11.5: Risks and Benefits for Participants

Because you’re writing about real people in real life in your ethnography, your words have potentially profound consequences for the people you write about. I was devastated by the professor’s response to my paper. Somebody I respected was very upset about what I’d written, and beyond his hurt feelings, he was concerned that my piece might affect his professional life. And I would soon teach my first research-writing course, having just experienced first-hand what happens when an ethnographic writer upsets a participant. The professor whose course I’d studied made it quite clear that we were no longer friends, and only once since then have we had any contact at all. He felt betrayed, a term I borrow from composition researcher Thomas Newkirk’s essay, “Seduction and Betrayal in Qualitative Research.” Newkirk contends that because qualitative research is inductive (we don’t know what we’ll see until it happens), there’s no sure way to ensure that participants won’t be unhappy about what researchers find; moreover, informed consent not only can’t stop this from happening, but also may lull participants into a false sense of security during the project.

Because I wrote the paper for a class with no intention of ever publishing it, the professional consequences for the professor were minimal; that’s not to say, of course, that his feelings weren’t hurt by the experience. However, even your fieldnotes can have consequences, and you need to be very careful to protect the identities of your participants, even if you don’t expect anybody else to see what you write. One former student of mine left his notebook on a table at his site one afternoon, and when he returned five minutes later, two of his participants were reading it. One of them discovered that her boyfriend was cheating on her with another group member; within two days the group had disbanded, and one participant wound up in the hospital with injuries from the ensuing fight.

Situations this dramatic are rare; I’ve read about 700 ethnographies and count fewer than ten with the potential to endanger any of the participants. The point is that they can be, and you should take steps to minimize the danger: never use anybody’s real name or anything that easily identifies them; ask participants to check your notes about them for accuracy, and respect requests not to reveal certain details; make sure participants have signed consent forms. None of these is fail-safe, but they should all be habitual.

Your ethnographic research and writing can, of course, be beneficial for you and your participants, too. Several of my students have discovered, during their projects, significant ways to help their groups. One student, who studied a dance troupe at the university where I did my doctorate, found that the biggest problem they faced was the absence of a regular practice space; she used the evidence she developed in her research—specifically the time members spent worrying about and looking for practice space instead of practicing, and the number of prospective members they lost because they looked disorganized—to argue for a dedicated room, and the group still uses the room to this day. Another studied a university office that provided escorts to students crossing campus late at night. His thesis in the first draft of his paper was that the service was under-utilized, largely because it was understaffed and underfunded. When he showed the draft to the office’s director, however, he learned the office had been well-funded and well-advertised for many years, but had slipped off the university’s radar. His study, particularly evidence that the staff didn’t take its public relations responsibilities very seriously because they didn’t have enough people to serve more students, helped the office’s director develop a convincing argument to resume funding and public relations work so the service got the resources it needed.

These projects helped their writers to see the significance of their own writing in very direct terms. One reason their papers worked so well is the authority (a somewhat different kind of authority than conventional academic writing demonstrates, a distinction that will be clearer shortly) with which they represented the cultures and the issues. Earlier, I mentioned anthropologist Clifford Geertz and sociologist John Van Maanen, both of whom have been extremely influential among ethnographers in helping us understand what ethnographic writing is good for. Geertz especially, in a book called Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, develops two concepts that have become crucial to my understanding of ethnographic writing. First is ethnographic authority. In simple terms, the problem is that for decades, anthropologists and sociologists had treated ethnography as if it were a science, i.e., as if it could/should result in objective descriptions of cultures. By the 1960s, ethnographers had begun to realize that objectivity isn’t possible in this kind of research; when I said in the second paragraph that ethnography makes you think about the kind of knowledge you make from doing it, this is what I was introducing. To be taken seriously as research, the writing has to demonstrate a level of rigor that many academic disciplines believe is best represented by scientific reportage (like chemistry lab reports—very thoroughly detailed, step-by-step descriptions of processes; careful analysis of results; style that excludes any mention of the researcher; etc.). But with the realization that ethnography doesn’t work like a science, ethnographic writers had to think about other ways to establish authority for their work.

Geertz presents the second major concept from Works and Lives in the deceptively simple phrase, “being there”:

The ability of anthropologists to get us to take what they say
seriously has less to do with either a factual look or an air of
conceptual elegance than it has with their capacity to convince
us that what they say is a result of their having actually
penetrated (or, if you prefer, been penetrated by) another form
of life, of having, one way or another, truly ‘been there.’ (4–5)

As he unpacks this phrase throughout the book, it becomes possible to paraphrase it in another deceptively simple way, i.e., ethnographic authority results from being able to present details and insights that only the writer would know, because the writer was there and readers weren’t.

The logic here is circular (authority comes from sounding like an authority)—mostly. Geertz’s goal is a little more complicated than I’ve put it. We haven’t explored yet his assertion (or recognition) that issues of writers’ voices and styles are as relevant to ethnographic authority as the writers’ content. Let me be clear here: nobody would argue that strong voice and style can override bad content; the data/findings/results have to be strong (in the sense that they’re specific, concrete, and analyzed carefully) before presentation matters. But, whereas traditional scientific discourse assumes that personal voice and style are distractions from content, Geertz posits that content, by itself, doesn’t really accomplish anything; the knowledge that ethnography produces
emerges from the relationships formed among writers and readers. The students in my classes whose projects directly benefited their cultures were all able to construct relationships of trust with their readers—exactly what I failed to do in my project I described earlier—helping the data make the case that something needed to change on behalf of their groups. It’s hard to imagine that happening if they hadn’t “been there.”

Another way that ethnographers can benefit participants in our research is by establishing a relationship of reciprocity. The principle, in the abstract, is simple—in return for inviting us into their worlds and letting us take information from them, we agree to return the favor by performing services of various kinds for community members. Literacy researcher Ellen Cushman, in her book The Struggle and the Tools, describes this exchange between members of a black Muslim mosque and herself as an example:

[A]rea residents invited me to attend the mosque with them
(this group of Muslims happened to be particularly private
and only allowed Whites to attend if invited by a member).
With their invitation, I was granted entry into a religious
arena that I would have been hard pressed to enter otherwise
[. . .]. In like fashion, I invited residents [participants in her
study] to use the computer facilities of the private university
I attended. Because this institute was private, residents would
have been hard pressed to use the computers without my invitation.
(23)

Much of her work with the residents of an inner city neighborhood also involved helping them deal with government agencies, advising high school students on college prospects, and similar activities.

Further, the principle of reciprocity signifies a commitment ethnographers make to developing personal relationships with research participants. Not only does reciprocity establish a relationship that goes beyond taking; it also allows ethnographers and participants to collaborate in the process of learning about each other, and learning about themselves. As ethnographers, we aren’t watching lab rats run through mazes or observing processes in laboratories. We are real people, involving ourselves in the lives of other real people, with real consequences for all of us.

The takeaway value of these concepts (consent, reciprocity) is that you need to respect your participants and make sure you’re not exploiting them and their goodwill just for the sake of your grades. Along with heightened attention to writerly authority (the discussion of Geertz earlier), concern for participants as a primary feature of ethnography is the most important shift following from the realization that ethnography isn’t a science.