members were required to gather at the leader’s house and wait for the end of the
world. Festinger participated in the group’s activities and every hour or so rushed to
the bathroom to record what he was observing. Other cult members assumed he had
some digestive distress!
In another famous study, Laud Humphreys (1970) was interested in the negoti-
ation of anonymous homosexual sex in public restrooms. He volunteered to act as a
lookout for the men who waited at a rest stop along the New Jersey Turnpike,
because it was against the law to have sex in public restrooms. As the lookout, he
was able to observe the men who stopped there to have sex and jotted down their
license plate numbers. Later, he was able to trace the men’s addresses through their
license plate numbers and went to their homes posing as a researcher doing a general
sociological study. (This allowed him to ask many questions about their backgrounds.)
His findings were as astonishing as they were controversial. Most of the men who
stopped at public restrooms to have sex with other men were married and consid-
ered themselves heterosexual. Most were working class and politically conservative
and saw their behavior simply as sexual release, not as an expression of “who they
really were.”
Humphreys’s research has been severely criticized because he deceived the men
he was studying, and he disguised his identity. As a result, universities developed insti-
tutional review boards (IRBs) to insure that researchers comply with standards and
ethics in conducting their research. But Humphreys was also able to identify a pop-
ulation of men who had sex with other men who did not identify as gay, and this was
thought to be one of the possible avenues of transmission for HIV from the urban
gay population into heterosexual suburban homes.
Increasingly, field researchers use the ethnographic methods of cultural anthro-
pology to undertake sociological research. Ethnographyis a field method used most
often by anthropologists when they study other cultures. While you don’t pretend to
be a participant (and you identify yourself as a researcher), you try to understand the
world from the point of view of the people whose lives you are interested in and
TYPES OF SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH METHODS 115JEthnography enables researchers to see people’s worlds up close, in intimate detail,
bringing out both subtle patterns and structural forces that shape social realities. Here
you can see an ethnographer talking with villagers in Bundu Tuhan, Malaysia.