Abstract
In this paper, we reflect on how time is appraised, organized, and managed by a group of researchers conducting an ethnography of 12 low-income families. We develop the concept of temporal dispositions: perceptions and preferences around time that in turn shape temporal practices. The concept of temporal dispositions encapsulates individuals’ background and training, agency and reflexivity, and the dynamic nature of ongoing social life and interactions through which temporal meanings may change or take on new symbolic weight. Overlaid upon each of these are larger social structures and power relations that affirm some temporal dispositions and stigmatize others. We conclude by considering the implications for ethnographic fieldworkers. We argue that analyzing the many ways researchers and participants navigate and perceive time offers insight into unspoken temporal assumptions, ideologies, and inequalities.
Keywords
As part of a team ethnographic study of low-income families’ food provisioning, a researcher accompanied Marlene, a white 35-year-old mother, to her WIC appointment. WIC, or Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, provides food vouchers and nutrition counseling to low-income caregivers of preschool aged children. After a 30-minute wait, Marlene’s four-year-old daughter Jade had been weighed and her iron measured in a painful ordeal, only to be sent back to the waiting room before meeting with a nutritionist. The researcher wrote in her fieldnotes: We went back out the waiting room to … wait. I have heard this about WIC before, and I wondered why the visits are in two parts. Why not transfer Marlene and Jade to an office? Why not have them wait in the room and then have the counseling there? Jade raises the topic of snacks again. She is whining and Marlene says, ‘I know, I am hungry too.’ Jade switches to another game [on the smartphone] with a motorcycle on a highway. She begins to whine about snacks again. Back out in the main room Marlene tells Jade that we have to wait some more. Jade says in an exasperated voice, ‘Again?!’ (I am thinking the same thing). We are now the only ones in the room. It is about 5:30pm. ‘We are the last ones in the room,’ Jade says. Marlene nods. ‘I always wanted to be the last one!’ Jade says cheerfully. Marlene chuckles. Jade asks Marlene, ‘Did you?’ ‘Not really,’ Marlene replies. She adds, ‘You’re awfully cute.’ Then Jade asks what is taking so long.
In addition to capturing a moment of spatiotemporal domination in her fieldnotes, the researcher also suggested how the situation might be remedied – by transferring Jade and Marlene to an office rather than having them return to the waiting room. In doing so, she focused on how to make the process more efficient, rather than, for example, more comfortable. The researcher’s approach reflects a particular way of thinking about time that is common in western industrialized societies (and in the social sciences). Time is often conceptualized as something scarce that should be used rationally and productively (Adam, 1990; González-López, 2005; Wajcman, 2015). Our fieldnotes document numerous other moments when we wrote about waiting and time use in ways that reflected our particular temporal understandings and preferences. We encountered frequent challenges as we attempted to schedule observations with participants who did not fully control their own time, due to parenting and work obligations, among other things. Despite our awareness of such constraints, our professional commitments and the increasing pace of higher education (Hannerz, 2003; Noonan, 2015; Vostal, 2015) made families’ cancelations and unpredictable schedules frustrating. Our perceived need to make the most of our time in the field led us at times to focus on seeing things happen, instead of valuing moments when time passed slowly and nothing seemingly of note occurred.
In this paper, we analyze these temporal disruptions and conceptions as they unfolded in the field and our fieldnotes. We develop the concept of temporal dispositions: unconscious perceptions and preferences around time, which in turn shape temporal practices. Our analysis underscores the value of being attuned to the ways that time matters and is marked by researchers, their academic disciplines, and their research participants. Dispositions reflect and can reinforce social inequality (Bourdieu, 1984; Lareau, 2011). Analyzing how researchers and participants navigate time offers insight into unspoken temporal assumptions, ideologies, and inequalities.
Time and temporality in the literature
Time is multifaceted, encompassing physical, biological, social, and psychological processes (Adam, 1990; Gell, 1992; Munn, 1992). It ‘can express and symbolically represent a range of aspects, from human social life to growth and decay in the environment’ (Adam, 1990: 43). Social scientists have long studied time, examining how it is used or budgeted (e.g., Bianchi et al., 2000; Sayer, 2005), people’s orientations in relation to time (e.g., past, present, and future) (e.g., Bourdieu, 2000; Hitlin and Elder, 2007; Otto, 2013), and time over the life cycle or life course (e.g., Warren et al., 2002). More recently, social scientific work has examined the seeming acceleration of time through technological innovation, such as the Internet (see Wajcman, 2015). In all of these approaches is a tendency to view time as a ‘quantity to be measured and a resource to be used and controlled’ (Adam, 1990: 103; see also Wajcman, 2015). For example, in his influential article on waiting and power dynamics, Schwartz (1974: 841) argued, ‘So far as it limits productive uses of time, waiting generates distinct social and personal costs.’ While Schwartz is sympathetic to the power imbalances associated with being made to wait, explicit in his rendering is the notion that time should be used productively. Scholarly work often reveals an assumption, moreover, that speed and perpetual motion are universally desirable (Wajcman, 2015), and there is a tendency among scholars to set western ‘clock time’ as the standard against which others’ uses of time are measured (see Adam, 1990; Gell, 1992; Munn, 1992). As Adam (1990: 126) observes, some of the knowledge of what constitutes the ‘right’ time or the ‘correct’ use of time ‘is deeply sedimented and taken for granted … [with] shared meanings not necessarily available to us at a discursive level of consciousness’ (see also Otto, 2013).
