as you can see the focus is very important in observation because you can't see my face now but now you can welcome in this lecture on observational Focus I would like to use the work of James Bradley it's rather classic it's 1980 he wrote it but he shows us very explicitly and very clearly how we can use observation and how we can build a focus into our observation and he does this by using four or three steps I will explain it first he says you have to start with a descriptive observations the second step is focused observations and the third step is selective observations so what you do here is to create a funnel or to put it in another way you start with a bird's eye view A View From a plane then you start driving around in the area so you can see the area from your car thirdly you start cycling maybe not so fast as this lady but a little bit less fast than driving this car so you start funneling you start looking and noticing other stuff and in the end you start walking and then you can go back to certain points you can stop more easily and test some ideas so in general this is how you funnel but how does this work more specifically well let's start with the descriptive observations the first part of spradley's scheme what you want to do with these descriptive observation is a general description you would like to create a general description of a certain group area or whatever you study and Spradley makes a distinction between two version The Grand Tour and the mini tour and you do this in order to create some broad characteristics early on in your research so how does this work well the suggestion is that you can use nine different dimensions of social situations you can describe a social situation using nine dimensions and these are the the the dimensions spread suggest space actor activity object act event time goal and feeling and if you think that you can use only five of those nine Dimensions it's perfectly fine I think and if you can make up some some other dimensions as well and you end up with 15 dimension for me it's fine as well because you start broadly and you start looking at different aspects of a social situation for instance now Spradley makes a distinction between two types of Tours a grand tour that's the bird's eye view where you start with a broad description of a social situation using one of those nine dimensions for instance space let's say you do a research like Mitchell duner did on the sidewalk then the space is the sidewalk and you look at book sellers on this sidewalk and it's an urban issue it's a probably for for policy makers it might be an urban problem because people are selling books secondhand books on the street and maybe some urban planners do not want them to sell those books so it's a social issue maybe a social problem and you give a broad description how urban planners think about this how this sidewalk plays a role then the second step is the mini tour and in this mini tour you focus a little bit more you start describing how actors on this space work act so what you do is you combine two dimensions and I can also show you a a matrix and in this Matrix you have these nine dimensions and there you are and you can combine them so you can describe the activity on the sidewalk you can describe the books that are sold and how they are sold you can describe um the actors over time how do they act in the morning how do they act during the afternoon or do actors change some sellers sell in the morning probably others sell during the afternoon or in the evening so you can make different descriptive observations now then you start the second step in observation according to Spradley is focused observation and in this focused observation you step away from your car you step onto a bike and you start watching more specifically you try to answer your research questions you try to deepen your interest as a research you try to to continue on serendipitous finding you found something that was really striking how these men talk to customers and you think I have to really look into that so you probably start creating taxonomies how these men talk to women versus men or how they talk to potential clients versus people that are surely not buying but they comment about and obviously this is later on during the research the last type of observation is the selective uh observation it's the last part of the funnel it's where you start walking instead of riding or driving and this part of observation is even more focused and it's focused on comparisons and nuances for instance looking for more evidence or contrary evidence and especially this contrary evidence is important see how some people act this way but others act in another way and you have to find start find finding examples and triangulate with probably other material maybe there are some documents someone else did observation or maybe you have done some interviews or conversations with people and what are these the outcomes of a selective observation well again taxonomies categories and in this phase they are tested so the relations are tested the taxonomies are tested because you look for contrary evidence and when do you do this well again in the end of the study now is this old-fashioned work of Spradley the only work no obviously not there are quite some others that have published about creating a funnel into um more focus in research and a good example is the work by the Walt and the Walt and and they suggest that you start with the descriptive part by looking at what what is happening and why is this happening what is regular in it and what is unique or what is unusual and the Second Step you start looking for variation and exceptions so how does it vary can we find some contrary evidence and then the third step is well you have to find more examples more specific examples probably similar situations Ware or systematic observation in order to to probably generalize a bit and maybe to look over uh at change over time so again this is some type of funnel and probably there are some other ways of funneling as well but creating focus is extremely important in observation