A proposed ordef among six classes of interpersonal reinforcers or resources (love, status, information, money, goods, and services), plotted on the two coordinates of particularism and concreteness, was tested in three interrelated studies dealing, respectively, with perceived similarity of reinforcers, their exchange, and their structural invariance. The results supported the order by showing that: (a) Reinforcers proximal in the order are perceived as similar and are substituted for one another more than the distal ones. ( 6) For each resource given there is one resource which is most frequently chosen for exchange. The probability of choosing other resources is inversely related to their distance from the most preferred one. (c) The intercorrelation pattern of resources is invariant across exchange situations. Implications of the findings for interpersonal reinforcement, social exchange theory, and experimental games studies are suggested. Some differential properties of the resources, related to their order, are discussed in reference to problems of behavior in the city.Most studies of social-interaction processes involve interpersonal resources as independent variables, outcomes, or both. The use of social rewards is particularly explicit in investigations of social exchange, experimental games like the Prisoner's Dilemma, and certain studies of behavior modification, where one person dispenses the reinforcers for another's behavior.It is becoming increasingly apparent that a general problem in these areas of research is inadequate conceptualization of the rewards which people provide for themselves and others. As Aronson (1969) has noted, in complex social situations almost any exchange is a potential reward, and yet many such interpersonal rewards are not transnational. 3 Thus, the investigator is left with the difficult
in spite o f long-standing interest among social scientists in participantobservation field methods there is little published material on h o w to teach these methods. in this paper the authors discuss a course they have offered at UCLA for the past six years. The course features experiential-learning, simulation o f fieldwork, and both student and teacher reflexivity. These teaching strategies are meant t o facilitatestudent learning in five essentialskill domains felt t o b e applicable t o most types of participant-observation field research. A detailed description o f course content a n d learning activities is included. JEACHiNG PAR J/C/PANT OBSERVAJiON METHODS, EXPERiEN-
VATiON SKILLS, COLLEGE COURSE FORMAT A N D CONTENT TiAL LEARNING, SiMULATiON OF FIELDWORK, PARTICIPANT-OBSER-The term "participant observation" refers to naturalistic, qualitative research in which the investigator obtains information through relatively intense, prolonged interaction with those being studied and firsthand involvement in the relevant activities of their lives. The primary data are typically narrative descriptions (i.e., field notes) based on direct observation, informal conversational interviews, and personal experience, although quantitative and more formal, structured data can also be collected through participant observation.As a general research strategy, participant observation has a long and distinguished history in anthropology (DegCrando 1969; Malinowski 1961) and sociology (Bruyn 1966; Thomas and Znaniecki 1918-20). M o r e recently, psychologists noted for their contributions t o quantitative methods (eg., Campbell 1973; Cronbach 1975) have begun to articulate the role which participant observation and other qualitative procedures might play in psychological research. There is also a growing use of participant observation in applied research, particularly in program development and evaluation Presumably, the major audience for these materials is students taking courses designed to prepare them to conduct such research themselves.Although most instructors would agree with the general notion that fieldwork is a craft best learned through doing, there is considerably less agreement regarding any formal pedagogical implications of that assertion. An extreme opinion is illustrated by the apocryphal tale of a distinguished fieldworker who responds to all student queries on method by pointing to a stack of fieldnotes and saying, "Go thou,anddolikewise."This"sink-or-swim" approach, although seemingly on the wane, still has a few hard-core adherents who maintain not only that classroom methods courses are irrelevant but that "trial-by-fire" offers major advantages in the selection and professional socialization of students.A more common attitude is that the fieldwork experience has general educational value for social science students, and that it can be meaningfully integrated into the traditional curriculum (DuBois 1967). This approach is exemplified by Spradley and McCurdy (1972) who offer a rationale and general inst...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.