Transcript Slide 1

Carrying out Person-Centred Ethnographic Research
with Teenage Boys in Rehab in Brazil
Dr. Gisella Hanley Santos
Research Fellow in Public Health Sociology
“Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of
Fieldwork Experience” (eds.: James Davies and Dimitrina Spencer).
“The aim of this book is to help retrieve emotion from
the methodological margins of fieldwork. Our task is
to investigate how certain emotions evoked during
fieldwork can be used to inform how we understand
the situations, people, communities, and interactions
comprising the lifeworlds we enter.”
(Davies 2010: 1)
My Research:
Identity change and resistance
1995
1999
Transitional living programme
Drug rehab
Street children
Low-income youth facing addiction
(majority from juvenile justice
system)
7 to 12 boys
30 to 40 boys
Ethnographic Research
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Participant observation
‘Insider’ and ‘outsider’
Building rapport
“Hanging out”
Person-Centred Ethnography
Person-centred ethnography refers to
"anthropological attempts to develop
experience-near ways of describing and
analysing human behaviour, subjective
experience, and psychological processes"
(Hollan 1997: 219).
Person-Centred Ethnography
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‘Informant’ and ‘respondent’ modes of
interviewing
Person-centred life history interviews over
numerous sessions
Open-ended probes
Encourage stream-of-consciousness-like
narratives
Focus on what experience means to
respondent
Active listening skills
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Encourage free-flow narrative
No interruptions
Be comfortable with silences
Avoid leading questions
Focus on emic perspectives… do not assume you
know what they’re talking about
Be aware of your own empathetic
Reflect on mirroring tendencies
What were my experiences during fieldwork?
What emotions were evoked for me?
A non-addict
Foreign
Female
Researcher
“You see here I talk with you. I like it. I feel good talking to you. Now I
can’t go [to the others] like this, the way I am, in this style, to talk and
start talking. There has to be the right person for me to talk about this.
It’s not everyone I trust. I trust you because I know you won’t harm me.
I can see it in your eyes that you won’t harm me” (Johnny, 18 years
old).
“I needed to open myself up, right. I needed to open myself up. To talk
about all my life because I kept it just to myself and I would go use
[drugs], right. I would use and forget, right… So, I needed to open
myself up, right, [speak of] everything that I did wrong. It was all locked
inside me” (Luiz, 18 years old).
“I am embarrassed to talk about who I am, who I was, right. For
you, it’s important who I am today, right. I liked doing this
interview... I was proud to share my life [story] with someone…
I am going to miss you. It’s like I got used [to doing the
interviews], right man. Weird. I’m going to miss you. I think
you’re a great person, right. You understand, right man. You
could be a psychologist too. [We both laugh]. You could, you
could, right man. I don’t have words. It’s very sad. On the one
hand, it’s very sad, right. On the one hand, I am happy because
you will achieve your goal there. But I am more sad, right man”
(Luciano, 16 years old).
How to interpret these emotions?
Countertransference:
“[A] client visits an analyst; he talks about his life, his problems, his
worries or the weather. The analyst feels something very
distinctive, which does not have to do with anything that has
been talked about. The analyst registers the feeling and does
what the client has not done – makes a mental note of it. Thus,
the analyst has made of her own body an instrument that
registers an emotion that the client him- or herself is bodily
playing out but without realizing it – in other words,
unconsciously” (Lorimer 2010:111).
Countertransference “is valuable in that it contributes to a different
way of knowing. Because it enables reflection on feelings, it
allows us as ethnographers to be emotionally involved without
that emotion coming to define us” (Lorimer 2010: 105)
“At some level, then, being aware of my countertransferences
responses allowed me to preserve my own personal integrity in
an environment where personal integrity was perpetually in
jeaopardy…[as] patients [struggle] to maintain their sense of
self while in institutionalized care” (Lorimer 2010: 105)
“Just because an emotion is patently there
does not mean that the interpretation of it is
necessarily accurate” (Lorimer 2010:113).
References
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Francine Lorimer (2010) “Using Emotion as a Form of
Knowledge in a Psychiatric Fieldwork Setting” in James Davies
& Dimitrina Spencer, eds.: Emotions in the Field: The
Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
James Davies (2010) “Introduction: Emotions in the Field” in
James Davies & Dimitrina Spencer, eds.: Emotions in the Field:
The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Doug Hollan (1997) “The Relevance of Person-Centered
Ethnography to Cross-Cultural Psychiatry.” Transcultural
Psychiatry 32 (2): 219-234.