Over the past century, a considerable amount of ethnographic research has been conducted and published. Ethnographies are no longer the primary research technique of anthropologists, as other types of social scientists, and students and scholars of business, law, and technology are also doing this kind of work too.
Moreover, there are numerous types of ethnography and a handful of respected scholarly journals now exist that focus solely on reviewing and publishing this type of qualitative research.
One of the major considerations when conducting ethnographies, however, are the inter-related questions regarding how investigator/s collect their data, how they analyze it, and how much resources (i.e., mainly time spent in the field) they need to invest in order to get the outcome they want (i.e., primarily useable/meaningful study).
To begin with many people who either conduct or evaluate ethnographies don’t really know the benefits and limitations of ethnographies. Learning how to conduct an ethnography is often not part of typical graduate school programs.
Likewise, there are many rules of thumb about how to do a “proper” street ethnography and much like most things in life, if you speak to 100 different people you may end up getting 100 different responses. Much of this advice, however, is idiosyncratic. In other words, what worked for one ethnographer, may not work for you and your special circumstances and vice versa.
In reality, almost each type of ethnography requires unique assumptions and techniques.
Let’s start with a handful of ones investigators should avoid.
Bad practices
Seeking Institutional Review Board approval before doing initial field work
If you work in a research setting like a university, then most likely you need to secure human subjects approval from your Institutional Review Board (IRB) in order to conduct your ethnography. This step is often time consuming and difficult to negotiate, as many IRB committees have difficulties with ethnographic research. Some investigators submit the research proposal before even visiting the field. Although there may be some logical arguments for doing this, there are lots of unknowns when doing a street ethnography, including but not limited to funding, accessibility, etc. that need to be worked out and it is advisable that you do some sort of feasibility study by spending some time in the field in a “non research capacity” first before submitting the IRB proposal.
Failing to properly observe
Although you may be able to get a sense of a neighborhood, or a subculture that exists in the area under investigation by driving a bike, car, or scooter, taking public transportation, or walking or running in the location, it is preferable to spend a lengthy amount of time getting off or out of your vehicle, and interacting with numerous people you encounter. Also only walking the main streets, failing to walk back alleys, during the same time of the day or season should be avoided. Just like the familiar criticism of some war correspondents, don’t be fooled into assuming that you know what’s going on at the battle front, by sitting at the hotel bar, or attending a press briefing.
Speaking to the wrong people
Even though you may have a bunch of juicy quotes, that you can pepper your written results with, it does not mean that you have tapped into the essence of what is going on. It’s important to talk to a variety of people in the location you are conducting your study. This includes not only individuals whom you have identified as your key informants, but secondary and tertiary people too.
Good practices
Likewise there are a number of good techniques that you should consider to improve your street ethnography
Read relevant research before, during, and after you do your field research
Read a sufficient body of relevant research on your subject before entering the field, while you are at the location, and after you leave. This critical step should not be lead to analysis paralysis If you engage in this strategy to its extreme you will never get out of your office and into the field. After you have written up your findings, it’s also important to do an additional comprehensive literature scan and read items that were recently published, and reread scholarship that you may have forgotten about or ignored. This can help you improve the contextualization of your findings, etc.
Start by doing a quick scan of the neighborhood
Begin by doing a quick examination of the neighborhood or research setting. As you gain more relevant information, then you should develop a strategy to spend more time there in an effort to immerse yourself in that setting, getting to better know the people who live and work there. That is why running or cycling in or through a neighborhood may not be so bad as an initial pass. This is especially valuable in particularly dangerous neighborhoods. You may decide after doing this initial work, that the setting that you originally wanted to explore is not your cup of tea and decide to pivot to a different neighborhood, setting or subject. This is valuable. Rather than spending hours trying to get a handle on the situation you have made a low risk investment and it is easier to leave at this point in time than after 2, 6, or twelve months in the field.
Find key informants and try to interview them in different situations
The truth is that you can spend lots of time observing and talking to lots of people in the setting under investigation, but the people you interact with are not that helpful in assisting you to understand the core dynamics of what is going on. That is why you must invest sufficient resources in trying to cultivate key informants. Moreover, to the extent possible, these individuals should be interviewed in different settings as they may act differently when they are in for example a bar, or on the street, and in the presence of other people.
