Prolonged Engagement

Prolonged engagement refers to spending extended time with respondents in their native culture and everyday world in order to gain a better understanding of behavior, values, and social relationships in a social context. The immersion of the researcher in the culture of the respondents on a long-term basis involves the development of congenial relationships between the researcher and members of the respondent community. The notion of prolonged engagement is most associated with traditional anthropology studies, such as those of Margaret Mead, but it is becoming increasingly used in a variety of qualitative research studies in an effort to move beyond the “observer” role of the researcher to one of engagement.

The use of prolonged engagement allows the research study to go farther in the investigation of certain phenomena that cannot be adequately explored with short-term study designs. By becoming engaged in and learning the cultural environment through experience in the natural everyday world of respondents, research-ers can explore multiple constructions of reality and become familiar with the variety of ways that respondents interpret experiences. Spending sufficient time in a culture provides a more appropriate basis for determining the relationships between empirical results and the way individuals behave, speak, and interact in the natural setting of everyday life. While intensive interviewing on a short-term basis can provide valuable data about respondents' culture, prolonged engagement goes beyond the words of respondents to the deciphering of meaning of language narratives and social interactions. In essence, researchers who employ prolonged engagement seek to become members of the community, going beyond what respondents tell them in initial interviews to discover more fully things that go unsaid in the early stages of all human encounters.

The purpose of this method is to spend longer periods of time both in the world of the respondent and their community in order to better understand contextual meaning through the eyes of the ones who know it best. The world reality of the respondents can be more fully explored and experienced by the researcher through prolonged engagement, rather than “sitting on the sidelines” of the research setting. Explanations are clarified through repeated encounters, the researcher can understand to a much greater degree what is being said and not said, thus focusing on the topics related to the focus of the research study. The research study then becomes a joint experience between researcher and subject, allowing for greater understanding for both in how a phenomenon is experienced over time.