research agendas

In thinking of the task of thinking of guidelines for doing ethnographic work, I liked a lot of the ideas that Nespor covered in chapter 7 (the reflexive chapter where he talked about his position as researcher). On page 232 he has a brief discussion of what it was like to interview the kids in groups and how this solves for some issues and creates others. The one issue/benefit that he pointed out was that he came to the project with a specific research agenda, but the kids tended to take control of the conversations. I specifically like his sentence, "I eventually realized I should be taking their agendas seriously." This reminded me of Frake's comments that are quite similar where he suggests that as an alternate to the typical question-answer structure to interviews, ethnographic research should spend effort on listening to naturally occurring dialog. Rather than the researcher coming with a sharp agenda, the agenda should to some degree be to find out what the respondent’s own agenda is. I'd pitch this idea as a guideline derived from our readings, particularly since the idea occurred in at least two of the readings.