A longstanding but less dominant social scientific approach to time focuses on individuals’ subjective experiences of time (Adam, 1990; Barbalet, 2003; Bergson, 1910; Gell, 1992; LaRossa, 1983). González-López (2005) notes, for example, that the Mexican immigrants she interviewed in California reported experiencing a lack of time upon immigrating to the United States. But she also observes that time carries heavy significance in US culture: Americans use the expression ‘Thank you for your time’ to express their gratitude after someone has spent ‘time’ helping them with a particular issue. In my years living in Mexico, I never heard anyone use its equivalent in Spanish … In general, in Mexico, people would use the expression … ‘Thank you for helping me.’ Socially speaking, in capitalistic societies, ‘time’ seems to have a higher value than ‘help.’ Time means capital, time means money. (González-López, 2005: 158)
Bourdieu (2003) encourages researchers to be reflexive about how immersion in a particular scholarly tradition encourages certain ways of viewing and analyzing the world while foreclosing others. Mills (2000) argues that researchers should reflect on how they experience the passage of time in the field while also keeping in mind how participants perceive time. Particularly in anthropology, some scholars have begun to reflexively analyze time within the process of doing fieldwork. Work in this vein includes reflections about cultural conceptions of time or ‘timescapes’ (Otto, 2013) and discussions of boredom (Sjørslev, 2013), waiting (Dalsgaard, 2013; Tan, 2009), episodic fieldwork (Whyte, 2013), and time pressures in modern ethnography (Dalsgaard and Nielsen, 2013; Marcus, 2013). We contribute to this body of work by analyzing the intricate ways time is woven into ethnographic research at all phases of the process, from project development and coordination to the writing of fieldnotes. We argue that temporal dispositions do not simply shape our analysis of what we experience and record in the field, they are also critical aspects of how we approach the field and the decisions we make therein.
In developing the concept of temporal dispositions, we build on existing conceptualizations of individuals’ temporal preferences and perceptions. Some scholars have used the concept temporal orientation to define individuals’ focus on the present, past, or future (Hitlin and Elder, 2007; Otto, 2013). However, we prefer the term ‘disposition,’ as articulated by Bourdieu (1977, 1984, 2000), because it highlights not only the role of unconscious assumptions, but also how power relations undergird people’s temporal perceptions and preferences. Thus disposition calls attention to the social aspects of time and to the underlying inequalities informing how individuals use and perceive time. Dispositions shape the way people approach, use, and perceive time, but are not necessarily fixed or rigid. For example, individuals may adjust their temporal dispositions in light of new information or a novel setting. Thus the concept of temporal disposition captures the sediment of one’s background and training (or, to use Bourdieu’s (1977, 1984) concept, one’s habitus), individual agency and reflexivity (i.e., the ability of the individual to reflect on and potentially modify one’s temporal dispositions), and the dynamic nature of ongoing social life and interactions through which temporal meanings change or take on new symbolic weight. Overlaid upon each of these are larger social structures and power relations that affirm some temporal dispositions and stigmatize others. For example, individuals who use their time strategically and productively are valued in capitalist cultures organized around the pursuit of efficiency and accumulation.
As we scheduled observations with families, we encroached on participants’ time and encountered time pressures of our own, which led to scheduling challenges. This experience of time manifested itself in our fieldnotes, where we wrote about our temporal assumptions, preferences, and disciplinary pressures – what we call temporal dispositions. Like many contemporary academics, we experienced time constraints in conducting this ethnographic research (Hannerz, 2003; Marcus, 2013; Noonan, 2015; Vostal, 2015). The option to simply disappear ‘into the field’ for a year or two at a time is no longer viable for most ethnographers (Hannerz, 2003; Sjørslev, 2013). Despite the autonomy that academics enjoy compared to many other professions, ‘surveillance, quantification and measurement of academic output’ (Vostal, 2015: 74) put pressure on the academic enterprise to be productive and efficient. Thus researchers may approach the field with a degree of temporal instrumentality (Sjørslev, 2013). Fieldworkers may ask themselves, for example, how they can maximize their time in the field even while they minimize the time spent in the field.
