Chapter Four: Ethics & Methodology
4.2 a Methodological Approaches in Bristol
In the months before I moved to York I was keen to begin gathering data because time with the Bristol homeless community was limited. I designed a short
questionnaire which I carried with me wherever I went in the hope I could gather data on numbers of people who considered themselves homeless and typologies of homelessness16. I quickly abandoned the questionnaires because they actively discouraged people from engaging with me. One man, Tyrone, had recently left prison and been allocated a room at Jamaica Street hostel (at the time run by English Church Housing Group). Tyrone had been keen to be involved in the pilot phase of field work but when I approached him with a questionnaire he found it very
15
http://www.bristol.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/council_and_democracy/Our%20City%2025
%20January%202012.pdf
16 In retrospect, I agree that this method of data gathering is almost completely useless with respect to homeless communities, as Hopper notes; ‘The trick…was not to confuse categories of problems with typologies of persons. It was practices not personalities than needed to be understood.’ (Hopper 2003:
84).
putting. I am not alone in having found this typical of how most homeless people respond to requests to complete questionnaires. Nels Anderson, sociologist and
‘pioneer of the method that became known as participant observation17’ studied
‘hobos’ in Chicago in the 1920’s. Anderson recalls:
‘At first the writer tried to gather his data by revealing his identity and purpose and asking the [homeless] individual to fill out the case card, upon which were about twenty five questions of a general nature. He was not long learning that such a method was not practical, as the reactions of the men were generally negative’
(Anderson, cited in Rauty 1998: 81)
More recently, the ‘rogue sociologist’, Sudhir Venkatesh, encountered the same reaction during research into housing projects in 1980s Chicago (Venkatesh 2009).
Acknowledging that paper questionnaires were likely to dissuade people from working with me I took to using a microphone and digital sound recorder. Asking whether they minded being recorded before any recording took place I engaged homeless people verbally.
A pilot phase of fieldwork took place 8th -12th June 2009 in collaboration with Dr John Schofield (JS was working for English Heritage at the time). Our aim was to meet a different homeless person each day and map their routine in as much detail as they were prepared to share. Homeless contacts already made were central to this week. Others were involved intermittently. Some people remained peripheral characters, keen to speak with us as archaeologists and talk about places they knew but not willing or able to take the time to engage in the process more fully.
During this period I observed street life to be chaotic and highly transient so it was impractical to schedule formal meetings. I suggested we took a less formal approach
17 See page 5 of Raffaele Rauty’s introduction to 1998 reprint of Anderson’s 1926 work ‘The Hobo’
by spreading the word by word of mouth that ‘the archaeologists’ would be around for a week and keen to work with homeless people who wished to work with us. I loosely arranged - with Punk Paul and Little Tom - to meet at Turbo Island (a small tract of private land where homeless people frequently gather) each morning of the week commencing 8th June 2009. The approach taken was that we would see what happened and be flexible.
I had also observed that most homeless people I had met in previous months suffered addiction to alcohol and/or heroin or other drugs. I felt that if we gave everyone an hour or so to sort themselves out – buy a beer or ‘have a hit’ – we would be most successful in finding people willing to work with us. I asked JS to meet me at a local café and we walked together towards Turbo Island. The route JS and I took between the café and Turbo Island led us passed the Post Office (from where most homeless people local to Stokes Croft collect their giro), The Big Issue office and Abdul’s convenience shop which sells strong cheap alcohol. My feeling was that we would likely meet homeless contacts going about their business as we walked and that we could ask whoever we met whether they would like to spend the day with us, there and then. This mirrors the spontaneity and chaotic nature of homeless habitus, I had observed, and felt the best way to approach people for whom formality can be extremely off-putting (Bourdieu 1977).
4.2b Ethnography (Bristol)
‘Participant observation as a method – and ethnography as a genre – may be said to have cut its teeth domestically in the effort to capture the dynamics of rootlessness and mobility apparent in post-Progressive Era America’ (Hopper 2003: 57)
Anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists routinely practice participant observation in ethnographic research. Research conducted for this project included asking homeless people if they would like to make notes, draw or annotate maps the
objective being to record as much of homeless peoples’ perspectives as directly as possible. I found homeless people consistently resistant to this idea for reasons I will explain. Information I sought to record included daily routines, journeys, places, items picked up and discarded and language and names for places, rituals and things.
As Denscombe notes:
‘Routine and normal aspects of everyday life are regarded as worthy of
consideration as research data…the ethnographer is generally concerned to find out how the members of the group/culture being studied understand things, the meanings they attach to happenings, the way they perceive their reality.’ (Denscombe 2010:
80, emphases in original)
Attempting to minimise inevitable partiality in conducting ethnographic research (Hopper 1990, 2003) I took a variety of equipment on these ethnographic journeys in the hope that where one method of recording was unsuccessful another would prove successful. For the first few journeys I carried audio recording equipment, maps of central Bristol, pens and paper and a digital camera. It quickly became evident that the map I was using was not sufficient as the journeys we followed incorporated areas far away from the centre of the city (appendix 2, see also Chapter Five).
Having found homeless people reluctant to draw or write I relied more heavily on the digital camera and whenever we stopped walking, I asked whether we might record our conversation (Fig 1).
Figure 1 - RK audio recording with PP (photo: John Schofield)
Between September 2010 and May 2011 I arranged to work more closely with Andrew, Punk Paul, Jane, Whistler, Danny and Deano on several occasions. It is not possible to be entirely scientific about how many meetings took place but I aimed to work with people until they felt we had exhausted the places, sites, journeys and intangible heritage significant to them (Figs 2 & 3). I showed each person the photographs we had taken previously, asked them to describe the picture and typed what they told me verbatim. During these conversations, I explained in greater depth what I meant by ‘attachment’ to specific areas in the city and we were then able to include intangible heritage such as memories of homeless people who had died and legendary squat parties (Byrne & Nugent 2004).
Figure 2- RK working on memory map with AD (photo: John Schofield)
Figure 3 - close up of memory map illustrating 'attachment' (photo: author's own)
4.2c Methodological Approach to Excavation at Turbo Island