OrientationObservationIn-depth interviewsDocument analysis and semiologyConversation and discourse analysisSecondary Data
SurveysExperimentsEthicsResearch outcomes
Conclusion
3.3.3.1 Introduction For critical social researchers, observation is a method of obtaining empirical evidence, with no more or less credibility than any other evidence-gathering approach. Critical social researchers are not particularly concerned with the debates about the status of observational data: is it objective, valid, reliable, authentic? Can one generalise from observational data? The key to critical research (as noted in Section 2) is that it situates evidence in a socio-historical context and relates it dialectically to wider social structures.
Critical social researchers tend to use observation:
• to deconstruct culture, for example to show how cultural adaptations are made that counter or accommodate structural formations, processes or inequality: : including people's connivance in their own oppression;
• to provide insights and rich description of social phenomena, which provide a basis for digging beneath surface appearances (see Critical Social ReearchChapter 1.6) and aid in debunking myths, unravelling inconsistent presuppositions and taken-for-granteds;
• as part of multi-technique critical community studies
The use of observation by critical social researchers is often referred to as critical ethnography.
Although there are variations in the work of critical ethnographers, the core is to use first-hand data to enable an analysis or evaluation of prevailing systems and structures. For critical social researchers, unlike for some phenomenologists, meanings are not important in themselves.
