Taking an Outsider Stance Posted on March 19, 2007 Matching the culture of participants and researchers is not always to best way to get good data, says Hirokazu Yoshikawa (bio)

We recruited our Chinese, Mexican, Dominican and African American families from public hospitals in New York City. And we generally tried to match, well, we had to match the ethnicity and the language of the recruiters to the families for our Chinese, Mexican and Dominican parents who are almost all first generation immigrants themselves.

And then, our field workers and home visitors are also, we try to match, though there's some benefits and interestingly some disadvantages that people have talked about in the literature if you are always matching. So, for example, with qualitative work, if you are always only matching within the very specific culture, there's the tendency to have shared understanding that doesn't get recorded in the data because they'll be like, 'Oh, sure, yeah, I know,' about that. Whereas, it can often actually be helpful to have someone who is a bit of an outsider, not a complete outsider, but you know, who can take that stance of, 'Oh, really, tell me about it.'

And so, for our interviewers, particularly our ethnographic interviewers who are interviewing within a particular culture, even if they're matched very closely, we asked them to take a bit of this kind of "not knowing", this kind of helpful ignorance. "I haven't heard about that, could you tell me about it?" because otherwise you actually don't get the data.

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