"To Fink, or not to Fink...?"

I have to admit, because of my interest in metacognition research, I skipped ahead to the section that Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw called “In Process Analytic Writing: Asides, Commentaries, and Memos.” I’m interested in how the focus on using strategies to locate and re-construct detailed observations of lived experiences meshes with an observer’s ability to occasionally step back and take account of the big picture. I entered into the book with the assumption that it would deliver skills and strategies for providing the most detailed, objective sorts of fieldnotes humans can muster. Luckily, this isn’t the whole thrust of the book. The notion of presenting, or inscribing, a version of world, from selectively recalled and accented moments, rather than a “mirrored” reflection of the world one observes (p. 66) struck me as an appropriate way to balance objectivity and subjectivity as a researcher. So I was taken by the description of a student’s aside in which she not only gives her version, or impression, of an agency office, but also puts herself in the shoes of a hypothetical, distraught office visitor, whose hypothetical confidence in the agency would be shaken, as a result of the researcher’s feelings about its lack of orderliness (p. 101). I find this “speaking for the other,” driven by one’s own emotional and positional reactions, in situ, a compelling motivator for the practice of in depth ethnographic methods. I also think that getting this into a context and lifestyle, such that one can feel legitimate in posing hypothetical beliefs of other participants, goes a long way past Irving Goffman’s notion of having to be a “fink” to do proper ethnography (p. 154).