RJ 12

Response to Essay

Dee in this passage seems to be the one that the writer wants us to focus our attention on. As she views all the small things as important, we as researchers should do the same. We often go out in search of something big and spectacular that is going to impress someone when at the same time, we often miss the important things that may be small. If we took time to view every item as an important artifact towards the community we are studying i think we will be surprised to see that most of the time, it is the small things that attribut the most to our projects. There are many great things to be found in simple items such as the quilt in the story.

Box 13

There are many things that may serve as artifacts. In my research I have found in my own case that simple things such as my football jersey from last year has a lot more meaning to it then what meets the simple eye. If someone would take time to ask why I have it still hung up on my wall they would get an answer that they would not all expect. People merely think that beacuse it is a football jersy, that is the only thing that it could possibly pertain too, in which they are wrong. The jersey has a value of motivation as well as other things that i could list but this just comes to prove that any given item can serve as a catalyst in making your research. These types of things are the things that I will look for as I do my research from now on.

Groundwork:

1. As I do my research I will have to be very carefull as to which subjects I put a lot of emphasis on. Some people’s histories are much more graphic than others and I do not want to make my interviewee feel uncomfortable in any way so I will try my best to watch out for those situations. All of the people I plan to interview share the one thing in common and I believe because of that, the communication will be that much greater. The expetations of the way I will conduct my experiment I hope are in the same manner as they would do it themselves to make them feel more comfortable asnsering all my questions.

What all activities were you involved in as a High School Student?
Would you consider yourself well off, average, or below average economically?
What was your favorite subject in school?
How many hours did you put in to extra curricular activities during the average week?
Why were you involved in the extra curricular activities?
Did you parents support your studies?
Did you work?
What grades did you maintain yearly?
Did anyone outside of the family encourage you?
What is the one thing you believe helped you succeed?

3.An outsider would find it very interesting to find out what the code is for the success in those students that did not have the perfect set up for success. To be able to fit in this culture that I am doing research upon, they must first come from a setting of failure to which they excelled and succeeded anyway.

African American Churches:

Although this was a long reading, I find that this plays into what we have been saying about ethnography. It is biased. Although she looked at a variety of churches, she failed to do one thing. That is to understand all of the people involved in that community. Even though she did observe the minister and says a lot about the congregation, she never once goes in to detail about any single member of the congregation. She seems to have not interviewed them seperately and just associated their thoughts and actions through the minister that she did study. This causes the bias where she gets the results she wants by not interviewing the congregation and potentially getting different data then if she would have interviewed even a few of them. Therefore in her conclusions about them, I do not think she understood them well enough to be able to draw upon any realisic conclusions over their true self.