Vary the time of day and season you collect your data
A good street ethnography attempts to observe and interact with the people, at almost all times of the day and night and all seasons. Otherwise your study will be more of a snapshot.
Spend a sufficient amount of time in the area under study
One of the questions and doing ethnography is how much time does it take to do an appropriate ethnography. And the answer is it depends. It’s not so much how much time one spends in the field, but the quality of the observations and interactions one achieves and records.
Concluding Thoughts
One way of looking at the techniques of street ethnography is to see them on a continuum. The good news is, notwithstanding the difficulties of conducting street ethnographies during the current COVID-19 pandemic, is that over time most street ethnographers improve the techniques that they use to conduct street ethnographies and the work they do improves.
Photographer Hernán Piñera
Title: Street photography.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/49690540107_bd3d373a2c_o-scaled.jpg16852560Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2021-10-15 18:30:152023-11-08 14:10:38How can researchers improve street ethnographies?
In the field of corrections, there are lots of labels, names, and terms (many that I dislike) that the public frequently applies to people who are housed in, live in, and are processed by jails and prison.
These terms are frequently used in a simplistic and dehumanizing manner. Take for example, the word offender. I think we can agree that many of the things that people who have been convicted did were offensive, but not all actions that they may have engaged in rise to this label. And, as we know, some people who are incarcerated are wrongfully convicted.
But when it comes time to choose the appropriate terms for someone who is locked up in or released from a carceral setting, a sufficient amount of nuance should be observed. People who are incarcerated in the United States, tend to differentiate among the labels prisoners, inmates, and convicts. Each term means something different to them, however, this is a different discussion from the one here.
The current tendency to use the expressions or terms formerly incarcerated or returning citizens, by well-meaning activists and academics, people working in the field of restorative justice, and the perpetual bomb throwers, who somehow magically show up during these discussions, is short-sighted. Worse, there is often an implicit suggestion that the scholarship that has been done to date using the terms related to the label exconvict (including convict, felon, inmate, or prisoner) is somewhat suspect.
Let’s start with the expression returning citizens. When a formerly incarcerated person is released from carceral custody, not all of their rights are restored. This includes, but is not limited to serving on a jury, voting, and owning a gun. Thus, to call them a returning citizen may be aspirational, but it does not accurately reflect their status.
Next, just because we change terms to formerly incarcerated or returning citizen does not somehow blunt, nor erase the stigma or objectification society assigns to people who have criminal records. There are innumerable collateral consequences of a criminal conviction that go beyond the label we ascribe to people who have spent time behind bars. For instance, criminal records hurt the chances for many people to secure appropriate housing or to gain employment.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, a relatively recent MacArthur Genius recipient, who spent over eight years incarcerated in a Virginia prison, became a respected poet, and completed Yale Law School upon release, put it most clearly when he stated, “I really just don’t like being called formerly incarcerated as a part of my title. I would much rather be called a carjacker or a convict or an inmate or a jailbird. Cause to do all this shit and be reduced by your allies to a condition brought on by the pistol you held is wild.”
So why then do some people insist upon using the labels formerly incarcerated or returning citizen?
Some of these individuals may be attempting to draw a distinction between old terms and new ones in an effort to effect change. But, as there’s no consensus among the formerly incarcerated community on how they want these terms used, policing this language amounts to little more than virtue signaling.
Thus, insisting that we must change the label of exconvict to formerly incarcerated or returning citizen seems more like a misplaced effort.
It does not materially improve the pressing and more important issues at hand, nor does it assist the lives of prisoners, ameliorate inhumane prison conditions, address the problems of mass incarceration, or solve the real challenges that people who are released from jail or prison face. In short, terminology debates do not improve their lives.
Photo Credit
Photographer: Patrick Denker
Title: Modern Chain Gang, Meridian, Texas
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2021-10-04-at-10.48.02-AM.png601800Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2021-10-07 12:47:212023-09-19 22:49:11What’s in a name? Exconvict, formerly incarcerated, or returning citizen?
Here are six possible reasons why this increase might have occurred.
To begin with, there may be more availability of guns on the street. Not only is there data to support the increase in gun sales, but some commentators have suggested that a certain percentage of the population used their stimulus check to purchase guns. Keep in mind that these sales were disproportionately from fearful white middle class people who live in the suburbs.
