Writing your Journal

The internship paper involves the application of primarily sociology course material (literature, concepts, ideas) to understanding and analyzing the internship experience. It is an applied research project in which you will be observing and studying an organization at the same time you are working and making a contribution to it. You will be recording your observations in a daily journal and you will use the data to help write your paper. You will also be asked to make an oral presentation of your applied research efforts and what you have learned. The following outline should help you in accomplishing this task:

JOURNAL

1) The Participant Observer -- Not only are you a worker in your internship experience, but you are also a participant observer. As a participant observer, you will be trying to understand the organization of work by observing the interactions of people around you. Your goal is to discover how the organizational structure shapes the type of interactions that occur. In order to observe the organization, you need to always keep a critical eye about what you are observing. The first step in being critical is never making any assumptions about what is going on or why. Instead, always ask yourself: WHY? For instance, Why do they have this policy? Why does this person apply the rules differently than the other? Who has power? Why? What policies are enforced. Why? Which rules are ignored. Why? Do rules apply differently by status?

2) Please remember that you are observing the organization AS A WHOLE and not just your position within it. Thus, your observations should not be limited to only your experiences with the organization, but the experiences of all workers/managers within the structure of your workplace.

3) Don’t “Go Native.” -- When you become too involved with the people you are observing you are unable to maintain a critical eye. So, always maintain some distance between yourself and the people you are observing. This doesn’t mean you have to avoid people or isolate yourself. What it means is that regardless of how close you become with people, you must never assume that you know WHY something is occurring.

Keeping an objective eye is really difficult. However, it is imperative for being able to write your paper.

For instance, let’s say your site supervisor is also your boss. She comes into work one day and tells everyone that the work they are doing is crummy and she expects everyone to work overtime to compensate. You might feel very compelled to get into the mudslinging that occurs when the boss leaves. You might, along with your other co-workers, start calling the situation “unfair” and your boss “mean.” In your role as an intern, however, you do NOT JUDGE. Instead ask yourself WHY. For example, consider these questions: a) Why did the boss interpret the work as crummy. b) Ihy does she expect your dept. to work overtime. c) is everyone in the department required to do overtime or just some people.

Here’s another example. Let’s say you are a caretaker working with disabled youth in a nursing home-type situation. You notice that whenever you tell a youth to complete some task, she runs to her room and calls her parents instead. The parents call your supervisor and you get reprimanded. Your first reaction may be to get angry with the client, the parent and the supervisor. However, we want you to focus on WHY that exchange occurred. Why did the child tell the parent? Why did the parent call the supervisor and not you? Why did the supervisor reprimand you before asking your side of the story? In other words, how did the structure of the organization shape the interactions that occurred?

4) Journal Notes --

You will be required to write down (and eventually type-write) the DAILY observations you make at your internship. Because you are making no assumptions about what is important to observe, you should write down all of your observations at first. What are you doing? What are others doing? Who makes the rules? Who breaks the rules, etc. The best time to write your journal notes is directly after your shift at the internship organization. Your memory is freshest at this time. Some of the information may seem irrelevant. However, because you have no idea what will become important, write everything down. Later you will find patterns of behavior that you may want to focus on. Your goal is to find patterns of behavior that help you explain the organization.

If you cannot write everything down when you return, then jot down notes as you are doing your internship. These notes will jog your memory for when you have the chance to write everything down.

The journal notes are not simply logs of what you did everyday. You will not write simply: today I shuffled papers, then I led a group about depression, then I answered phones, etc. The journal notes are your opportunity to figure out how the organization works. Therefore, you will be focusing on the interactions that occur and trying to derive some meaning about those interactions. Discuss how your assignments made you feel. Discuss who give you the assignments. How people reacted to you and to each other. What were other people in the office doing? Are receptionists treated differently than groundskeepers? Is the workplace all White? African-American? Who hangs out together?

Your journal should begin: Today I observed that in my organization ..................(at lunch, all the women sit together or the manager knows everyone's name or that workers have pictures on their desks of each other's kids, etc.)