Centenial Celebration

Transaction Search Form: please type in any of the fields below.

Date: March 28, 2024 Thu

Time: 8:42 am

Results for ethnographies

1 results found

Author: Goldstein, Daniel M.

Title: Qualitative Research in Dangerous Places: Becoming an Ethnographer of Violence and Personal Safety

Summary: Conducting qualitative research is a challenge in any environment, but in highly violent settings the obstacles to both successful outcomes and researcher safety are especially high. Not only are the usual problems that confront qualitative researchers intensified when fear and insecurity add to local people's tendency to mistrust strangers asking questions; environments marked by high levels of criminal, political, and/or daily social violence require researchers to be constantly alert to threats to their own physical safety, and to the ways in which their research can imperil their subjects and collaborators. While some dangers will be obvious, such as people firing guns or waving knives, they may include more subtle things as well, like being in the wrong place at the wrong time, witnessing an activity one shouldn't, asking the wrong question of the wrong person, revealing the extent of one's personal resources and equipment, or inadvertently violating the unwritten codes that govern violent areas. Extreme caution is needed, not only when doing research, but when carrying out the daily business of living and working as well. Qualitative researchers working in highly violent settings confront the same risks and dangers that the inhabitants must confront on a regular basis. And like the people who are often the subjects of their research inquiries, researchers must learn how to keep themselves safe in places where violence is always a possibility. One effective way to do this is to adopt the local cultural and linguistic norms their subjects use to promote their own security. In other words, researchers, regardless of discipline, can become "ethnographers" of local violence and the responses it engenders and emulate the behaviors their informants have learned to keep themselves safe.

Details: Brooklyn, NY: Social Science Research Council, Drugs, Security and Democracy Program, 2014. 21p.

Source: Internet Resource: DSD Working Papers on Research Security: No. 1: Accessed September 10, 2014 at: http://webarchive.ssrc.org/working-papers/DSD_ResearchSecurity_01_Goldstein.pdf

Year: 2014

Country: Indonesia

URL: http://webarchive.ssrc.org/working-papers/DSD_ResearchSecurity_01_Goldstein.pdf

Shelf Number: 133258

Keywords:
Criminal Justice Research
Ethnographies
Qualitative Research
Violence
Violent Areas