A Comment on Research Methods

It might be a bit late in the life of this blog to talk about my research methods - what I did, where I did it, and how I went about it. It's better late than never though! (And admittedly, sometimes it's easier to take stuff that I've already written and just tweak it for a blog post. Especially when I have about an hour before my self-imposed deadline).

So finally: Some background information on my research.

I began my fieldwork by wandering the subways and streets of downtown Chicago. I was able to find buskers on the subway platforms of Jackson Station, on State Street, and Michigan Avenue. I also observed a singer busking in Bryn Mawr (North Chicago) and several musicians at the throughway from the blue line to the Chicago O’Hare International Airport. However, given the scope of my study, I decided to focus my research primarily on the street performers on Michigan Avenue. Michigan Avenue has a higher concentration of street performers than any of the other sites and, unlike the subway platforms in which the majority of buskers are musicians, it has a wider range in terms of the different types of performances they do.

Armed with a personal history as a magician, and using my past as someone who had a few months’ worth of experience street performing in Memphis, Tennessee, I was able to go beyond my identity as “just another student researcher” and situate myself within the loose community of Chicago street performers. Two of the key participants in my study (the Chicago Tin Man and Jeremy, the Magician from Britain) took me under their wing as a young performer interested in learning the craft of busking. A friend of Jeremy’s, a performer who works as a silver statue and balloon artist, took this directive to heart: Every time I saw him, he would ask, “When are you going to start working? I want to see you making money!”

Another performer, a living statue who at the time went by the name of the Golden Lady, befriended me as one among the even smaller group of female street performers. The other performers with whom I observed, spoke, and interviewed viewed me more generally as another street performer – a shared identity that made many of them more interested in speaking with me than they otherwise would have been. There was a shift in my relationships with other street performers the weekend after my first time performing on the streets of Chicago. The Golden Lady ran into me performing the morning of the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade; the next time I saw her, she walked up to give me a hug, proclaiming, “You’re one of us now. Welcome to the streets.”

In addition to a sense of shared identity, the time spent maintaining relationships mattered too. As one street performer explained after I observed a student from Northwestern quickly interviewing him with a voice recorder between shows, he gets interviewed like this “every now and again” but “no one has stuck around to research [street performers] in depth.” Here then, time spent in the field, as well as a commitment to stopping by and speaking with performers – even after my main observations of them were finished – allowed me to come to them again and again with questions and ideas as my research progressed.

Immersion (of some degree) was the hard part. Weekly observations, combined with constant informal interviews and occasional more structured interviews, made up the bulk of my data collection. With some help, I also managed to take some footage of a few buskers. In the end, though, none of my research would have been possible with the generosity and trust of the street performers who agreed to work with me. This is a trust that I hope none of them have decided was misplaced, and a trust for which I am forever indebted.