This is about honing your perceptual abilities

1. This is about honing your perceptual abilities (as opposed to uncovering patterns beyond the perceivable to challenge false perceptions – as statistical research often does)

2. Evenly Distributed Attention • Impossible? yes…but you can do a better or worse job of this • Evenly distributing your attention makes it possible for you to build, “…a description which makes sense of as much as possible of what they have seen…to describe a system of relationships, to show how things hang together in a web of mutual influence or support or interdependence or what have you…what the fieldworker sees is…people doing things together in ways that are manifestly connected” - Becker, “Epistemology of Qual Research”

3. Basic Description without Interpretation • Impossible? Once again, yes it is…but you can do a better or worse job of this too • “Careful description of details, unfiltered by our ideas and theories, produces observations that, not fitting these categories, require us to create new ideas and categories into which they can be fitted without forcing.” – Becker, ‘Sampling’ chapter • Also to facilitate reinterpretation later on down the line as you accumulate more observations

4. Reinterpretation • “The ethnographer ‘inscribes’ social discourse; he writes it down. In so doing, he turns it from a passing event, which exists only in its own moment of occurrence, into an account, which exists in its inscriptions and can be reconsulted.” – pg. 19, Geertz “Thick Description”

5. Thick Description • Just want to point out that this is not the same as taking field notes. “Thick Description” is the post-analysis output of the research process, not the raw material.