Alternatively, the guns that were used in homicides may be of better quality. Many of the guns on the street are of low quality, typically used to threaten a potential victim of a robbery and not necessarily because it will be fired. By default, brand new guns, on the other hand, are of better quality.
Additionally, another reason why homicides may have increased in 2020 is that people using the guns have become better skilled at using them. Shooters may have had more time on their hands to improve their ability to use these weapons.
Moreover, the situations in which guns are used may have increased, thus there may have more domestic violence (e.g.., families living in close proximity for longer periods of time), gang activity, including competition for scarce markets.
Another possible reason for the spike in homicides is that first responders, especially EMTs may have been slower to get to gun-shot victims. Why? They were tied up with COVID-19 related patients, and thus the times between dispatch and arrival on the scene may have been slower. Thus, a certain percentage of victims of shootings may have died because of slower response times. A similar situation may have occurred in the emergency departments of our hospitals that were crowded with COVID-19 patients.
Finally, a decrease in trust in the criminal justice system in general, and police in particular to “serve and protect” may have pushed some members of the public to handle their disputes with others on their own and resort to gun violence.
Regardless these are all speculations regarding the increase in the murder rate in 2020. Until we get a better handle on who the shooters and victims are, especially finding out why they decided to pull the trigger, we will probably not really know for sure why there was an increase last year.
Title of photo: Crime Scene Patrol Cars
Photographer: F. Muhammad
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/crime-scene-g6873bd2d6_1920.jpg12801920Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2021-09-30 03:55:462021-10-05 17:01:36What explains the 2020 spike in murders in the United States?
How can researchers improve street ethnographies?
/by Jeffrey Ian RossOver the past century, a considerable amount of ethnographic research has been conducted and published. Ethnographies are no longer the primary research technique of anthropologists, as other types of social scientists, and students and scholars of business, law, and technology are also doing this kind of work too.
Moreover, there are numerous types of ethnography and a handful of respected scholarly journals now exist that focus solely on reviewing and publishing this type of qualitative research.
One of the major considerations when conducting ethnographies, however, are the inter-related questions regarding how investigator/s collect their data, how they analyze it, and how much resources (i.e., mainly time spent in the field) they need to invest in order to get the outcome they want (i.e., primarily useable/meaningful study).
To begin with many people who either conduct or evaluate ethnographies don’t really know the benefits and limitations of ethnographies. Learning how to conduct an ethnography is often not part of typical graduate school programs.
Likewise, there are many rules of thumb about how to do a “proper” street ethnography and much like most things in life, if you speak to 100 different people you may end up getting 100 different responses. Much of this advice, however, is idiosyncratic. In other words, what worked for one ethnographer, may not work for you and your special circumstances and vice versa.
In reality, almost each type of ethnography requires unique assumptions and techniques.
Over time, however, I’ve noticed some good and bad approaches to conducting street ethnographies, that are frequently used to better understand gangs, graffiti and street art, street crime, street culture, and urban public space.
Let’s start with a handful of ones investigators should avoid.
Bad practices
Seeking Institutional Review Board approval before doing initial field work
If you work in a research setting like a university, then most likely you need to secure human subjects approval from your Institutional Review Board (IRB) in order to conduct your ethnography. This step is often time consuming and difficult to negotiate, as many IRB committees have difficulties with ethnographic research. Some investigators submit the research proposal before even visiting the field. Although there may be some logical arguments for doing this, there are lots of unknowns when doing a street ethnography, including but not limited to funding, accessibility, etc. that need to be worked out and it is advisable that you do some sort of feasibility study by spending some time in the field in a “non research capacity” first before submitting the IRB proposal.
Failing to properly observe
Although you may be able to get a sense of a neighborhood, or a subculture that exists in the area under investigation by driving a bike, car, or scooter, taking public transportation, or walking or running in the location, it is preferable to spend a lengthy amount of time getting off or out of your vehicle, and interacting with numerous people you encounter. Also only walking the main streets, failing to walk back alleys, during the same time of the day or season should be avoided. Just like the familiar criticism of some war correspondents, don’t be fooled into assuming that you know what’s going on at the battle front, by sitting at the hotel bar, or attending a press briefing.