For the ethnography analyzed in this paper, we used a team-based approach in order to divide our time in the field among a number of researchers, which was a valuable way to share the time demands of ethnographic research (Snow et al., 2010). Researchers set ‘the agenda in the data gathering process’ (Mills, 2000: 116), however, and our temporal dispositions shaped the research protocols. For example, we organized our ‘visits’ (the observations) with families around particular events, such as a meal or naptime. This sometimes meant that both we and the families shared a perception that something should happen during the observations, imposing a temporal purposefulness and structure that may not characterize typical family life. In the analysis that follows, we reflect on how time is appraised, organized, and managed by a group of researchers conducting an ethnography of low-income families. Our analysis of the many temporal dimensions of ethnography reveals perceptions of time that go beyond measuring time use or subordination via waiting. We argue that future research should consider how time, and, in particular, temporal dispositions, are woven into research, including data protocols, collection, and analysis.
Methods
Between April and December 2013, our research team conducted over 250 hours of ethnographic observations in the homes of 12 low-income mothers and grandmothers. This fieldwork took place in three counties in North Carolina, two rural and one urban. The observations were part of a larger study on families, food, and health involving multiple types of data collection, including in-depth interviews, fieldwork, time diaries, and surveys, collected over a five-year period. We have worked hard to keep in touch with participants and to build durable relationships with them outside of data collection activities. These efforts include sending monthly newsletters, engaging them via social media, and hosting community events for which we offer transportation and childcare services.
For the ethnographic observations, the team of seven researchers included four graduate students, one part-time research staff member, and two professors. To help families develop stronger relationships with researchers, we assigned one lead researcher and two backup researchers to each family. The lead researchers generally conducted eight of the 12 observations, while the two backup researchers typically conducted two observations each. For the three families that spoke predominantly Spanish, only a lead and a backup researcher were assigned, because we had only two native Spanish-speakers on the research team. Our intent was primarily to observe but also to interact with families, although our level of interaction varied according to the families and the fieldworkers. In some instances, researchers became quite involved in families’ routines, playing with children and helping with chores. It often took time for these relationships to develop, however, and backup fieldworkers had fewer opportunities to cultivate these connections.
Each set of observations started with an initial intake visit; the lead researcher met the family in their home, introduced the research project, and asked about upcoming planned events, such as doctors’ appointments or birthday celebrations. We scheduled observations around and often aimed to include these events. The majority of the observations centered on family practices, such as families’ morning, afterschool, and evening routines, which, given our research interest in food, were timed to include breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We also accompanied participants on their major monthly shopping trip, additional activities such as Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) or doctors’ appointments, and children’s school lunch when applicable. We conducted an interview during an ‘appreciation party’ held at each family’s home for the 12th observation. We provided the food for the party and ate with each family; this marked the end of our time with them.
Observations lasted between one and four hours, with an average of two and a half hours. We strove to make two to three visits per week for five weeks. Our goal was to finish all 12 families’ observations over the course of a nine-month period. Once we had scheduled the observations, we gave families a calendar with the dates and times we had discussed together, a checklist of events we wanted to observe, and researchers’ contact information. Fieldworkers also called or texted families to confirm the appointment 24 hours prior to each observation and ended each observation with a verbal reminder of the next visit.
During the observations, we jotted overtly in a notebook and sometimes used a digital recorder to record specific conversations. We wrote detailed fieldnotes within 48 hours of each observation. For this analysis, we coded instances in the fieldnotes of boredom, temporal uncertainty, and discussions of time as it related to scheduling and rescheduling the family visits. In the section below, we analyze the ways the researchers’ ideas about time, as well as the time pressures we experienced and created, shaped the research protocols and data collection.
Temporality and ethnography
In what follows, we reflect on the significance of time in an ethnography of 12 low-income families. As we entered the field, we encountered various challenges related to time and physical space. Two-thirds of the families were an hour’s drive away for the research team, and there were time pressures associated with scheduling and completing each family’s observations. In the US, moreover, the home is considered a haven from the outside world. Entering this so-called private space created additional emotional and logistical dilemmas. Our research protocols and researchers’ temporal dispositions also influenced what we witnessed and how we thought and wrote about time. These filtered into our fieldnotes. Our analysis highlights the value of paying attention to these many dimensions of temporality in fieldwork. In the spirit of critical reflexivity, we highlight moments of disjuncture rather than times when things went smoothly. In doing so, we risk portraying our research in a more negative light than is perhaps warranted. However, as scholars who have benefited from other ethnographers’ reflections, we offer this account in the interest of sparking conversation about the temporal dynamics of fieldwork.
