By Jordan Marsh
While conducting the survey in the Lakefront building, Venkatesh was accosted by several young gang members with guns. “They thought that I was an intruder,” he says. “They thought I was a Latino gang member. They really didn’t know who I was….So they basically kept me in a stairwell in an abandoned apartment building and sort of held me there until they felt comfortable enough to let me go.
“I had to sort of show him why I thought what he was gaining from survey research was partial. It was valuable but it was partial. And I had to make the case for why I thought that I needed to try a different way of engaging the communities, and a different way of intervening….We had to tussle a little bit, but I think he saw the value in what I wanted to do, and he gave me the freedom to do it.”
“There was a period between June and December [of 1990] in which I was there almost all the time,” he says. “This was immediately after I met these guys at the Lakefront. And then after that I went in for maybe a couple days…or a week, and stayed with some families or stayed with some friends….I had a friend, this kid who had his own apartment, and he would let me stay with him. I had a family who would let me stay with them. I would just stay where I could.”
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Matt McGuire, an anthropology student at Harvard and a friend of Venkatesh, feels the criticism is unwarranted. He’s currently conducting research for his dissertation on the redevelopment of Cabrini-Green and the surrounding neighborhood. He lives in a subsidized apartment building just north of Division, and he’s using the same qualitative, participant-based methodology as Venkatesh, interviewing area residents and taking an active role in community activities.
McGuire feels there’s a place for both survey research and ethnographic research. Surveys might offer a more broad-based look at a group of people, but with limited depth. Ethnography, on the other hand, is grounded in observation, so it can offer a closer and perhaps more candid look at the lives of people. Yet McGuire says problems arise under either method. “How much do we want to be able to generalize about society anyway, given the incredible variation among people and among groups of people? I don’t think generalizing should be the goal. Thoroughly understanding a specific situation can give you insight into other situations that look similar…but this quest for general truths, I think, is a misguided one within the social sciences.”
In the language of his profession, Venkatesh was studying the context in which his primary subject–street gangs–operated. By doing this, he was able to examine street gangs from the perspective of those who live with them and are most affected by them. “That allowed me to see the ways in which gang activity and drug distribution and informal economies and a very poor relationship with city agencies are a part of everyday life in these communities.”
