174 ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA
apartments. But one thing did somehow move its way to my conscious mind: The homes some-
how felt different from one another. I can’t tell you why, but I became quite adept at differentiat-
ing the religious-ethnic-class backgrounds of their residents by how my friends’ home spaces
were designed and organized, without having religious symbols visible—a hobby that was to
become an academic endeavor. The power of experience in framing a question or opening one-
self up to trying to see through different eyes cannot be underestimated. I often think about how
this reflexivity informs my research, teaching, writing, social activism, and policy work, as well
as how I designed my own house (A. Dean 2003).
Participant-observation is not at heart an alien practice, as it is so much a part of what we do in
negotiating our daily lives. What is particular to researchers is making explicit, or visible, the
patterns that we tend to take for granted as second-nature common sense. This is what differenti-
ates ethnographic observation from daily life. To make explicit the meaning, the significance, of
everyday practices in any kind of truly explanatory manner requires going beneath the surface to
those messy spaces of our lives where we commonly don’t explain why we do what we do. In the
commonplaces of everyday life, we just accept these patterns as right. The careful observation
and self- and cultural discovery of research, however, turn this acceptance into explicitly stated,
empirical data. What makes this so hard is the difficulty of recognizing something that is so close
that it is blurred in one’s vision. Fortunately, the desire and intention to see and to interpret that
sight in multiple ways is what can bring clarity.
Not everyone who has lived with people different than themselves uses the experience as a
base to go beyond their own imaginations. Many have lived with people with less money or
different goals than their own without realizing that the others, like themselves, probably dream
about a safe home, beauty, and contentment—however differently those attributes are defined.
For some, this type of experiential learning is pushed aside as irrelevant or interpreted as mere
“cultural relativism” and a “backwardness” holding people down. The labeling becomes a me-
dium for derision or patronization. There is no doubt that cultural differences can be threatening
to someone who can’t, or won’t, imagine any other worldview as right. It can be difficult to
accommodate competing logic systems simultaneously. Accepting another’s perspective may
seem to negate or devalue one’s own.
Participant-observation is not a panacea. Nor is it always practical to do an in-depth, multiyear,
ethnographic study before embarking on a planning, policy design, implementation, or policy
analysis project. But this does not diminish the efficacy or flexibility of such a study. Having
experienced being part of another way of living, interacting, thinking, and relating using different
value structures and having learned to read written and verbal case studies with an ethnographic
sensibility, it is hard to ever respond in the old way again. For such experience develops cognitive
slots in the brain ready to accept new questions about unknown situations and to see beyond
where one could have ever conceived of looking before. Once acquired, this ethnographic sensi-
bility carries over into other settings, other policies, and other research questions. Although it is
not reasonable to expect to thoroughly think and respond as the people with whom one is living
do, enmeshing oneself in another’s world is a teacher unsurpassed by any other I have known.
After several days in Monterrey and time to think about the sociocultural meanings of sleeping
arrangements and how I had been enculturated to accept them unthinkingly, I moved on with my
traveling companions to their natal village in western Mexico, where I shared a bedroom with
their cousin’s two teenage girls. There was a double bed and a single bed in the room. On our first
night there, one of the girls asked me which bed I would prefer to sleep in, fully expecting that I
would prefer to sleep with someone else, rather than to be alone, since I was in a new place. That
we were complete strangers was not a relevant factor for her in her role as host. Before I gave my