Scheduling challenges and temporal disorganization
We knew from our previous interviews that families had complex and demanding schedules (Bowen, Elliott, and Brenton, 2014). Even so, our labeling of events to observe in terms of ‘morning routine,’ ‘afterschool routine,’ or ‘bedtime routine’ reveals our own temporal dispositions, which projected a certain level of regularity about participants’ lives that reflected our fairly systematized lives. In fact, the amount of temporal uncertainty in families’ lives caught us off-guard and made it difficult for some families to schedule observations. For example, at the intake meeting, one researcher assessed the work schedule for Illana, a black, 28-year-old mother of one: When I asked about her work schedule, Illana replied, ‘It’s backwards as hell.’ She then explained that she works every weekend, and her hours are typically 6-2pm or 12-8pm. Her days off are usually Tuesday and Wednesday or Wednesday and Thursday. In general, her schedule varies and she always knows her schedule by Wednesday. Illana felt more comfortable only scheduling the two [of the five upcoming] visits and checking in later in the week when she knew her schedule.
Illana’s family was not the only one with a challenging work schedule. Moreover, some families also struggled with uncertainty around transportation. Families also did not always have a working phone. The following excerpt comes from the fieldnotes for the intake visit with Wanda. Wanda and her husband Marquan are black, in their 20s, and reside with their two preschool-aged daughters in one of the rural counties we studied. Wanda’s cell phone is currently disconnected, but when I spoke with her on Wednesday she promised me that it would be reconnected by Friday. As of late Friday afternoon, she still did not have a phone. We had arranged to do the intake after she got off work [at a fast food restaurant]. She told me she never works past 5 p.m. because her mother, who looks after the girls during the day, has a night job (!). So Wanda implied she was quite regimented with her work schedule. I asked her if I could come at 5:30 and she said that would be fine. It takes just over an hour to get to Wanda’s, so I left work at 4:30, leaving a message for Wanda on her mom’s phone letting her know I was on my way. At 5:20, Wanda phoned me to say she was just getting off work.
Wanda occasionally expressed frustration about her unpredictable work schedule, a situation shared by 66% of US food service workers (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015) and one that is increasingly common, especially for low-wage workers (Wajcman, 2015). Marquan’s shifts at another fast food restaurant also varied, and he worked two shifts in a row whenever the opportunity arose. Although we had hoped to schedule several visits in advance during the first visit, this proved impossible since Marquan and Wanda would not know their work schedules until the beginning of the next week, when they were posted. The fieldworker wrote: The person at work who does the scheduling, whom Wanda refers to as ‘the girl,’ has done half her schedule; she should know more early in the week but it is hard to tell because ‘lots of people aren’t coming in right now.’ (Wanda seems proud that she meets her work obligations, annoyed that others do not, and worn down by the scheduling vagaries.)
Strategizing to control time
Although fieldwork, with its requisite degree of hanging out and getting along, may not appear to be work, it is, in fact, very much work (Sjørslev, 2013). And it is temporally engendered work that produces anxiety about missing out, not keeping up, and being belated (Marcus, 2013). In our fieldnotes, we at times saw a clash between the relative fluidity and unpredictability of family time and fieldworkers’ spatiotemporal demands. One aspect of these demands was to get the work done on time. By asking the families we observed to complete the observations within a specified amount of time and to give us advance warning of mundane errands, we were asking a lot of them. We also felt pressure to keep our research agenda on track, given our multiple, contingent stages of data collection. Moreover, we timed the observations so that the fourth visit would coincide with the family’s big grocery shop (which typically occurred just after they received their monthly SNAP benefits, also known as food stamps). These constraints meant that we did not have a lot of flexibility in our schedules.
The fieldnotes reveal that fieldworkers’ concerns about time management sometimes resulted in frustration when families changed, canceled, or forgot scheduled observations. One researcher recounts the shuffle of getting into the field at the last minute when the participant, Samantha, a white, 34-year-old mother, lived almost an hour’s drive away: At the intake, I had asked Samantha to give me a call a day or two before she thought she would be grocery shopping. Since she shops weekly ‘as needed,’ we hadn’t been able to schedule a shop [ahead of time]. At about 10:40 on Friday morning, she called me and said that she was planning to go grocery shopping at noon [an hour and 20 minutes later]. I groaned inwardly because it takes me 45 minutes to get there [to her home], which meant I was going to have to leave in about 20 minutes to give myself a safe buffer – not a lot of lead time. I also knew that we prefer not to have the first observation be a grocery shop; I explained this and asked if she thought she might be shopping next week, too. She said she didn’t know, and that this shop was going to ‘be a big one’ because she didn’t have much in the house, so I told her I’d definitely be there. I asked, ‘You said noon, right?’ and she said it would be noon or ‘maybe a little earlier’ because [her son] Tremaine was at therapy and she would go straight from there. I gathered up my things while we worked out that I would meet her at the Super Wal-Mart on [a main highway].
