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238 CHAPTER 9 Ethnography

intermediaries. Instead of relying upon members of a group to describe situations of
interest, a participant-researcher can experience it first hand, relying upon their own
powers of observation to understand the situation. Direct experiences of phenomena
of interest can provide a richness of data that is almost impossible to get from any
other research approach.
Having decided to participate, you must decide exactly what this means. You
might be tempted to try to join the group—to become a member in order to study
the group. This form of participation evokes images of anthropologists living in tra-
ditional villages. By sleeping, eating, and working with residents of the village, and
becoming—as much as possible—part of their community, a researcher learns “from
the inside.” These complete participants (Gold, 1958) may learn a great deal, but at
great expense, often involving years of fieldwork. Even if you are able to make this
effort, you may run the risk of losing the ability to be a detached observer, as your
identity as a member of the group may overwhelm your training as a researcher.
Known as “going native” (Gold, 1958), this reaction may impair your ability to con-
tinue your research.
Some ethnographers have pushed complete participation to its logical limits, con-
cealing their identity as researchers in order to make their membership in the group
appear more authentic. This strategy has the advantage of easing access to the group:
if you don't present yourself as a researcher, you don't have to explain your work or
deal with concerns of group members. This strategy can be particularly appropriate
in public or near-public settings where you generally would not be asked to justify
your presence or behavior (Lofland et al., 2006).
Private settings pose more of a challenge for such “covert” research, as conceal-
ing your identity may mean deceiving group members as to the reasons for your
participation. Even when conducted in the interest of fidelity of research, it is often
considered unethical for researchers to intentionally misrepresent the goals of their
research. Deceptions about a researcher's identity are also considered unethical if
they are conducted in order to get access to a group or context that they would not
otherwise be able to join (Angrosino, 2007). Thus, creating an avatar for participa-
tion in a virtual world (Ducheneaut et al., 2007) does not raise an ethical concern
because membership in these worlds is not constrained and interactions are not in-
tended to be private. However, falsely claiming to be a resident of a neighborhood
in order to join a residents-only discussion group might be considered inappropriate.
These concerns notwithstanding, some researchers have used covert participation in
situations where they believed that it was the only way that they could gain access to
the group (Lofland et al., 2006).
Pragmatic considerations can also limit the practicality of complete participation.
Let's return to the hospital information system that we described earlier. You might
be able to spend a great deal of time watching intensive-care nurses and physicians
up close, and you might learn a great deal about how medical care is given in the
ICU, but you probably shouldn't be involved directly in patient care. Even if you are a
trained and licensed medical professional, it is not at all clear if you could be working
effectively both as an HCI researcher and as a caregiver at the same time.