Speaking to the wrong people
Even though you may have a bunch of juicy quotes, that you can pepper your written results with, it does not mean that you have tapped into the essence of what is going on. It’s important to talk to a variety of people in the location you are conducting your study. This includes not only individuals whom you have identified as your key informants, but secondary and tertiary people too.
Good practices
Likewise there are a number of good techniques that you should consider to improve your street ethnography
Read relevant research before, during, and after you do your field research
Read a sufficient body of relevant research on your subject before entering the field, while you are at the location, and after you leave. This critical step should not be lead to analysis paralysis If you engage in this strategy to its extreme you will never get out of your office and into the field. After you have written up your findings, it’s also important to do an additional comprehensive literature scan and read items that were recently published, and reread scholarship that you may have forgotten about or ignored. This can help you improve the contextualization of your findings, etc.
Start by doing a quick scan of the neighborhood
Begin by doing a quick examination of the neighborhood or research setting. As you gain more relevant information, then you should develop a strategy to spend more time there in an effort to immerse yourself in that setting, getting to better know the people who live and work there. That is why running or cycling in or through a neighborhood may not be so bad as an initial pass. This is especially valuable in particularly dangerous neighborhoods. You may decide after doing this initial work, that the setting that you originally wanted to explore is not your cup of tea and decide to pivot to a different neighborhood, setting or subject. This is valuable. Rather than spending hours trying to get a handle on the situation you have made a low risk investment and it is easier to leave at this point in time than after 2, 6, or twelve months in the field.
Find key informants and try to interview them in different situations
The truth is that you can spend lots of time observing and talking to lots of people in the setting under investigation, but the people you interact with are not that helpful in assisting you to understand the core dynamics of what is going on. That is why you must invest sufficient resources in trying to cultivate key informants. Moreover, to the extent possible, these individuals should be interviewed in different settings as they may act differently when they are in for example a bar, or on the street, and in the presence of other people.
Vary the time of day and season you collect your data
A good street ethnography attempts to observe and interact with the people, at almost all times of the day and night and all seasons. Otherwise your study will be more of a snapshot.
Spend a sufficient amount of time in the area under study
One of the questions and doing ethnography is how much time does it take to do an appropriate ethnography. And the answer is it depends. It’s not so much how much time one spends in the field, but the quality of the observations and interactions one achieves and records.
Concluding Thoughts
One way of looking at the techniques of street ethnography is to see them on a continuum. The good news is, notwithstanding the difficulties of conducting street ethnographies during the current COVID-19 pandemic, is that over time most street ethnographers improve the techniques that they use to conduct street ethnographies and the work they do improves.
Photographer Hernán Piñera
Title: Street photography.
What’s in a name? Exconvict, formerly incarcerated, or returning citizen?
/by Jeffrey Ian RossIn the field of corrections, there are lots of labels, names, and terms (many that I dislike) that the public frequently applies to people who are housed in, live in, and are processed by jails and prison.
These terms are frequently used in a simplistic and dehumanizing manner. Take for example, the word offender. I think we can agree that many of the things that people who have been convicted did were offensive, but not all actions that they may have engaged in rise to this label. And, as we know, some people who are incarcerated are wrongfully convicted.
But when it comes time to choose the appropriate terms for someone who is locked up in or released from a carceral setting, a sufficient amount of nuance should be observed. People who are incarcerated in the United States, tend to differentiate among the labels prisoners, inmates, and convicts. Each term means something different to them, however, this is a different discussion from the one here.
The current tendency to use the expressions or terms formerly incarcerated or returning citizens, by well-meaning activists and academics, people working in the field of restorative justice, and the perpetual bomb throwers, who somehow magically show up during these discussions, is short-sighted. Worse, there is often an implicit suggestion that the scholarship that has been done to date using the terms related to the label exconvict (including convict, felon, inmate, or prisoner) is somewhat suspect.
Let’s start with the expression returning citizens. When a formerly incarcerated person is released from carceral custody, not all of their rights are restored. This includes, but is not limited to serving on a jury, voting, and owning a gun. Thus, to call them a returning citizen may be aspirational, but it does not accurately reflect their status.
