Research participant roles

James Spradley’s fantastic book The Ethnographic Interview identifies four different roles a research participant can play. Each implies a different relationship between researcher and participant:

• Informant – In ethnography, a participant is related to as an informant. Informants are “engaged by the ethnographer to speak in their own language or dialect”, providing “a model for the ethnographer to imitate” so that “the ethnographer can learn to use the native language in the way informants do.” The ethnographer learns as much about the informant’s world as possible, in the linguistic terms of the informant, and this helps provide insights into the informant’s perspective. The informant is related to as a teacher.
• Subject – Subjects are participants in social science research, upon whom hypotheses are tested. “Investigators are not primarily interested in discovering the cultural knowledge of the subjects; they seek to confirm or disconfirm a specific hypothesis by studying the subject’s responses. Work with subjects begins with preconceived ideas; work with informants begins with a naive ignorance. Subjects do not define what it is important for the investigator to find out; informants do.”
• Respondent – A respondent is any person who responds to a survey questionnaire or to queries presented by an investigator. “Survey research with respondents almost always employs the language of the social scientist. The questions arise out of the social scientist’s culture. Ethnographic research, on the other hand, depends more fully on the language of the informant. The questions arise out of the informant’s culture.”
• Actor – “An actor is someone who becomes the object of observation in a natural setting.” In ethnographic research, participants are also often observed but the participant is still related to primarily as an informant, indicating through language, in his own terms, the significance of his actions, to give (to use Clifford Geertz’s term) “thickness” to the description of what is actually going on. As with subjects and respondents, when participants are related to as actors, the terms of the description are those of the researcher, not of the participant.

The takeaway from this is that over the course of a research program research participants may at various times be regarded as subjects, actors or respondents — but if the goal is to really understand participants as people in order to cultivate a relationship with them, the beginning of a research program should treat participants as informants. Accordingly, early research should include a component of semi-structured or unstructured conversational interviews (instead of more structured interviews that resemble in-person questionnaires). Once researchers have developed a better idea of what matters to the participant and how they conceptualize and speak about these things, researchers are in a better position to conduct more structured kinds of research that permits comparison and quantification.

This allows researchers to use language participants will find natural and understandable — earning trust and cooperation, while and minimizing misunderstandings — it also helps researchers form more productive hypotheses, ask better questions and to find more insights in the answers they get. The insights on hidden “subjective” motivations complement the objective data to help the organization avoid superficial misinterpretations of the kind people make of strangers with whom one has never spoken. Instead researchers gain a much more complete, nuanced and fully-dimensioned human understanding of the people with whom the organization is seeking to cultivate relationships.

Recognizing the difference between insights and data and how the two relate allows researchers to design research programs that allow organization to understand large numbers of individuals, how they see and how to reach them and engage them, without sacrificing either empathy or statistical significance in the process.