SEEING WITH AN ETHNOGRAPHIC SENSIBILITY 165inform what they are doing and assess their validity. Uninformed assumptions can be dangerous
to the social researcher. For instance, let’s say the student who originally posed the question
about the number of rooms, residents, and income was assuming there would be a significant
relationship between low income and high density levels. Although not articulated and perhaps
not even recognized by the student, the underlying, implicit hypothesis is that given the economic
wherewithal, people, as an undifferentiated category, choose homes with sufficient individual
rooms to enable each household member to be apart from others at any time. Perhaps such was
the ideal in that student’s home or he picked it up from the media. The student who wanted to
explore geographic location as a potentially relevant variable might have studied architecture or
lived in different parts of the United States and realized there is no national norm for house size.
She “intuitively” felt that this relationship had to be teased out of the data. The student who
wanted to add national origin to the equation might be well traveled or might be from an ethnic
background in which it was more highly valued for household members to be together, not apart;
he might have noted that his extended family’s norms were not the same as those of his Euro-
American friends. If the instructor’s experiences were similar to the student who posed the ques-
tion, she might assume that adding the extra variables would be a waste of time, but good pedagogy
requires letting students find that out for themselves.
This example begins to demonstrate a particular form of generalization or transferability from
one case study or one person’s experience to another case or experience. My Mexican example
shows that it would not be appropriate to make the simplistic assumption that all people who
sleep in shared bedrooms do so for reasons of cultural background and choice. Certainly, for
many people it is a cultural preference, but it would be naive to deny that for some it is an
economic necessity. An appropriate use of these ethnographic data would be to ask the question:
In any given interpretive community, is there a relationship between sharing bedrooms and cul-
tural beliefs? What are the clues that enable someone who did not grow up in this interpretive
community to learn whether such a relationship exists and to discover the deeper social threads to
which the findings relate? These clues come from understanding the life experiences of people
who live the situation being studied, not just from the variables that researchers’ personal and
academic experiences lead them to believe are significant. This is where respecting the insights of
participant-observation becomes essential, whether gained through reading others’ work or through
one’s own research.
Granted, sitting in a classroom with your students is a qualitatively different experience than
sharing a bunk bed and bedroom with a family you just met in a country with cultural formations
alien to yours. But both activities require stepping outside of yourself and giving credence to another’s
way of approaching a problem—be it a cultural or a statistical problem. They require comprehend-
ing others’ underlying rationales for approaching the problem as they do and figuring out how that
rationale is part of a larger understanding of the world. The researcher needs, in other words, not
only to understand how someone else interprets “the problem set,” but also to acquire the tools
necessary for analyzing that person’s understanding and interpretation of the issue at hand. What-
ever the particular ethnographic situation, understanding and analysis require pattern recognition
and an exploration of the logic that creates a particular pattern of thinking and doing.
It is a common experience for outsider observers that, try as they may, their own expectations
and experiences, their own logical constructions, fall short of providing them with a way to inter-
pret the situation appropriately because they lack the appropriate cognitive or perceptual “slot”
for the situation. A researcher might never quite be able to agree or feel comfortable with some-
one else’s chosen solution to a cultural or statistical problem, yet through participating the re-
searcher gains an understanding of and appreciation and respect for the beauty, complexity, and