HL only: the research report and reflection practice questions.

An HL student's research report on a Saturday-morning barber's shop devotes four of its six pages to the sequence of events: who arrived, in what order each man was served, what was said about the football results. The closing page states that the shop 'is an important place for the men who use it'. Judged as a research report, the central weakness is that

• the material is recorded but never read through an anthropological concept
• the student worked in a setting where she was already known rather than in an unfamiliar one
• the observations were made on a single morning, and no anthropological claim can rest on one visit
• the report quotes what the men said instead of confining itself to what could be seen and timed

Answer: the material is recorded but never read through an anthropological concept

A report is an argument built from fieldwork, not a chronicle of it; the marks sit where recorded material is made to speak to a concept such as social relations or masculinity. Length of observation and familiarity with the site are separate questions that a reflection can address.

The reflection attached to a research report reads: 'I was very nervous on my first visit, my notes that day were untidy and I am sorry that I missed things.' The reflection would become anthropologically useful if the student instead

• removed the admission, since a reflection is expected to present fieldwork that went to plan
• listed each occasion during the fieldwork period on which she had felt uncomfortable or out of place
• showed how her nervousness on that first visit shaped who approached her and what she was told
• explained that a more experienced researcher would have gathered a fuller and more reliable set of observations

Answer: showed how her nervousness on that first visit shaped who approached her and what she was told

Reflection is analysis of how the researcher's presence and position produced the data, not confession and not apology. An untidy first set of notes becomes evidence once it is linked to something about the encounter itself.

A student writing up fieldwork in a setting where participants could be harmed by exposure faces the problem Bourgois had to solve: in In Search of Respect (1995) he published the men he had worked with in East Harlem under invented names and withheld the block on which they sold crack. His practice is a model of

• protecting participants by removing the details through which they could be identified by readers
• obtaining a signature from every person named in the account before the report is submitted
• keeping the field site from the reader so that the findings reported cannot be checked
• altering what was observed wherever an accurate record might place participants in a difficult position

Answer: protecting participants by removing the details through which they could be identified by readers

Anonymisation removes identifiers, it does not change the data or hide the fieldwork from scrutiny; the account still has to describe the kind of site and the conditions of observation. Falsifying the record to protect people is not an ethical solution but a fabricated report.

A student carried out her fieldwork in the youth choir she has sung in for four years. Her notes show that she already knew the rehearsal routine and was told things that a visitor would not have been told. Her reflection handles this position best by

• stating that four years of membership make her account more objective than an outsider's could be
• setting out what her membership opened up to her and what it made hard for her to notice at all
• apologising for having chosen a setting in which she could not be a neutral observer
• leaving the membership out of the report so that the reader judges the observations on their own terms

Answer: setting out what her membership opened up to her and what it made hard for her to notice at all

Insider position is neither an advantage nor a defect to be confessed: it distributes access, opening some scenes and making familiar routines invisible. Naming both effects is what turns positionality into analysis.

Two people interviewed at an allotment site gave a student incompatible accounts of how vacant plots are handed on: the site secretary described a waiting list, a long-standing plot-holder described an informal succession among neighbouring families. In the report the disagreement is best treated as

• evidence that one of the two was lying, so that account should be left out
• a reason to drop the question of plot allocation, since the fieldwork produced no single answer to it
• material to be analysed, since which of them gives which account is itself a finding about the site
• a sampling error, to be corrected by interviewing enough plot-holders for a majority view to emerge

Answer: material to be analysed, since which of them gives which account is itself a finding about the site

Contradictory accounts are data about position and interest, not noise to be averaged away or resolved by counting. The secretary speaks from the formal order of the site, the plot-holder from a neighbourhood practice, and the gap between them is the finding.

A research report based on three afternoons in one cafe concludes that 'young people today no longer talk to strangers'. As a piece of anthropological writing the claim fails mainly because

• a conclusion about behaviour cannot be drawn from observation alone unless a questionnaire supports it
• three afternoons are too few for the difference between the age groups present to reach statistical significance
• an anthropologist should describe what people do and should not draw a conclusion from a period of fieldwork
• the evidence supports a claim about one cafe on three afternoons and is stretched to a whole generation

Answer: the evidence supports a claim about one cafe on three afternoons and is stretched to a whole generation

Ethnographic authority comes from the fit between the claim and the scale of the fieldwork, not from sample size or significance testing. The same material would be defensible as a claim about that cafe at that time of day.