Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries. Steve Portigal

our participant. It ended up not being a big deal, but I was embarrassed. And I felt guilty for all my negative thoughts toward our translator. As much as I was annoyed at our tinkler friend, at least she didn’t break anything.

Dan Szuc: Shanghai Surprise

      We were on the train in Shanghai on our way to visit a person in their home as part of a research project. Doing random checks of all equipment becomes second nature, ensuring that you have backups of backups, cables work correctly, sound is being recorded correctly, and video is working well.

      “LE MÉTRO DE SHANGHAI” (CC BY-ND 2.0) BY CHRISTIAN MANGE

      We all have specific roles on home visits. Hok and I capture both the interview and surrounds on film using Flip cameras, Jo is responsible for speaking with the person we are visiting to ensure that they are comfortable, and Hok also is our guy for ensuring that all the equipment is technically working well (and if something is not working well, he usually knows how to fix it).

      So back to the train ride in Shanghai . . . the three of us were together, testing the recorder, cable, and microphone. We realized after conducting a few test recordings that there were clear breaks in the recording when playing it back. During the previous interview, we had gone through a security scanner at a train station with the participant (as part of the journey we were filming). The cable connecting the recorder and the bag were stretched going through security unnecessarily, possibly causing damage to the wires.

      We tested various places where we thought the sound might be breaking up—the connectors, the microphone, and the cable itself. We wanted to get this right because the microphone clips onto the person we are interviewing and ensures that we have clear audio (in addition to the audio that’s captured on the video using the Flip cameras). We did not have time to go to an electronics store to get new equipment and were relieved that the audio recorder itself was working well and could serve as a (non-ideal) backup microphone.

      Together, we needed to come up with a plan to ensure that we could capture the same level and quality of audio as in the other people’s stories captured to date in Shanghai. Consistent film quality is an important part of the storytelling. We tried a few configurations using the cables, rubber bands, and microphone. We eventually worked out a way to place the microphone close enough to the participant’s chin so that the audio would come through clearly, and we discarded the faulty cable.

      On reflection, it taught us all the importance of teamwork, thinking quickly about solutions, not blaming anyone when things sometimes go wrong, trying out various configurations while on the move, and planning ahead to have some other cables/equipment available if there were failures. Not everything goes according to plan in field research, but having a calm head and a team who works together makes for a nicer working environment and a huge difference in the overall results. Happy researchers lead to happy participants, which lead to nice stories and lots to learn from.

Sean Ryan: Pockets Full of Cash

      It was back in my early days as an ethnographer. I was still a young pup in the field, doing consulting projects. I was teamed up with an elder anthropologist—a Puerto Rican woman who lived in Guadalajara, named Luz. We were doing a project for a major pharmaceutical company that had just had great success with a new oral care product, so they thought they would try an ethnographic exploration to uncover any other unmet needs. I think their aspirations at the time were something like “We want the next $500 million consumer product!” Luz and I were going to visit two field sites in Mexico: Guadalajara and Tijuana. Living in Los Angeles, I was relatively close to the border, and it wasn’t yet seen as that dangerous to go to Tijuana (i.e., no Mexican mafia drug lord street battles . . . at least you didn’t read about them in the papers everyday). But I still had my reservations, not possessing any Spanish language skills (outside of the slang I had picked up from bartending in a Mexican restaurant in Long Beach).

      Having only been to Tijuana once to explore the finer points of Avenida Revolución⁷ (read: drinking tequila shots with college kids and having my head shaken back and forth by a woman with a whistle⁸), I had no real frame of reference for doing fieldwork in TJ. As I quickly learned, neither did my counterpart Luz. She had some relatives in TJ, but had never done fieldwork there. And so we made what we later realized was a critical error in not pre-recruiting participants before we went into the field. Upon arriving in Tijuana, we quickly found ourselves literally approaching people in the streets, in shops, etc., to ask about their oral care routines (a strange encounter for the locals I’m sure). While this has all the hallmarks of classic guerrilla recruiting it’s never a comfortable situation to be in, especially in a foreign country. Luz was doing her best to recruit people while I stood by idly awaiting our field day fate.

      Eventually, we started to have some success . . . or so we thought. One woman who worked in a nice department store in downtown TJ offered to let us come to her home after work. We got her contact info and told her we would see her that evening. We were offering $150 in U.S. cash (this was more than 10 years ago) to interview participants and observe their oral care routines. This, no doubt, was more than substantial for an incentive. So we were quite confident that we would have no problem with grabbing participants on the fly.

      That evening, we made our way to this woman’s house via an old Crown Victoria station wagon taxi (with the suicide seats facing out in the back). Once we got to her town, we approached the participant’s door and gave it a confident knock . . . but nobody answered. We waited a few minutes longer and knocked again . . . still no answer. This was before mobile phones, so we couldn’t exactly call this woman on her cell. We sat and waited for 15 minutes, but then realized that our day was quickly being wasted on a participant who, for whatever reason, decided she did not want to do the study. (Perhaps she thought the $150 was too good to be true?) In a moment of desperation, Luz decided to frantically go door-to-door in this small community, hoping for a shot at someone’s teeth and mouth. But to no avail.

      This disastrous field trip continued. The next day we tempted fate again by preying on another unsuspecting citizen of Ciudad Tijuana. Once again, we arranged to go visit a shopkeeper’s home later in the evening. Once again, we had no idea where exactly our little field visit would take us. And once again, we crammed ourselves into an old Crown Victoria station wagon. This time we were left off at what appeared to be a small village of gypsies. It was, in fact, just a typical working class abode on the outskirts of the city. I brazenly brought out my Sony DV camera with the Carl Zeiss lens and began filming the local scene as we walked through the streets to find the right home. We were very excited to find the participant’s home and then to actually find her in her home!

      It was a very interesting interview. The participant was a mother of two, a 9-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son. We observed their oral care routines, which consisted of going out to the backyard to gather water from a large plastic drum (as there was no running water), after which the children vigorously brushed their teeth with your standard run-of-the-mill Colgate toothpaste and toothbrush. When we paid the mother $150 (U.S.) cash at the end of this encounter, her eyes lit up. I realized at that moment that this was probably more money than she made in a month. And so we broke another field rule: understand your surroundings and pay participants appropriately based on the context. But there was a bit of a feel-good moment here, too; the client could clearly afford the incentive money, so it was no skin off their backs.

      

      PHOTO BY SEAN RYAN

      After this first round of field visits in Tijuana, we went back about a month later for a second round, with different participants. We interviewed a relative of Luz’s who lived in a canyon high above where we had visited last time. He laughed out loud when we told him that we had been down in that village only a month ago. He said with all seriousness “Don’t you know that is the most dangerous area