Authors: Alfredo Berbegal, Researcher, Department of Methods of Research and Diagnostic in Education (MIDE), University of Zaragoza, Spain
Fernando Sabirón, Research Director, Department of Methods of Research and Diagnostic in Education (MIDE), University of Zaragoza, Spain
Patrick Boumard, Research Director, Department of Philosophy, Breton and Celtic Research Center (CRBC-CNRS), University of Western Brittany, France

2. The data

The research was based on Participant Observation and Descriptive Writing (Research Diary). I recorded professional competences and obligations, informal interviews or ongoing talks, conflicts, obstacles or problems, kinds of interpersonal relationships, prescriptive institutional actions, profane descriptions, institutional organization, motivations, participants' reactions, personal tensions and dilemmas. I worked inside, as "member", and straight afterwards, I did outside, as ethnographer. Consequently, I had to face up to a "dissociative description": member description (primary description) and witness description (secondary description). For this reason, Description became an "imperative" (Ackermann et al., 1985) and it was worth spending time explaining it... Wittgensteinian paradox (1969)!! Among other things, Description was the key to understanding how social world was going to organize itself.

2.1. Participant Observation
To make things!! Participant...
To see, look, watch what is happening!! Observation...
Is Participant Observation so simple?

On the one hand, my first Description was very closed to ethnomethodological program (Cicourel, 1964; Garfinkel, 1967). Membership was the conceptual pillar to articulate a phenomenological cosmovision and an ethnographic approach. Thinking (reflexivity) about this gradually shaping identity, about my ethnomethods and implications, revealed important social features (vid. Diagram n° 2, p.1).
On the other hand, my Description had to distinguish between my psychological, political and epistemological implication. The point was the last one, but forever depending on the other ones (Devereux, 1980; Hunt, 1989): intentional behavior, attitudes, intuitions, emotions, ideals, desires; values and believes, interests; notions and perceptions, capabilities, communications... all of them were relevant for the psycho-socio-anthropo-educational knowledge production. This implicational perspective, as understanding approach (Schwartz & Jacobs, 1984), was focused in the subject through the subject, but avoiding any tempting simplification (therapeutic narrative, autobiographical work).

The most important for me was how Participant Observation could deal with the integration of research and "life-world". My fieldwork Participation was neither technical - ritual or ceremonial - nor methodological - strategy to access significances and informations. Research was gradually thought from theoretical participation - resignation of simple familiarizing with the situation - to epistemological one - rejection researcher neutrality and active implication (Boumard, 1989).

"Actor" condition had to take advantage of "Author" one. Classical dimensions EMIC - ETIC (Harris, 1976) were deliberately mistaken. My Observation was producing "Information", since my Participation, as actor, subject, professional, person... was creating new reality, singular and dialectic (Ibáñez, 1989). I was both producer and product of this self-eco-organizing reality (Morin, 1986). And if I was concerned about this dynamical construction (entropic-negentropic social organization), I had to be extremely sensitive to my place in this co-production.

Thus, I constantly was weaving the relationship between my intervention and my implication (Reflexive Participant Observation), as well as deciding its effects and specific weights in the whole of knowledge production.

2.2. Research Diary
In situ or after some time had elapsed, observations and reflections were written on my field notebook: accounts of experiences, events, behaviors and activities; physical settings; reconstructions of conversations, verbatim or categorized; quick, key words and symbols; details, notes about specific and predetermined themes, and so on. I carried out an exhaustive thick description (Geertz, 1973). But reader... Let me emphasize you some issues about my Research Diary. It was the way to reflect the articulation Observation-Participation inside the "Lebenswelt" fieldwork (Husserl, 1931, [1936] 1990; Merleau-Ponty, 1958; Schütz, 1970). My ontological axiom defended that social world organizes itself through description and interpretation of itself (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). So, two important questions were in the core of my diary: 1) the nature of the world that I belonged to; and 2) the nature of its organization and construction that I took charge of (vid. Section 4.1.).
Attention, please!! My Data were not collected by either theoretical models or consolidated methodological paths. My Information was produced by an epistemological attitude towards a "situation-in-life" which allowed me to achieve an emergent knowledge production. My diary helped me and made it possible.

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