Expanded accounts based on condensed accounts #1

This blog entry is the result of my expanded accounts based on my condensed accounts from an exercise about observing a social situation in Aarhus for 15 minutes.

Observations

October 7th. 4:45 PM. I'v located myself in the mall Storcenter Nord in Aarhus. More concrete, 15 meters across the Netto shop. I'm observing the cash registers as the customers buy their chosen groceries and checkout.

The customers are grouped in three lines since three cash registers are in action and ready to handle the customers. Immediately after writing this down they opened a fourth cash register, ready for the customers to group a new line. At this moment most people standing in line have come in pair or with several family members. I saw several children spending time on helping the parents pack the groceries in bags. Typically this took longer time than if the parents were to do it themselves, but they didn't overrule the childrens' dedicated assignments. I was surprised to see this because of the pressure they might've felt based on the many people waiting and making natural noise behind them.

During the short time of 15 minutes I observed a lot of different people doing different things in the process of their checkouts. A guy was checking the receipt for errors while his girlfriend focused on packing up the groceries. It seemed that this was a routine and distribituion of roles that is done every time they shop together, and maybe even individually as well. I observed several of these situations that led me to think of different assumptions, rules, routines and distribution of roles (conscious and unconscious).

Journal

In the beginning I felt confused and awkward because I didn't really think that there were anything important to observe here - isn't it just people shopping? It slowly occured to me through my notes and thoughts that there might be some important things about the way these customers checkout. This makes me that I've fallen under the, according to Spradley, tip-of-the-iceberg-assumption:

"Almost  everyone,  beginning ethnographer  or  experienced  fieldworker  experiences  the  feeling  that  "not  much  is  going  on"  in  a new  social  situation.  Especially  when  doing  micro-ethnography,  we  fall  prey to  this  assumption. We mistake  the  tip  of the  iceberg  for the  entire  mountain of  ice,  nine-tenths  of  which  lies  hidden beneath the  ocean  surface."

It was challenging to observe with no specific focus. Like the interviews we did in the first lecture of this course, it is difficult to know what to search for and what not to. It seems that I feel more comfortable observing with a specific focus in mind, so pretty quick I found myself taking notes primarily about the different kinds of individuals and groups in these checkout lines.

When I left at 5:05 PM the amount of opened cash registers were down to two.