What are the elements that make research “research” and not just “observation?” Where are the bones of the beast, and do all strategies share the same skeleton?

Last Thursday, in my Ethnography of Communication class, we spent the first half hour of class time taking field notes in the library coffee shop. Two parts of the experience struck me the hardest.

1.) I was exhausted. Class came at the end of a long, full work day, toward the end of a week that was full of back to school nights, work, homework and board meetings. I began my observation by ordering a (badly needed) coffee. My goal as I ordered was to see how few words I had to utter in order to complete the transaction. (In my defense, I am usually relatively talkative and friendly…) The experience of observing and speaking as little as possible reminded me of one of the coolest things I’d come across in my degree study: Charlotte Linde, SocioRocketScientist at NASA

2.) Charlotte Linde, SocioRocketScientist at NASA. Dr Linde had come to speak with the GU Linguistics department early in my tenure as a grad student. She mentioned that her thesis had been about the geography of communication- specifically: How did the layout of an (her?) apartment building help shape communication within it?

This idea had struck me, and stayed with me, but it didn’t really make sense until I began to study Ethnography of Communication. In the coffee shop, I structured my fieldnotes like a map and investigated it in terms of zones of activities. Then I investigated expectations and conventions of communication in each zone. As a follow-up to this activity, I’ll either return to the same shop or head to another coffee shop to do some contrastive mapping.

The process of Ethnography embodies the dynamic between quantitative and qualitative methods for me. When I read ethnographic research, I really find myself obsessing over ‘what makes this research?’ and ‘how is each statement justified?’ Survey methodology, which I am still doing every day at work, is so deeply structured that less structured research is, by contrast, a bit bewildering or shocking. Reading about qualitative methodology makes it seem so much more dependable and structured than reading ethnographic research papers does.

Much of the process of learning ethnography is learning yourself; your priorities, your organization, … learning why you notice what you do and evaluate it the way you do… Conversely, much of the process of reading ethnographic research seems to involve evaluation or skepticism of the researcher, the researcher’s perspective and the researcher’s interpretation. As a reader, the places where the researcher’s perspective varies from mine is clear and easy to see, as much as my own perspective is invisible to me.

All of this leads me back to the big questions I’m grappling with. Is this structured observational method the basis for all research? And how much structure does observation need to have in order to qualify as research?

I’d be interested to hear what you think of these issues!