A & A (not to be confused with The Program)

Apologies for the late post. Connectivity was down till after I went to work tonight.

Adler's article on Observation had many points, but ethical implications were the one thing that stood out to me. And when I say 'stood out,' I mean that they confused me and seemed problematic, to say the least. First issue: public versus private locations. While the term “parochial space” seems convenient, redefining public space could be a slippery slope. How many people are required to constitute a semi-private community in a public space? To wit, is Britney Spears' limousine a private space? What about the smoker's bench outside of my favorite coffeehouse? Perhaps even more appropriately, if I'm engaged in a 'private' practice (deviant or not) in a public space, am I somehow entitled to be free from scrutiny while performing said practice? If so, there are a whole bunch of social norms we need to overturn (indecent exposure, obscenity laws, views on public intoxication, etc.).

It seems to me that Observational Techniques are really systematized eavesdropping, especially since it is untenable to be forthright about your acts of observation to every subject that happens to enter your field of observation. Which leads into the other problematic ethical issue—misrepresentation of oneself as an observing researcher.

People watch and listen and smell other people literally all the time. They don't bear responsibility to those they observe to not do so unless they declare their intentions or lack thereof. Further, some people write down what they see, communicate to others what they've heard, and (horrors!) even publish based on what they've seen. None of these practices is exclusive to formal research. If suitable effort is made to protect the identifiable information of observed subjects, where is the dilemma? I don't like being watched and recorded without my knowledge, but my dislike is not sufficient reason to prohibit it.

Obviously, I am not advocating disguised research, but that is a more extreme case. Humphreys really did “walk a really perilous tightrope” in his “watchqueen” role, but as a not-quite-participant he gathered amazing information. Erikson's two rules (388) both address “deliberately misrepresenting” but make no mention of passively not representing oneself. Given Carol Warren's account of bridling at being observed in a coffee shop, do we condemn the observer for his acts of observation, or for his lack of subtlety? The problem is of course, complicated by the greatest method of unobtrusiveness: Disguise.