SEEING WITH AN ETHNOGRAPHIC SENSIBILITY 163others. Obviously, no one could hear my thoughts, but you couldn’t have convinced me of it at
that moment. In no time, all were settled into their shared beds and someone, I no longer remem-
ber who, started speaking softly. Then someone else joined in. And soon there was quiet conver-
sation going on all around me. To my amazement, the stiffness left my body, replaced by a feeling
of utter comfort and safety as I drifted into sleep, feeling the voices around me.
The morning brought this new experience into focus. With it came questions I don’t believe I
even could have thought to ask or have been able to comprehend fully had someone brought them
up to me only eight hours earlier: Why do we in the United States insist on identifying ourselves
with private, individual rooms, even when semi-comatose in sleep? Why do we keep ourselves
apart from one another with walls and other physical barriers when the soft chatter and knowl-
edge of other bodies nearby feel so comforting? At this point, I still didn’t know about U.S.
policies or Dr. Spock-type parental guidance books (e.g., Spock 1976) that told parents it was not
healthy for children—even, according to some Western “experts,” as infants—to sleep in the
same room as their parents and certainly not healthy for children’s development as individuals
and their future well-being to share a bed. I had not yet started thinking in any systematic manner
that there might be an integral relationship between everyday, seemingly mundane activities,
such as where and with whom one sleeps, and larger social policies and belief systems.
Participant-observation is the fine art of hanging out—with a difference. The difference is
that an ethnographer doing participant-observation attempts to interpret observations and ex-
periences systematically by looking for sociocultural patterns. Each participant-observer goes
in with his or her own experiential background, theoretical preferences, research questions,
and ideas about how to obtain the appropriate data to answer the initial research questions. As
learning develops, these questions are, ideally, continually revisited and revised. A multifaceted
research method and theory, participant-observation is the process of living, working, and/or
otherwise hanging out with a defined group of people, what might be considered an interpretive
community. The goal is to have a more nuanced understanding of the world from their perspec-
tives rather than simply from the researcher’s; to have a basis for exploring the multiple ways in
which people categorize their worlds; and to understand the significance of those perspectives
and categories for the many ways by which people learn their place in society and represent their
worldview in policy, art, the built environment, social relations, and other facets of their social
and political worlds.
For participant-observers interested in policy and planning, another goal is to extrapolate from
these perceived patterns and categories the fundamental structural principles underlying them, as
well as their relation to one another, to the development of the observed people’s sense of right
and proper behavior, and finally to decisions about appropriate policies and planning.
In this chapter I explore how the results of participant-observation, when understood from an
interpretive perspective, enable both the original researcher and subsequent readers to make sense
of local knowledge, expert knowledge, and the researcher’s or reader’s own knowledge (among
others) in a manner that has potential to accord more equal weighting among the different knowl-
edge bases. I draw examples largely from what has been the central focus of my own research:
how people from different backgrounds prefer to use domestic space, how that can lead them to
misinterpret another’s housing density preferences, and the policy implications of such misinter-
pretations. I also draw on the work of other participant-observer studies to illustrate the strengths
of an ethnographic sensibility for producing insights that help ground policy analysis and that
could prevent many of the errors of judgment that otherwise can creep into public policies. In
focusing on observing, this chapter provides only a partial look at the full range of activities that
constitute participant-observation research.