I sometimes crossed several social scenes, namely my places of observation,
of family life, of professional activity, and so on.
After a brief methodological presentation, this paper will analyze
various excerpts from my field journal, evoking some of the social scenes
(professional, field, familial, and personal) encountered during my observa-
tion. I will then discuss the interactions that arose from one scene to the
next and the methodological issues connected to them. Finally, to conclude
I will underline the need for the researcher to integrate her own personal
situational factors at the heart of her reflexive process in order to best
address the precautionary requirements that scientific validity sets forth
when collecting data throughout an observation.
METHODOLOGY
This paper is based on material from an observation carried out between
October 2010 and November 2011 in the context of my doctoral thesis:
Police Officers and Youth: the Social Organization of Interactions in Public
Space. The police officers who were the object of this observation
belonged to two seemingly different groups: on the one hand,police patrol
officers attached to intervention services dealing with urgent missions.
Their professional framework essentially falls under the “traditional”
police model (response, symptomatic approach, legalism, and isolation).
The other group wasneighborhood police officersattached to neighbor-
hood services, whose framework is based on the “community police”
model (prevention, problem resolution, and partnership). The observation
focused on two local police zones of the Brussels-Capital Region in
Belgium. The data analysis still underway is mainly undertaken under
the theoretical perspective of symbolic interactionism (Becker, 1963;
Goffman, 1967), while remaining open to other related theoretical move-
ments that may enrich this study. The heart of the analysis is understand-
ing the elements that define the “social organization” of interactions
between police officers and youth, that is to investigate the “reasonable, if
not explicitly reasoned, putting into play of social factors” (Monjardet,
2003 , p. 70). In other words, to understand a seemingly individual beha-
vior one must not only identify the rules/factors at play, but also make
use of these rules/factors and the interaction between them to understand
the particular social process at play in the interactions between police
officers and youth.
An Observation Situation: When the Researcher’s Scenes Interact 45