Abstract
Researchers in the social sciences face conflicting pressures to produce work that is both impactful to their field of study and feasible within time and resource constraints. These pressures are particularly acute for junior academics, but they extend throughout the career of professional researchers. Ethnography is an approach to research that cannot only afford many benefits in this regard but also challenges. While ethnography offers a “ground-up” approach that makes innovation more readily available, the commitments required by such an approach are substantial. In this chapter, we detail our individual pathways into fieldwork and qualitative analysis. We then outline some of the lessons we have learned and questions that have emerged after years of ethnographic research with kids in gangs and child protective services. In short, ethnography can make your career awesome but only if you are willing and able to stomach some risks, commit yourself fully, and navigate emerging problems.
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Notes
- 1.
The late Charles Manson had spent time at IBS and I got to read his file. This is just one example of how getting out into the field and “getting your hands dirty” can be exciting for a young student and an experience that can maintain relevance over the course of a career.
- 2.
The National Research Act of 1974, responsible for the Belmont Report and the Act that initiated IRBs at most universities, had not been passed yet. Important changes have been made in recent years to the so-called common rule (Hudson & Collins, 2015).
- 3.
Recall that this was 1974 and there were no electronic files; all papers were typed or handwritten and then typed and xeroxed.
- 4.
Street Daddy attended the conference with me in what was his first airplane flight and stay in a hotel. He was amused by the range of options on pay-per-view and the availability of a minibar in his hotel room.
- 5.
For clarity, my family is from Corktown. I was born on Cabot Street in Southwest and grew up in Inkster. Many of my earliest childhood lessons about fieldwork and human interactions were forged at my grandfather’s side at the Express Bar on Michigan Avenue and 12th Street. But I went to high school at Wayne Memorial High School in the suburbs.
- 6.
As Scott noted earlier, this sounds more intentional than it was. I moved because work was hard to come by in Detroit, and I had heard there were more lucrative and accessible opportunities to be had in Phoenix. In fact, I secured a job that doubled my salary and got me my first office job during my first week in town. During my master’s, I worked as a skip tracer and garnishment administrator at a collection law firm.
- 7.
The museum was, in fact, cool.
- 8.
- 9.
Throughout this process my committee was invaluably helpful in honing my dissertation. Dani helped me plan my analysis and was a constant source of support. Without Dani’s guidance through the perils of grad school and professional academia, there is no telling where I, or my dissertation, would be today. As a first generation, working class academic like me, her perspective on my development as a professional scholar has always been uniquely insightful. Mike was instrumental in making sure my work produced meaningful implications and was accessible to criminologists and criminal justice professionals not steeped in the CPS literature. His keen eye and advice were priceless. In fact, during my first prospectus defense (I had two), Mike singled out the term “CPS Paradox” and suggested that as a concise, compelling title.
- 10.
Nelly [pseudonym] is a social work student who works professionally with special needs youth in CPS. She agreed to participate as the trauma-informed practitioner for a month, five hours a day, five days a week, as a volunteer on my unfunded dissertation. The IRB’s insistence on an on-site behavioral health professional would have been a steep hurdle for my project without voluntary participation. In this case, having some friends in the social work department paid off big time. But even my meeting Nelly was serendipitous. Friendships and informal networking are a key tool in the ethnographer’s tool box, and the importance of nurturing relationships (by helping others) cannot be overstated.
- 11.
“Clinical descriptions of PTSD emphasize the importance of flashbacks, powerful multisensory image-based memories triggered by reminders in which traumatic events are reexperienced in the present rather than in the past…” (Brewin, Lanius, Novac, Schnyder, & Galea, 2009, p. 369; emphasis added, citation removed). In this case, the theater scene that preceded mine was a recreation of family members screaming at and over each other. The sound (all day long) of them screaming, the sight of the dinner table they were standing around, and the stress of being that raw on stage made me feel like I was small and weak and at the mercy of scary, violent adults. I grew up in a home where yelling, hitting, belittling, and insulting was fairly common. Revisiting those experiences makes me feel like a cornered rat. I told the 50 or so kids assembled around the stage that if I started hitting people there, I would get physically tired before anyone could stop me. They responded with a huge group hug. I cried. The show went on. In ethnography, the researcher is the data collection tool. This process often involves self-reflection in the trenches that was unanticipated at the outset.
- 12.
The average score in my dissertation was 6.26/10. This score places the group well above the 85th percentile nationally. In other words, the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates 87.5% of the population has an ACEs score of 3 or less, while only 12.5% score 4 or higher. https://vetoviolence.cdc.gov/apps/phl/resource_center_infographic.html.
- 13.
Choose Your Own Adventure is a series of children’s gamebooks where each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character’s actions and the plot’s outcome. Choose Your Own Adventure, as published by Bantam Books, was one of the most popular children’s series during the 1980s and 1990s, selling more than 250 million copies between 1979 and 1998. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure.
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Cesar, G.T., Decker, S.H. (2018). The Promise and Process of Ethnography: What We Have Learned Studying Gang Members and CPS Kids. In: Rice, S., Maltz, M. (eds) Doing Ethnography in Criminology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96316-7_6
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