Karen O'Reilly is senior lecturer in Sociology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. She has taught ethnographic and qualitative methods at Oxford, Essex and Aberdeen, including the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Collection and Analysis. She gained her PhD in Sociology and Anthropology from the University of Essex in 1996. Her thesis, now published as a monograph titled The British on the Costa del Sol, was based on fifteen months intensive ethnographic fieldwork with the British community in Southern Spain. However, her work is not all qualitative; she has also spent three years working on the UK government review of social classifications analysing Labour Force Survey data on occupations. She has just published a textbook, Ethnographic Methods, and has recently completed multi-strategy research in Spain, exploring integration between migrants and hosts.
Observational methods have a long history in anthropology and sociology and are increasingly being employed across the range of social science fields. However, in practice observers do more than simply observe: they typically immerse themselves in a setting for a period of time, listen, ask questions; and supplement observation with the collection of interview data, documentation and even visual data. Such an intrusion into the social setting presents a challenge to what Agar has called the 'received view of science' but observational studies have found creative and critical ways of dealing with this that range from the postmodern ethnography to the post-positivist emphasis on reliability and validity. This course will address these practical and theoretical issues through the following topics: the history of observational methods and contemporary applications; participation and observation; hypotheses and grounded theory; accessing the field; writing fieldnotes; case studies and ethnography; analysing observational data; and writing up.
The course includes a strong practical element, encouraging participants to relate topics to their own research interests and to carry out and begin to analyse micro-observational studies.
Course objectives: By the end of the course participants should: Be able to make close, theory-oriented observations through participation, observation, listening and enquiring. Be equipped to record and analyse the data produced through observational and related methods. Take a critical and creative approach to observational methods and understand how they can be combined with other methods of data collection for a diverse range of social, political and policy research areas.
Course Prerequisites: Participants will benefit from beginners knowledge of qualitative methods and background knowledge of philosophy of social science. Participants should be aware that the practical decisions to be made when conducting observational research are necessarily theoretically-informed and will vary with each practitioner's orientation. The course aims to equip participants with the knowledge required to make those decisions for themselves in practice.