Participant Observation (newly revised & updated)

Participant observation is a minimal method that, as its name suggests, involves participating and observing places, practices and people. It proceeds along two trajectories. The first trajectory is searching for a setting where the social or cultural thing that the researcher wishes to study is happening and becoming intimate with the group that populates that setting. The second trajectory, which moves in parallel with the first, is that the researcher themselves changes how they understand the setting and its inhabitants. By undertaking participant observation the researcher aims to gain the authority of 'insider' knowledge. They will then able to report on what matters for that culture, how things are organised and why locals do things in the distinctive ways that they do. Geographers have used it to study communities, public spaces, institutions, embodied practices, game playing, illness, political action, online communication, everyday life and other spatial phenomena.