Next, just because we change terms to formerly incarcerated or returning citizen does not somehow blunt, nor erase the stigma or objectification society assigns to people who have criminal records. There are innumerable collateral consequences of a criminal conviction that go beyond the label we ascribe to people who have spent time behind bars. For instance, criminal records hurt the chances for many people to secure appropriate housing or to gain employment.
Finally, most of the “we don’t call them convicts or excons anymore” crowd, do not ask convicts, or exconvicts, which labels they would prefer. And if they do ask incarcerated people what terms they like, the studies that have been done have not used rigorous social scientific methods, and thus the results are not conclusive.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, a relatively recent MacArthur Genius recipient, who spent over eight years incarcerated in a Virginia prison, became a respected poet, and completed Yale Law School upon release, put it most clearly when he stated, “I really just don’t like being called formerly incarcerated as a part of my title. I would much rather be called a carjacker or a convict or an inmate or a jailbird. Cause to do all this shit and be reduced by your allies to a condition brought on by the pistol you held is wild.”
So why then do some people insist upon using the labels formerly incarcerated or returning citizen?
Some of these individuals may be attempting to draw a distinction between old terms and new ones in an effort to effect change. But, as there’s no consensus among the formerly incarcerated community on how they want these terms used, policing this language amounts to little more than virtue signaling.
Thus, insisting that we must change the label of exconvict to formerly incarcerated or returning citizen seems more like a misplaced effort.
It does not materially improve the pressing and more important issues at hand, nor does it assist the lives of prisoners, ameliorate inhumane prison conditions, address the problems of mass incarceration, or solve the real challenges that people who are released from jail or prison face. In short, terminology debates do not improve their lives.
Photo Credit
Photographer: Patrick Denker
Title: Modern Chain Gang, Meridian, Texas
What explains the 2020 spike in murders in the United States?
/by Jeffrey Ian RossLast week the Federal Bureau of Investigation released the most recent crime statistics and it revealed a surprising finding; the number of murders (21,500) which occurred last year (2020) was the highest it has ever been since 1960. Meanwhile, most other crimes, for which data is systematically collected, decreased.
Keep in mind that last year was unique as we were in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and there were numerous protests across the country, most of which were in support of Defunding or Abolishing the Police, Black Lives Matter, and in reaction to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, and other similar deaths of unarmed African-American men and women (e.g., Breonna Taylor) at the hands of police officers.
That being said, I’m neither suggesting nor implying that the protests or bail reform efforts, caused an increase in homicide. That’s too simplistic.
But what explains the rise of murder, a type of crime where the statistics are the most reliable?
Here are six possible reasons why this increase might have occurred.
To begin with, there may be more availability of guns on the street. Not only is there data to support the increase in gun sales, but some commentators have suggested that a certain percentage of the population used their stimulus check to purchase guns. Keep in mind that these sales were disproportionately from fearful white middle class people who live in the suburbs.
Alternatively, the guns that were used in homicides may be of better quality. Many of the guns on the street are of low quality, typically used to threaten a potential victim of a robbery and not necessarily because it will be fired. By default, brand new guns, on the other hand, are of better quality.
Additionally, another reason why homicides may have increased in 2020 is that people using the guns have become better skilled at using them. Shooters may have had more time on their hands to improve their ability to use these weapons.
Moreover, the situations in which guns are used may have increased, thus there may have more domestic violence (e.g.., families living in close proximity for longer periods of time), gang activity, including competition for scarce markets.
Another possible reason for the spike in homicides is that first responders, especially EMTs may have been slower to get to gun-shot victims. Why? They were tied up with COVID-19 related patients, and thus the times between dispatch and arrival on the scene may have been slower. Thus, a certain percentage of victims of shootings may have died because of slower response times. A similar situation may have occurred in the emergency departments of our hospitals that were crowded with COVID-19 patients.
Finally, a decrease in trust in the criminal justice system in general, and police in particular to “serve and protect” may have pushed some members of the public to handle their disputes with others on their own and resort to gun violence.
Regardless these are all speculations regarding the increase in the murder rate in 2020. Until we get a better handle on who the shooters and victims are, especially finding out why they decided to pull the trigger, we will probably not really know for sure why there was an increase last year.
Title of photo: Crime Scene Patrol Cars
Photographer: F. Muhammad