding question?
What questions do you have to help focus your observation on subsequent visits? Can you begin to draw preliminary connections or potential conclusions based on what you learned?
Reflection on what you learned of a personal nature.
What was it like for you to be doing this research? What felt comfortable for you about being in this site and what felt uncomfortable?
In what ways did you connect with informants, an in what ways didn’t you?
While this is extremely important information, be especially careful to separate it from analysis.
GUIDELINES FOR OBSERVERS:
Observers try to uncover and record the unspoken common sense assumptions of the group that they are studying. Look for immediate and local meanings which appear to matter to the people you are observing.
Field notes should include writing; drawing maps and sketching activities is often very useful when trying to remember the details of what you have seen.
Include notes about body language, environment, and noise. What is going on around this context that may be shaping it?
Reflect on your own actions. Ethnographers alter themselves in order to fit into their contexts as unobtrusive observers and as participant observers. How much do you have to adapt yourself in order to learn about the context and culture that you are studying?
Try to find emic categories and terms that the participants themselves use. How do these emic concepts organize the activities that you are observing?
Systematically look for discrepant cases or anomalies. If most people seem to be doing an activity the same way, notice who does it differently. What seems to be going on here?
Try various kinds of observation. Be a silent observer one time, and talk to people the next (if relevant). 7. If you are interested in critical/feminist approaches to research, consider how power is located in the practices you are observing.
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