One of our protocols was the use of phone calls and texts to confirm and remind participants of our upcoming visits. At the interviews we conducted at the conclusion of each family’s observations, families said they liked the researchers’ flexibility and the reminder calls and texts. However, these reminders also posed challenges for researchers because they sometimes led to last minute changes and even cancelations. This was the case when scheduling with Samantha, who routinely canceled when she received a reminder text. In strategizing to complete an observation with Samantha, the lead researcher decided to forego the reminder on one occasion: I was starting to get frustrated and anxious about getting in another observation soon. Before I left, I debated sending another reminder. I was pretty concerned that Samantha would not be at home when I arrived, but I also worried that if I said anything, it would give her the opportunity to cancel. Since we had settled on the time just the previous day, I decided to just drive out there and hope for the best. … I pulled up to Samantha’s house several minutes before [the appointment time] and – surprise – no car in the driveway.
We aimed to minimize the burden our research placed on families by emphasizing the flexibility of the observations and providing reminders. Yet some researchers, feeling pressure to ensure that families completed their observations in a timely manner, engaged in strategies, such as foregoing the reminder text, in an effort to gain temporal control. This temporal strategizing was also the case in an observation with Tara, a white, 26-year-old mother who routinely canceled observations. About her attempts to confirm a scheduled visit, the researcher wrote: This observation, mom’s lunch, was scheduled for 11:30. I texted Tara the morning of the observation, then set off for her home. I had scheduled another meeting nearby at 9:00, then planned to hang out until the observation. Around 10:00, I got a text from Tara: ‘I will be home at 12:30 [one hour later] is that ok u can come then.’ I told her that was okay, and asked her to text me if she got there earlier. Unfortunately, at 12:11, as I was getting ready to leave for her house, I got another text: ‘Can u be here at one [a half hour later] I am running a lil behind please.’ By this point, I was getting annoyed. I asked if she was at home or somewhere else, to make sure she wasn’t misunderstanding me. She replied that she was at her sister’s house, because she had taken her to the hospital [the night before]. I asked her to be there by 1pm, and explained that I had already left, to try to make sure that it would really happen at one. She agreed.
The fieldnotes, however, also contain many examples of moments when fieldworkers worked diligently and patiently to accommodate families’ oft-changing schedules, including rescheduling numerous times. Especially given our awareness from the previous year’s interviews of the temporal demands and uncertainties families faced, we had made it a priority and ethical commitment to be flexible with families. In fact, we had begun thinking about the issue of temporal autonomy in terms of social justice (Brooks, Elliott, and Bowen, n.d.). Yet, as the examples above illustrate, despite our goal to work collaboratively with families, occasionally fieldworkers strategized ways to gain some measure of control over families’ time in an effort to limit their own sense of temporal disorganization.
Developing field protocols, imposing temporal dispositions
The ways we described and organized our visits with the families also reflected particular temporal demands and expectations. We developed our research protocols with a particular kind of temporal experience in mind: that we would go to families’ homes to observe certain events, whether that was a family meal or getting the children ready for school or going grocery shopping with the family. Our protocols made sense to us, given that we wanted to observe a variety of family interactions around food. However, the way we described and organized our visits around ‘events’ had unintended consequences. For instance, although all of the families we observed said that, over time, they began to forget we were in their homes, some families appeared to perform the event we had requested to see. One researcher described observing a meal that the family may not have had, if not for the planned observation. When the researcher arrived at the home of Ciara, a black, 24-year old mother of three-year-old DeAndre, Ciara was engaged with a client in her hairdressing business in the living room as her son’s bedtime approached. After walking through Ciara’s home and greeting each family member in this multigenerational household, the researcher wrote: I went back to the living room where Ciara and her client were still watching [the talk show] ‘Maury.’ I was becoming a tiny bit concerned because I did not get the impression that Ciara would be preparing a main meal or anything for that matter, any time soon. Ciara asked her mother, Aphra, to heat up the leftovers from last night, along with the white rice, in case DeAndre wanted some of that too. … Finally, last night’s leftover [tacos] were heated up. It was almost 7pm when Aphra served dinner and Ciara was insisting on DeAndre going to bed at 7:30pm. Ciara could not eat because she was still doing the girl’s hair and still had at least a quarter remaining. When DeAndre finished eating, it was 7:15pm and Ciara was happy because he would still be able to go to bed early. As I prepared to leave, Aphra handed me a small plate with a taco on it. I wasn’t expecting that from her. ‘I just had to. That’s Ciara’s creation,’ Aphra tells me. I thanked her and Ciara, since she prepared it, and sat back down to eat. Aphra went on to say that Ciara knew we were coming, so she cooked the night before instead because she wouldn’t be able to [during the scheduled observation]. I always wondered about how families prepare for us coming to observe.
