Roles in the field

At the moment I am agonizing with the following doubt: should I tell the journalists at The Newspaper that I am a journalist as well or should I just be presented as an ethnographer.

I may sound overdramatic when I say “agonizing” but the questions has been a theme of an entire chapter (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983 chapter 4). When presenting what I consider a thorough account of “field relations”, the authors bounce back andd forwards with examples of advantages of the two options.

For example, Beynon (1983) explains that during his research at a school, telling the other teachers that he had taught for ten years worked out as a “bonus”. It and opened up the other teachers for more conversation as they considered Beynon to be “one of theirs”.

Hammersley and Atkinson go on saying that a problem that the ethnographer often faces is deciding “how much of self-disclosure” is appropriate or fruitful. They also quote Klatch (1988) whose investigative willingness to understand the social scene was confused with accordance with principles she was not particularly in agreement with. (The study was about women who are involved in right wing organizations).

The chapter also gives various examples of how personal characteristics of the researcher invariably influence the fieldwork: gender, ethnic group, religion, colour, sexual orientation, nationality, etc.

Other very interesting topic raised on this chapter is the variety of roles the ethnographer can adopt, the “theoretical social roles for field work”: complete participant, participant as observer, observant as participant and complete observer. Disregarding the detail about the theory, they do have one brilliant conclusion for this question:

“While ethnographers may adopt a variety of roles, the usual aim throughout is to maintain a more or less marginal position, thereby providing access to participant perspectives but at the same time minimizing the dangers of over-rapport. (…) The ethnographer needs to be intellectually poised between familiarity and strangeness, and (…) between stranger and friend. (…) the ethnographer is generally a marginal native”.

They also go about the stresses and strains of fieldwork, describing a variety of symptoms, from discomfort to physical pain, suffered by ethnographers in the past. They say that, however bad these feelings can be, the one thing to be avoided at all costs is the feeling of being at “home”: “the comfortable sense of being ‘at home’ is a danger signal. From the perspective of the marginal reflexive ethnographer there can thus be no feeling of ‘surrender’ or ‘becoming’. There must always be some intellectual distance – without that the ethnography can be transformed into an autobiographical account of a conversation. If the sense of being a stranger is lost, one might have lost the critical perspective.

So, what should I do? Should I tell the manager of the newsroom I would like to keep my background as a secret, take the role of the “acceptable incompetent” (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983: 103) and pretend all the time not to know what is “closure” and “lead” and all the journalistic jargon, or should I just let the truth out and tell them I had some experience as a journalist in the past?

I think that either way I will be misinterpreted. First because despite the fact I had some experience, I never have been to a newsroom except Reuters and other newspapers as a visitor. Second, I might know some jargon in Portuguese, but I’m certainly not fully acquainted with the English version of these, therefore it would be perfectly acceptable that, as a foreigner I ask silly questions about the language. Third, if I do decide to hide it, there is a possibility that I will slip that through a conversation as I get close to the people I will be conversing with.

So I think that my attitude is going to be the following:

- make sure I am introduced as a researcher from UCL, not a journalist
- reassure them I am no spy, no management “secret weapon” or consultant, that I am there to fulfil my own interest: writing my theses
- don’t lie about the fact that I have some experience as a journalist but don’t present it as a big deal, just mention it in the conversation
- feel entitled to ask questions about journalism practices and jargon I do know, but not in English