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36 Soc. F. 217 (1957-1958)
Roles in Sociological Field Observations

handle is hein.journals/josf36 and id is 233 raw text is: ROLES IN SOCIOLOGICAL FIELD OBSERVATIONS base of the county has shifted from agriculture to industry as shown by occupational trends. SUIMARY Following the location of a major steel plant in a rural Utah county, thousands of new people came into the area to seek industrial employment and many more people living in the county mi- grated occupation-wise into industry. From previous studies in the field of labor mobility, a series of hypotheses were set up and tested to see if this situation showed trends in agreement with other such situations. 1. It was found in this study that the majority of industrial workers came from the local labor market within the county. Following this, workers migrated into the county from contiguous counties in the state. While most of the workers were from Utah, some were from out of state and, contrary to expectations, the majority of workers did not come from contiguous states. Evidently recruiting poli- cies and other factors drew workers to Utah from more distant states than from adjoining states. 2. While it is generally true that it is the younger men who migrate, and this study indicated that only ten percent of immigrant workers were over 45, there was no direct inverse correlation between age and distance of migration. In this case instead of age decreasing as distance increased, there was a positive correlation between age and distance. 3. It was also hypothesized that labor turnover is a function of migratory tendencies, age, and education. It was found as expected that those workers with previous records of termination were most likely to terminate their employment and move on. Also as expected the younger workers had a higher termination record than older work- ers. In the case of education, three studies had found that the more educated were more likely to be occupationally mobile. This study found that the terminated workers had less education on the average than those who continued their employ- ment. 4. As workers migrated into the industrial area, the trend was to seek residence on accessible roads to the work plant in communities dose to the plant with adequate community services. This is in agreement with other studies. It was also evident that workers in the county formerly living in rural areas moved into closer urban communities. as they obtained employment in the steel plant. 5. Within the rural county itself there was a marked shift in population composition from rural to urban and a decided change in occupational trends from agriculture to industry. We would expect now the trend of behavior in most activities in the county to be more consistent with urban than with rural life. ROLES IN SOCIOLOGICAL FIELD OBSERVATIONS* RAYMOND L. GOLD Montana State University UFORD JUNKER has suggested four theoretically possible roles for sociolo- gists conducting field work. These range from the complete participant at one extreme to the complete observer at the other. Between these, but nearer the former, is the participant-as-ob- server; nearer the latter is the observer-as-partici- * Read before the nineteenth annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta, Georgia, April 13, 1956. 1 Buford Junker, Some Suggestions for the Design of Field Work Learning Experiences, in Everett C. Hughes, et al, Cases on Field Work (hectographed by The University of Chicago, 1952), Part III-A. pant. As a member of Junker's research team, I shared in the thinking which led to conceptualiza- tion of these research roles. After the work of the team was completed, I continued the search for insight regarding processes of interaction learning in field observation in a special study of my own.2 A considerable portion of this study was devoted to exploration of the dimensions of Junker's role- conceptions and their controlling effects on the product of field study. 2Raymond L. Gold, Toward a Social Interaction Methodology for Sociological Field Observation, un- published Ph. D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1954.

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