Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Participant-Observer Continuum

I will describe how the continuum I proposed intersects with the participant-observer continuum visually.
In below, I drew two bars, blue represents participants actions in the site and yellowish-orange one represents the observer's position as outsider and insider. The colors gets brighter in both bars, which reflects the dichotomy of the opposite sides.
I made the orange bar transparent and placed on the blue bar to see how the blue color will appear, that is, what the observer will observe
  1. when s/he is outsider and when participant intentionally perform in the way that they want (i.e. adjusted actions)
  2. when s/he is insider and when participants show their typical actions in the site
  3. when s/he is outsider and when participants show their typical actions in the site
  4. when s/he is insider and when participant intentionally perform in the way that they want (i.e. adjusted actions)

As seen, the blue color appeared at most in the 2nd case above. The next color close to blue, but brighter is the case 4. Then, the case 3 produced a color which is a combination of blue and orange, but still closer to blue when compared to the color in case 1.
According to this picture, an observer can understand the typical actions of participants in their lifeworld when s/he is an insider.
What I pointed in my previous post regarding the two studies that we read can be seen in the left sides of two red rectangles (i.e. Case 1 and Case 3).

1 comment:

  1. This is really helpful! Thank you for sharing/developing this further. What are your thoughts on those researchers who might have both insider/outsider roles? I'm thinking about Sofia Villenas' work around being an insider/outsider (both a colonizing researcher and a colonized Latina). Any thoughts on this?

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