Similarly, in her interview, Wanda told us that having the observations organized around events imposed a rigidity around her family’s schedule, which was usually very fluid and flexible. She explained: I didn’t know if I was messing you guys up with my schedule, you know, having to work over and saying you could come at this time and getting my days mixed up. Then I had to give you a time limit of, you know, okay we’re gonna eat lunch at this time and we’re gonna take a nap at this time and we’re gonna eat dinner at this time, and so it was just being on a schedule. I had to be on a schedule for you guys!’ Cause usually we just, I try to cook around my schedule or when Marquan gets home, if we even eat.’ Cause sometimes I get home tired and don’t eat. I usually don’t fix, like, a whole meal because the kids, they’re real picky eaters, so they’ll just eat, like, plain macaroni noodles. So I’ll just fix something small [for them].
Families (and some researchers) also held the expectation that once the event we had scheduled to see was over we would leave, sometimes causing confusion and discomfort. In our list of events that we hoped to observe, we included ‘mother’s lunch,’ because we wanted to see what the mothers in our study did during the day, when their kids were generally at school. For those mothers who were employed, we asked to come on a day when they were not at work. These observations were intended to be scheduled at times when mothers’ lives were less dictated by work and childcare demands. However, our fieldnotes revealed how our temporal dispositions framed our intuitions and interactions in these observations. For example, one researcher spent time with Illana on a weekday afternoon. After Ilana had hung laundry to dry outside, eaten lunch, and watched TV, both Illana and the researcher were at an impasse as to what should happen next. The researcher wrote, ‘Next, Illana looked around the home with a blank face, as if not knowing what to do next. I thought that might have been a good time to leave.’ Not only did the researcher intuit that Illana felt compelled to do something for this visit, the researcher felt like she should leave if nothing was going to happen. There was an unspoken agreement that there must be something to observe for the observation to be productive.
The ‘morning routine’ offers another example. One researcher conducted this observation with Becky, a white, 27-year-old mother. During the observation, Becky helped her school-aged sons get ready for the bus, but then signaled that the observation was over: [After the boys left] Becky looked at me, too, and then back to Uncle George and said (at him but I think really to me), ‘Well, I’m real tired.’ I got the hint and asked ‘Are you going back to bed now?’ She said ‘Yeah,’ almost sarcastically, smiling and facing me but with her eyes on the door. I said, ‘Okay, I don’t blame you, I’d want to, too.’ I said thanks and let myself out.
In general, organizing visits around particular events, such as breakfast or naptime, gave some families the impression that they needed to perform the event for us and that, once the event was accomplished, we should end the observation and leave. In hindsight, we came to see that this was a perception often shared by both researchers and family members. Researchers themselves often felt uncomfortable and unsure about how long to stay during any given observation. If an event, such as a meal, happened very quickly, should the researcher then leave? Family life can be intimate and private. What happens when someone starts to go to sleep with a researcher observing? And, crucially, if not much seemed to be going on, was it time to leave?
Feeling bored in the field
Our temporal dispositions not only shaped the research protocols we developed, but also how we wrote about certain events in the fieldnotes. In particular, fieldworkers often privileged more productive and efficient uses of time over unstructured time. For example, we observed Becky during a time when her elementary-school-aged boys were at school. We had scheduled this observation with the intent of observing Becky’s time when it was less structured by childcare demands. Becky relaxed on a couch, playing on her cell phone. Yet the researcher grew impatient: At 1:08 (yes, absolutely nothing changed between 1:02 and 1:08), another car passed on Becky’s road, and again, Becky lifted her head to look out the window. I told Becky that I would go since an hour had passed. (What I didn’t say was, an hour has passed, plus nothing has really happened and I have a lot to do today.) I think she was probably relieved that I was going, so she could fall asleep. She again apologized for it being boring, and I told her that was not a problem, and sometimes it’s good to just sit, especially since I have done a few things in the last few days (like moving an apartment) that have made me really sore.
Other researchers also wrote critically of unstructured family time. For example, during an observation in Wanda and Marquan’s home, Marquan looked after his two daughters with a well-worn ‘Smurfs’ DVD while waiting for Wanda to return home from work. The girls had clearly seen the DVD many times and paid it little attention. This visit was the first time the fieldworker in the passage below had met Marquan and his children, informing her comfort level in interacting more with the family. The fieldworker expressed discomfort in her fieldnotes about the passage of time: I feel bored. … Qianah (2) is now fooling around on the side of the couch, just out of Marquan’s view. Marquan tells her to get up from there. I chuckle to myself. Qianah’s clacking hair beads circumvent any attempt at stealth. Maylee (3) stretches across Marquan’s lap and then sits on his leg like riding a pony … bouncing up and down on her father/horse. Marquan tells her, ‘Maylee. Stawp!’ I realize that these fieldnotes may be boring. If so, then I am doing a good job of conveying how boring the whole situation felt. I do not say this to suggest that I wished I wasn’t there, but to convey how boringness can be awful to endure … I write in my notebook, ‘A continuous cycle of boredom, movement, commands.’
