Leicester Adventure: Ethnography

I'm starting to feel a familiar feeling that I've missed more than I thought I could over the last five months. I feel like I'm working.

Most people I've talked to always said that Master's programmes are so incredibly light when you've done RA. As a response to that, I can only offer three possible reasons for why I'm feeling like this: 1) RA wasn't as tough as it was presented to us and as we presented it to ourselves; 2) the Leicester Criminology programme is good; 3) I'm not as clever as I'd have liked to think myself to be.

The optimist in me prefers 2). I think it's the correct one, too... it's not necessarily a difficult programme, because you'd assume by the time you've completed a social sciences bachelor, social sciences graduate programmes are just a continuation (undergrad: learn theory; postgrad: apply theory; doctorate: create theory, that sort of continuation), but it's actually a lot of reading. And I'm very happy with that, because now I feel like I'm accomplishing something again.

Today was fun. We covered ethnography in Criminological Research Methods, and I loved it. I didn't do qualitative methods in undergrad, just quantitative, and I didn't think I could find a research method that's so... me. One of my undergraduate law papers was criticized for employing too much of a literary style in my writing, and the instructor for my class today basically said that you have to put something of yourself in that research but that you do have to acknowledge your subjectivity. That you have to be descriptive. And that you have to be something of a journalist. He told us brilliant stories of when he'd done ethnographic research into football hooliganism. Afterwards I had my first CRM workshop, in which we designed and even carried out a proper sort of basic quantitative research by doing small interviews (10 questions, short answers) and we'll carry on with it next week. It was just so much fun, I mean... our research question was "to what extent are public perceptions of female sex offenders shaped by representations of the written news media?", and we got to interview course mates and then put everything in Word and we'll carry on with it next week.
I normally prefer quantitative research because you've got the numbers there and can mess around with values and variables and see whether the outcome changes when you change this or that factor, but, of course, it's lacking the actual human element. I like reducing things to variables and values and treating it all as a sort of economic function, but instead of figuring out how many employees you need to have for this result or how changing the monetary input changes that result, it's more like "if I change this detail, what does the actual situation end up being like?". I've mainly taken to seeing stylistics/literary linguistics/literary analysis this way, as in, "if I were to change this word into that word (because words are simply input values too), or change that sentence structure into that one (because sentence structures are just a different variable, and the specific options are just values), or have it read as an ebook instead of a real book (because media are also a variable, and the types are values), how does this change the reader's perception/experience?". It's a very orderly way of seeing the world. But it's not complete, and certainly not fully correct. Ethnography can help, and I'll probably feel the same about other qualitative methods too once I'm introduced to them. In fact, I guess ethnography is necessary in some cases to find out the actual values/variables. After all, you can't know the factors that make criminal subcultures act the way they do if you don't jump in there and talk to them to figure out what actually drives them. Otherwise, of course, you're just messing about in the dark with some bits of theory that may be unfounded but work so well to explain something, and that's hardly good scholarship.