Consideraciones generales

So far, I have identified four arenas of action at the CDT - the general office, the waiting room, the Needle Exchange and the counselling room. Parallel dramas were being played out in each of these areas at any one time and as a sole researcher, I had to content myself with observing and participating in only one of them at any one time. Fantasising about what was happening elsewhere and trying to gain insight into events that I had not been present at, only served to jeopardise my attention to current events. However, in addition to the four main arenas of action at the CDT, there were also numerous other places where workers might be delivering the service which I was researching. The team Co-ordinator, for instance, regularly visited the psychiatric ward

at the local hospital where clients of the CDT were being detoxified. I accompanied him on a number of occasions and found the visits extremely fruitful in terms of my research interests. Home visits were another potential arena of action and service delivery, and, again I had a good deal of opportunity to participate in this aspect of the work. Both the visits to the Ward and to clients’ homes yielded some very rich data, as did the

conversations in the car to and from such visits. However, these visits also served to remove me from the CDT’s main premises and other arenas of action. As a result, the question of what might be happening back ‘at base’ was never far from my mind.

My experience at the Residential Centre was very similar in terms of my

awareness of the fact that significant events were being played out in a number of arenas at the same time. I tried to deal with the problem here by taking an early decision to concentrate on discreet areas of the work at any one time, eg. two weeks observing the work of the Family House, two weeks in the Main Programme, two weeks with the Resettlement Team, etc. This cut down the options, to some extent, but it by no means eliminated the problems created by concurrent events. Not only did it fail to resolve the problem of observing parallel events within the sub-site, it took no account of the many ways in which the different aspects of the Centre’s work are linked. Staff and residents regularly moved between the sub-sites, Family Unit business was reported at meetings in the Main Programme and issues often arose which were common to all sites.

An example of the way in which my attempts to separate out my research attentions were confounded, serve as further illustration of the problems I am exploring in this discussion. Having completed my observations at the Family Unit, I transferred my focus to the Main Programme, only to discover, via an observed ‘morning handover’ meeting, that an issue which had been of particular interest to me the previous week had taken a new turn. This resulted in me taking a fairly instant decision to re-focus my attention on developing events at the Family Unit and temporarily suspending my observations in the Main Programme.

The problem of doing field research on multiple sites is one which has been given some attention in the literature. Straus et al cited in Burgess (1984) recognised that, in a hospital setting, the field researcher will constantly need to make decisions about, for example, what wards to observe, whether to stay in the nurses station or move around on the ward. However, while Burgess recognises the problem of site selection as a complex one which the researcher must address and resolve, there is little indication of the fact that it is an ongoing problem. Far from being something which the researcher resolves once and for all at the outset of the research, my experience is that site selection is an ongoing issue and an important dynamic of participant observation. It is, however, a dynamic which appears to be glossed over rather than investigated. Summarising the tasks of the participant observer, Becker cited in Burgess (1984) states:

The participant observer gathers data by participating in the daily life o f the group or organisation he studies. He watches the people he is studying to see what situations they ordinarily meet and how they behave in them. He enters into conversations with some or all o f the participants in these situations and discovers their interpretations o f

the events he has observed.

(Becker, cited in Burgess 1984 p.79)

There is little indication here of the fact that the participant observer constantly has to decide which groups, which people, what situations, and how to u enter into

conversation” with half a dozen participants all at the same time. Becker seems to be supremely in control. My grasp of the situation on the other hand was much more slippeiy.