Form Of Participant Observation Research Articles

Teaching Moral Education In Secondary Schools Using Real-Life Dilemmas

The purpose of this study is to contribute to contemporary debates about alternative ways of teaching Moral Education (ME) in Malaysia by including the voice of students. ME in the Malaysian setting is both complex and compulsory. This study explores alternatives to the current somewhat dated approach. It seeks to discover what young adolescents describe as moral dilemmas, how they approach them and what they find useful in resolving these moral problems. The research is founded on a modified version of Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), extended to suit the multicultural, multiethnic Malaysian setting, and here called the Zone of Collaborative Development (ZCD). This study uses qualitative research methodology consisting of a modified framework of participatory action research (PAR) as the methodological framework. Data was gathered for textual analysis through a modified form of participant observation, focus group transcripts, interviews, and student journals. The research trials a process of resolving reallife moral dilemmas in the ME classroom. It critically analyses the types of reallife moral dilemmas that a selected group of secondary students face. It also indicates the moral choices they make and the moral orientations they use. Participants in this study were 22 16-17 year old adolescents from three different types of secondary schools in a Form Four ME classroom in Malaysia. They were from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, but within a nonMuslim community of students. ME in Malaysia (MEM) is designed to cater for this group while Muslim students study Islamic Studies. Findings show that students were concerned about moral issues and values not covered in the current ME curriculum. The moral dilemmas that they identified were relational and context dependent. Multiple factors contributed to the problems they described. These factors included national legislation, Malaysian culture, ethnicity, and religion as well as the effects of history, in particular the Japanese occupation. Students named autonomy, self and mutual respect, trust, freedom, and tolerance as main conflicting themes in their reallife moral dilemmas. They found their peers helpful in providing support, advice, and direction. Students also appear to find the process trialled in the research interesting, interactive/collaborative, meaningful, and reflective. The analysis also shows that the respondents' moral choices were influenced by parents, culture, religion, utilitarianism, collaboration, and friendship, within a strong carebased approach. However, moral pluralism was also evident in the findings in cases where participants made decisions based on care and justice interchangeably. The study suggests that including students' voices in MEM in this way might better engage students' interest, whilst at the same time contributing to intercultural tolerance and understanding.

Shadow Writing and Participant Observation: A Study of Criminal Justice Social Work Around Sentencing

The study of decision‐making by public officials in administrative settings has been a mainstay of law and society scholarship for decades. The methodological challenges posed by this research agenda are well understood: how can socio‐legal researchers get inside the heads of legal decision‐makers in order to understand the uses of official discretion? This article describes an ethnographic technique the authors developed to help them penetrate the decision‐making practices of criminal justice social workers in writing pre‐sentence reports for the courts. This technique, called ‘shadow writing’, involved a particular form of participant observation whereby the researcher mimicked the process of report writing in parallel with the social workers. By comparing these ‘shadow reports’ with the real reports in a training‐like setting, the social workers revealed in detail the subtleties of their communicative strategies embedded in particular reports and their sensibilities about report writing more generally.

"ERACE-ing" the Color Line: Racial Reconciliation in the Christian Music Industry

In this article I look at the contemporary Christian music industry and the issue of race. Racial reconciliation and inclusiveness have been part of an ongoing discourse and larger movement gaining momentum among Evangelicals since the early 1990s, and it provides important context and point of departure. The methodological approach is qualitative, based primarily on fieldwork in the form of participant observation in the setting of annual industry conventions, interaction and conversations with a number of industry workers, and review and analysis of a variety of documentary data sources. The main argument is that in the context of the heightened recent mainstream attention given Christian cultural products, certain members of the industry are using a form of what Smith (1998) termed "engaged orthodoxy" to spread the gospel and to further the aims of the racial reconciliation movement through their work. This is being done at a number of industry levels, and in this article I discuss some aspects of this activity. I also consider are some of the conflicts and tensions engendered in cultural workers' attempts to combine faith and commerce in the service of effecting social change.