The above researcher’s preference for the productive use of time also extended to her depiction of the participant’s parenting practices. Marquan was using a parenting style characterized by unstructured free time, what Lareau (2011), in her bestselling ethnography of US family life (first published in 2003), terms the ‘accomplishment of natural growth’ in contrast to the concerted cultivation model of parenting, which involves much more planning and intentional interactions with children. Lareau argues there are social class differences in parenting styles, with working class and poor parents less likely than middle-class parents to engage in concerted cultivation. Despite growing concerns about children’s lack of independence and heavily scheduled lives (Baird et al., 2012; McMillan et al., 2013; Schooler et al., 2011), ideas about the value of concerted cultivation still hold currency in the US and may have disposed the researcher to view and characterize what she observed as boring and unproductive.
Lareau (2011) documents how middle-class children with highly structured lives did not know how to entertain themselves when faced with unstructured, free time. The children we observed, in contrast, were often very good at managing their free time. For example, while Claudia, a 37-year-old Latina mother of four, cleaned and worked through her bills, a researcher noted feeling impressed by her one-year-old son’s ability to play on his own: ‘I thought that he did a really good job of playing solo.’ Nevertheless, researchers consistently wrote about family time in ways that suggested adults should be much more involved in actively directing children’s time and that time should be spent productively and, when it was not, it was boring or a waste of time. One fieldworker wrote about the creativity of Rashan, Tara’s four-year-old son, in the face of a boring afternoon, but it was the researcher’s feelings of boredom, not necessarily his, that she observed: Rashan wandered slowly back into the living room, wearing a pair of women’s sunglasses. ‘No!’ Tara exclaimed, but she immediately returned to [texting on] her phone. Rashan kept the glasses. He took them off and began rubbing the lenses with his finger. He looked up at the cartoon. It was something about Tom Thumb. In my opinion, this was a VERY boring cartoon, but I never liked Looney Tunes. Tara continued texting, with one of the dogs asleep on her lap. Rashan moved to the floor and continued watching the cartoon. He was still holding the glasses. Tara coughed, looked up at me, and then went into the back room. She seemed to be talking to whoever is back there. I wondered who it was, and why they wouldn’t come out – did they not want me to see them? Did Tara want me to leave? I had now been at the house for an hour and a half, and I was bored. I decided I would leave around 3:00. To no one in particular, Tara said, ‘I’m exhausted.’ She stared blankly into the middle of the room and looked like she wanted to go to sleep. Rashan returned to the recliner and was absent mindedly playing with the sunglasses and watching TV. Tara put her head in her hands and closed her eyes. Rashan sat down in the recliner and began watching TV. Again, I was struck by how boring this was, especially for Rashan. I don’t think she had tried to engage him in conversation at all since I arrived – i.e., asked him a question about something or told him a story. I thought that Rashan had coped with the lack of attention (and no toys) pretty well.
In analyzing moments when researchers wrote of being bored, we also found that references to boredom were routinely accompanied by comments indicating anxiety and insecurity on the part of the researchers about their presence in the families’ homes, specifically regarding how they were being perceived, what was and was not permissible to see, and whether families were looking forward to the researcher leaving. Above, for example, the researcher wrote in her fieldnotes, ‘Did Tara want me to leave?’ The awkwardness expressed in our fieldnotes about ‘invading’ people’s personal space by observing them at home may have heightened researchers’ perceptions of the passage of time. Emotional responses in the field offer insight into larger dynamics and fieldworkers may perceive and characterize the field in ways that correspond with their emotions (Kleinman and Copp, 1993). Although some fieldworkers had met families in the previous year (during the interviews) and were able to develop stronger relationships with families over the course of numerous visits, some researchers only visited families two times over the course of five or so weeks. This meant they had fewer opportunities to gain rapport with and feel embedded in the families, heightening their sense of discomfort and awareness of the passage of time.
Marking time in ethnography
This paper analyzes moments when time is marked in ethnography. The research team, comprising seven researchers, spent nine months conducting observations in the homes of 12 low-income families. For each family, we strove to visit 12 times over the course of five weeks. Our analysis reveals how the temporal dispositions of the research team shaped the ways we conceived and organized the family visits as well as wrote about time in the fieldnotes. Temporal dispositions encompass the constraints and demands individuals feel around time, the kinds of assumptions people make about time, and individuals’ preferences when it comes to time use. Researchers’ frustrations with mothers’ oft-changing schedules, and their boredom in the face of unstructured time, uncovered value judgments about how time ought to be spent and managed. We argue that paying attention to these judgments offers analytic insight into dominant beliefs about time (e.g., that it should be used productively) as well as insight into modern time pressures.
