Sociology Plus
Covert Research Definition
Covert research is research undertaken without the consent or knowledge of those being studied. It is most strongly associated with participant observation, in which a researcher joins a group or organisation under an assumed role to observe its functioning and daily life at first hand — pretending to be a believer to study a new religion, working as a waiter to overhear diners, or, like Laud Humphreys in Tearoom Trade (1970), ostensibly interviewing people for one purpose while gathering data for another.
Why Go Covert
There are strong methodological reasons for concealment. As the Hawthorne effect showed, people who know they are being studied may change their behaviour, and respondents may deliberately mislead. If the point of participant observation is to learn what life feels like for an ordinary member of a sect, announcing the research is likely to compromise it: even willing members will not treat a known researcher as they treat one another. And going undercover may be the only way to study deviant or criminal groups powerful enough to control access. In short, covert methods can be the sole route to certain information and experiences.
Conducting Covert Research
The approach has a long tradition in sociology and criminology, going back to early ethnographers such as Whyte (1943), who sought to study the social world naturalistically, much as anthropologists learn other cultures through first-hand immersion. Access is often secured through a key informant inside the group who may know the researcher’s true purpose and act as gatekeeper. Sustaining a believable role is difficult, so some researchers covertly study organisations they already belong to — as Holdaway (1983) did in his account of police work carried out while serving as an officer. Managing the role, devising an exit strategy, and handling the close relationships formed during deceit-based fieldwork all pose problems, as does the risk of over-immersion and lost objectivity. Practically, data recording is awkward: events and conversations must be reconstructed later or captured on concealed recording equipment.
Evaluation and Ethics
Covert observation can yield richly contextualised accounts of experience, yet relatively little of it is done: it is time-consuming, fieldwork is costly, and funders — harbouring doubts about its validity that are often misplaced — are reluctant to support it. Ethnographers’ claims to capture the fabric of life have also been questioned on interpretive grounds: the difficulty of translating observed events into academic writing — what Pearson (1993) called “the requirement to carry the narrative back home” — means the “reality” may be lost in the researcher’s interpretation. Ethically, covert research transgresses the codes of bodies such as the American Sociological Association, the British Sociological Association, and the Social Research Association, whose central principle of informed consent requires that participants understand a study’s nature and purpose before agreeing to take part. Covert work, resting on deceit, cannot obtain such consent; its practitioners reply that the deception is justified by what the research adds to our understanding of the social world.