Practice question · True or false
Participant observation deliberately requires the researcher to become personally involved with the people studied.
Hints
- Is detachment the goal, or the obstacle?
- The clue is in the first word.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. The method's premise is that some things are visible only from inside, you learn a kinship system by being assigned a place in it. The methodological problem is therefore not how to avoid involvement but how to account for it, which is why reflexivity became a formal part of ethnographic writing after the 1980s.
Practise Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method
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