Mystery shopping: Using deception to measure service performance

AbstractThis article reports on a program of exploratory research aimed at examining the practice of mystery shopping in service organizations. Mystery shopping, a form of participant observation, uses researchers to deceive customer service personnel into believing that they are serving real customers or potential customers. The research focused on the views of senior managers responsible for commissioning mystery shopping research and directors of market research agencies responsible for the provision of such research. The research findings identify the manner in which mystery shopping is used and the methods used to maximize the reliability of the technique. The study also revealed that employees' acceptance of this form of deception appears to be critical if the results are to be taken seriously by service personnel and if industrial relations within the organization are not to suffer. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The Migration and Re-settlement Process of a Clan Group in Korea

Since the 1970s dam construction in the rural areas of South Korea has formed a major part of government works. This has contributed greatly to the control of water resources, but has also resulted in many involuntary or forced migrations of people from inundated areas. In many studies of the villages lost to dam construction, whether undertaken by geographers, cultural anthropologists, or folklorists, the central concern has been on the ethnology of the former settlement and on the pattern of removal. Other important aspects such as the process of re-settlement, adaption and acculturation of the migrants to their new homes have so far tended to be overlooked.This paper explores the re-settlement process, adaptive strategies, and acculturation of a migrant clan in South Korea. Steward's (1955) cultural core model is applied with respect to the adaptation of migrants to their new communities. The study area is the village of Ilsun-ri in Heapyung-myun, Sunsan County, Kyungpook Province. This village was occupied by migrants from the Chonju Ryu clan in 1987, with most of them coming from several clan villages which were lost in the course of construction of the Imha Dam. Particular attention was paid in this study to villagers from Musil, a native place of the Chonju Ryu clan. Fieldwork took the form of participant observation during January and February, 1991. At that time there were 66 households in Ilsun-ri, and the population was 192.In Section II the cognative structure of the villagers is outlined, followed in Sections III-IV by an examination of villagers occupations, customs, and their adaptive mechanism to their new environment. The main features of this adaptation process can be summarized as follows:These migrants made a collective decision to move in the hope that cultural shock would be lessened and the homogeneity of the clan would be maintained. Since the family heads were mostly middle-aged, and ranked in economic terms in the 'middleclass', the group adapted well to their new milieux.Before migration the Chonju Ryu villagers depended on subsistence agriculture, using manual labour and farm animals, for their livelihood. After migration, the villagers had to cope with many changes in agricultural environment, including climate and quality of arable land. They were also introduced to farm mechanization and improved methods of transportation. It was therefore necessary to switch to production of commercial crops in order for them to remain economically self-reliant. Accordingly, the traditional pattern of labour exchange transformed into one of functional cooperation. Also, some villagers became free to seek employment at the nearby Kumi industrial complex. As a result, the life style of the villagers has become more varied after the migration.Despite these changes, the villagers were able to maintain their traditional ancestral worship practices and Confucian value system. For example, the villagers brought with them symbolic buildings and structures, such as Chongga, Sadang, and Chongja, to set up in the new village. These structures were re-erected in the same spatial arrangement as in the old village, giving full regard to the geomantic traditions of Pung-su and their positions relative to the surrounding mountains and rivers. All this can be viewed as a kind of defensive reaction to new external influences and surrounds, but it is also clear that a necessary part of the villagers adaptive strategy was affirmation of their common ancestral heritage.Finally, it is clear that while the migrants accommodated rapidly the new agricultural technologies and methods of cooperative organization, they maintained many cultural factors related to clan identity. Although the former spirit of cooperation and internal cohesion outwardly appears to have weakened in the village, the migrants have displayed an adaptive mechanism of selective acceptance of new things

Information acquisition by users of hospital libraries: a comparison of Brazil and the UK

The acquisition of relevant, up-to-date information is clearly of prime impor tance to medical staff. Though there have been numerous medical informa tion user studies, only a few have involved the observation of medical personnel as they are actually in the process of acquiring information. A form of participant-observation is employed here to examine the problems of medical staff acquiring information from formal sources located in hospital libraries. A teaching hospital library and two non-teaching hospital libraries have been studied in the UK along with three comparable hospital libraries in Brazil. The results indicate that information requirements and library use in the two countries are distinctly similar, but the process of acquisition is affect ed by the differing information environment. Medical staff adapt to the ambient information environment as best they can. In fact, respondents in Brazil express only two major reservations — regarding the currency of information and the language of delivery — which do not appear in UK responses. Though transfer of innovatory practices from the UK to Brazil is therefore feasible (and desirable) in human terms, it is necessarily limited by the resources available.

Doing research in prison: The strengths and weaknesses of full participation as a guard

Prison research has traditionally been conducted by outsiders, or researchers in non-participant roles. This paper, however, demonstrates that involvement in the prison as a prison guard, an insider, is a viable and needed form of participant observation. As an insider, the author was able to collect data on behaviors often concealed from other fieldworkers. However, participation as a member was not problem-free and this paper addresses the strengths, weaknesses, and ethical dilemmas of full participation as a research role. The paper also addresses whether or not full participation hinders or hampers data collection when the researcher returns to the same setting but in the traditional or outside role.