I'm glad Jennifer has returned to the point about whether covert research yields better data. It's something that has been bothering me since the inception of this conversation. This comes up every time I teach Research Methods (which I do every year). When teaching, I attribute the belief that "only covert research yields good data" to the far greater familiarity my students have with quantitative methods and with the fact that culturally in the U.S. the understood model of SCIENCE means experimental methods, in which as many aspects of the research project are as tightly controlled as possible. The objection raised by my students is usually that if people know I'm observing them, they will behave differently, and therefore I won't really find out "the truth." A similar (but sort of reversed) reaction is contained in ET's original post on this topic. He wrote (on May 5, and I was surprised -- I was sure we'd been talking about this much longer!):
"To me, if one is studying humanity one should be part of it, exposed to the same experiences, feeling the full swing of their emotions through their research. The obvious criticism of such an approach would be that one is too involved and therefore potentially producing inaccurate research. But is such research any less accurate than the arms length - dont get involved - approach where the participants are wary of the watcher?"
I have several responses to this. First, coming in as researchers with a research agenda, we can never be participants in exactly the same way as the people we are studying. Most participants presumably have one agenda in participating (although in some settings, other participants may also have more than one agenda, such as a journalist participating in a listserv and using posts from the listserv -- overtly or covertly -- as fodder for a weekly column). Researchers (at least in the type of research I do: participant-observation or ethnographic) always have two (at least!) agendas -- a split self. We are both observers, with all kinds of reasons why we want to observe -- and we are participants. That being the case, you can actually be *more* of an immersed participant overtly than you can covertly. Covert research requires you to always hold something back, as you hide your second agenda. Overt research is therefore *less* "arms-length," not more. Second, being an overt researcher allows you to ask questions. Some of these questions would be considered rude, weird, or out of place from a "regular" participant, but are acceptable from someone new to the culture or studying the culture. Without the ability to ask questions and achieve greater understanding of what's going on, you risk completely misinterpreting things you observe. I have an example from my research of such a misinterpretation (from not asking a question), but it's kind of long to explain, so if people are interested I can email or maybe post it later. Third, I'm personally interested not just in what people do and say but in what these things *mean* to them, in what they *think*. While you can observe some physical cues for emotional reactions (not available in many online situations), a better way to find out what things mean to people is to ask them. This can provide for much richer, more nuanced, and yes even *better* data. An example of this is in my book Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub. The people I was studying had read a short piece I'd published in an anthology and we were discussing the accuracy (or lack thereof) of my observations. So because I was open about my research, and shared the "results" of that research with participants as I went, I was able ultimately to present (a) an excerpt of online text, (b) my own analysis of what that text means, and (c) further text discussion amongst participants about what *they* think the text means (with considerable disagreements between me and them and amongst them). I believe this provides a much better picture of their culture, and it gave me further insights and yielded an entirely new avenue of analysis for me. As Nancy mentioned earlier, there may be some situations in which people would so object to being studied that being an overt researcher would not provide you with an advantage. But in most situations I think it does. When you add that to the ethical considerations, I think covert research can only be justified in a very limited set of cases. Lori ________________________________ Lori Kendall Assistant Professor of Sociology Purchase College-SUNY lori.kendall@purchase.edu