This is about honing your perceptual abilities

1
This is about honing your perceptual
abilities (as opposed to uncovering patterns
beyond the perceivable to challenge false
perceptions as statistical research often does)
2
Evenly Distributed Attention

• Impossible? yesbut you can do a better or worse
  job of this
• Evenly distributing your attention makes it
  possible for you to build, a description which
  makes sense of as much as possible of what they
  have seento describe a system of relationships,
  to show how things hang together in a web of
  mutual influence or support or interdependence or
  what have youwhat the fieldworker sees ispeople
  doing things together in ways that are manifestly
  connected - Becker, Epistemology of Qual
  Research

3
Basic Description without Interpretation

• Impossible? Once again, yes it isbut you can do
  a better or worse job of this too
• Careful description of details, unfiltered by
  our ideas and theories, produces observations
  that, not fitting these categories, require us to
  create new ideas and categories into which they
  can be fitted without forcing. Becker,
  Sampling chapter
• Also to facilitate reinterpretation later on down
  the line as you accumulate more observations

4
Reinterpretation

• The ethnographer inscribes social discourse
  he writes it down. In so doing, he turns it from
  a passing event, which exists only in its own
  moment of occurrence, into an account, which
  exists in its inscriptions and can be
  reconsulted. pg. 19, Geertz Thick Description

5
Thick Description

• Just want to point out that this is not the same
  as taking field notes. Thick Description is
  the post-analysis output of the research process,
  not the raw material.