Consider your response as participant, observer, researcher in your site. There is a fine line between thoughts and feelings at the gut level. Here, you want to explain whether you were happy, sad, engaged, angry, grossed-out, excited, bothered, etc. as you begin to engage with your observations as a human being.Â

In addition to taking jottings about your observations at the site, you can and should also engage in conversation and interviews with informants at the site. As part of the process of triangulating your research data, you will look to your own observations, information from informants at the site, and secondary source research to create your ethnography

Though headnotes are extremely important to your project, your thoughts cannot remain in your head. Your observations and ideas must make it to the page in order to become primary data and inform your ethnographic essay. A first step in this process of recording observations is to take a few, brief notes when you are in a site and then translate these notes into complete sentences and ideas at a later time.

You should also note how you feel about being present at the site. Are you comfortable? Do you feel out of place? Are you interested in what you see? Are you comparing this context with a similar context in your own culture? Is this your own culture? What, specifically, makes you feel that way?

At the site, you should try to take notes that address all five senses:

the end, fieldnotes are only for you.  They are the primary data you will use to write your final piece, your larger representation of your research.  But, though it seems this would be low-stakes writing (writing only for you, without an immediate purpose),

An annotated bibliography is essentially a list of the sources you find relevant, with all of the necessary bibliographic information (i.e. author, title, publisher, year, etc.), followed by information about the content of the source. Annotated bibliographies can be used for a variety of purposes.  They may demonstrate the quality of your research, or provide readers additional background information.Â

Start the process of secondary research as soon as you can!  Certainly, it’s difficult to begin secondary research before you’ve been to your site, or written any fieldnotes—how would you know what to look for?  But, the fact is that since this process requires so much time, you do want to begin sooner, rather than later, and make sure that you don’t leave all of this work to one weekend or, worse yet, to one night

It can be relevant and powerful to use popular cultural source material, but you need to be conscious of how and how you would use it.  Some of these texts, such as documentaries and websites, can often provide a great deal of information about a subject or project.  Statistics and facts can be powerful, but they are also often beside the point since the most important data is the data that you will collect.

Bibliography plundering:  If you have the experience of finding one “really good” source, look to that source for more answers.  Plunder the Bibliography or Works Cited pages of that volume and go and get the sources that author uses in order to make his/her argument.  Of course it is best to skim the source you have, to read enough of it in order to identify some of the more relevant citations of that author before randomly choosing alternate authors from the Bibliography.

It is not unusual to choose obscure, or less-well-researched sites. When this is the case, you must consider some of the larger ideas that may inform the creation of the sites, and to think about ways of categorizing the action that occurs in the specific site.

.  Your words used to explain or label a particular situation or idea may differ greatly from the words and terms used by a specific academic field to describe or label that very same situation or idea. The key here is to pay attention, to be willing to second-guess your own ideas, to ask for help, to know yourself, to be self-reflexive to the point of understanding whether you are able to ethically incorporate research ideas, or whether they would be used to further isolate or denigrate particular individuals, behaviors or cultures.

Identification of a cultural text is relatively easy.  Take a look around the room or place you are in right now and briefly catalog the people and/or things you see. These objects and actions are cultural texts.

Students often initially struggle with the discussion sections of their research proposals. They select interesting sites, know why they are interested, and are able to describe research plans and methodologies, but often wonder how to think about their lines of inquiry and clearly state how their research connects to the wider world. As a means of guiding, but not prescribing, ways to think about your research site, you can use some of the following questions as food for thought for potential inquiry before moving into the writing of your actual research proposal.

In a research proposal, the researcher identifies a research site and articulates a particular thought process and plan. First, you need to brainstorm and theorize about the value of your research, what your questions are, and what other, broader ideas your research might be connected to. The research proposal also asks you to create a plan for your data collection. As is the case with most research connected to people and community, things may not always go according to your plan and you may learn things (hopefully) other than things you imagine you will learn, but the proposal is a very important piece of the process.

In an age of reality TV and surprise, tell-all talk shows, there are always some students that are excited about the possibilities of “not telling” or of using the information they uncover to pit people against each other. For example, one student wrote about fighting in his family, and he really wanted to use inside information to set his family up for a big, blow out fight – for the purposes of his research. While that may or may not have been a smart personal strategy, as a writer and ethnographic researcher, it crossed the ethical behavior line. Chapter 2 explains why you need to include ethical considerations in your research and research plan, but overall, the issues of ethics come back to respect for the people and cultures at your site. You need the kind of access we have discussed in this section to collect enough data from which to write and present your interpretations, and both your research process and writing must be accomplished with this respect.

Because there is no one way to choose a site or to write ethnography, making a good decision regarding a research site might seem difficult.  This is true.  But this also means that there are also endless possibilities for success. If you take the time to carefully consider finding a site or group that you have a genuine interest in, your research and your writing will be much better.

One semester is not enough time to conduct research and then write an enthographic essay discussing the behaviors and/or beliefs concerning a particular site/group/community about which you know, and initially care, absolutely nothing. You want to give yourself a leg up and choose your site based on a genuine interest or personal connection with a site so that you have a starting point for your observations and analysis. The site you select will be a place you go or a group you meet with for many, many, many hours over the next weeks. Your site will be your text. If you are not “into” your research or “into” your site, chances are that you’ll be bored and not want to conduct your research. And, then writing an essay will become more of a chore than a challenge. If you have an identifiable connection with the site, you will be better able to embrace and understand the role of the participant-observer in ethnographic data collection. To some degree, you will need to see yourself as part of, rather than separate, above, or beyond the community/site you’re researching. Choosing a research site based upon personal connection allows you to more easily become one of the subjects of your own research, thereby increasing your own abilities to conduct reflexive analysis of the community and yourself.