In our efforts to carry out the research, which often involved driving long distances to families’ homes in order to view families’ interactions around food, we necessarily had to schedule when we would be with the families. Yet this imposed a structure and predictability that may not characterize some families’ time. It also crafted a purposefulness around family life that led us to prioritize ‘things happening’ over the unstructured and seemingly boring aspects of family life. Researchers should be attuned to their expectations around time as well as their emotional responses: anger, boredom, and anxiety were all emotions that fieldworkers recorded experiencing when time did not pass in ways we imagined, organized, or preferred. As other fieldworkers have observed, documenting and reflecting on our emotional responses can provide deeper understanding of processes in the field and yield analytic insight (Kleinman and Copp, 1993).
Temporal dispositions are largely invisible, yet can have important implications for research. The findings reported here highlight a range of implications. First, researchers need to check their temporal dispositions when conceiving and organizing a research project. Our ideas about how time should be spent may profoundly influence our expectations and the research protocols we develop. In using the concept of temporal dispositions, we do not mean to imply that our preferences towards time are unchanging or deterministic; dispositions form a body of practical knowledge that individuals may draw on but do not determine behavior (Bourdieu, 1977, 1984). People may have different temporal responses in varying situations. However, our analysis suggests the value of being attuned to temporal dispositions. We argue that critical reflexivity about time should be employed not simply in the field but also as fieldworkers contemplate and figure out the logistics of entering and leaving the field. Of course, an important aspect of fieldwork has always been the unexpected: we often do not know where or when insights will arise and they may come with distance from the field. Ethnography involves a steep learning curve. We are fortunate to have the opportunity to revisit the families in this study a second time, one year later (in the intervening year, we conducted in-depth interviews with families and kept in touch through community events and newsletters). As of this writing, all 12 families have agreed to allow us back into their lives, and we have visited eight families thus far. This new round of fieldwork has allowed us to implement the lessons learned from our initial time in the field. Recurring fieldwork, the opportunity to return again and again to the field, is also a temporal strategy (albeit one that may be increasingly a luxury) that can enhance fieldworkers’ understandings of the symbolic and power dynamics at play in the field as well as our imbrication in them (Sjørslev, 2013; Whyte, 2013).
Second, our analysis highlights further dimensions of the implications of time demands on researchers. With an increasing emphasis in higher education on efficiency and productivity, more fieldworkers may find their time in the field limited or fragmented and will need to develop strategies to account both for less time and more time pressures, including being aware of how such pressures may influence research decisions. Efforts to maximize our time in the field may lead to feelings of frustration when nothing seemingly of note occurs and to craft a research agenda that imposes temporal expectations on others. Fieldwork is work and, as such, researchers may approach it with a certain degree of instrumentality, especially if we are anxious about making the most of our time in the field. Our ‘fieldwork by appointment’ protocol allowed us to be strategic about our visits, but it also meant that we experienced each visit as highly consequential because we had only a limited number of preset times with families. Researchers should also push back against bureaucratized time pressures and make a case for the continued value of temporal autonomy in research. In addition to researchers’ temporal autonomy, it is important to be mindful that those we research may face temporal constraints and precarity of their own. Ethnographers need to think about the implications of this for research design. By scheduling our fieldwork, we were able to avoid overburdening families by limiting and coordinating the time we spent with them, especially in the private space of intimate family time. Yet scheduling in advance was hard for some families and some families felt put on a schedule by us, suggesting the project protocols had restricted their temporal autonomy.
Finally, fieldworkers should pay attention to how temporal dispositions may lead us to characterize and make sense of time in ways that, for example, reflect our disciplinary training and upbringing and potentially reinforce social inequality. In the spirit of reflexivity, we must turn a critical eye not just to our own temporal dispositions, but also our discipline and larger society, both of which are replete with ideas and value judgments about how time should proceed and be used (Adam, 1990; Gell, 1992; Wajcman, 2015). When people’s dispositions align with dominant ideologies and institutions, we may be less aware of them. Fieldwork can bring powerful assumptions about time to the fore, but only if we notice (Otto, 2013). Our ideas about time do not simply shape our analysis of what we see and record in the field, but also how we approach our time in the field, including how we schedule and make decisions about when to enter and leave the field. We urge researchers to be reflexive about the scheduling process and their perceptions of time when conducting research with participants, because conducting an ethnography requires finding time in our own lives as well as the lives of others.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the families who participated in the study and the research team whose efforts made it possible. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Ethnography Mini-Conference at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society in New York, NY, USA, 28 February 2015.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This material is based upon work that is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under award number 2011-68001-30103.