The most effective way to analyze the work done in funeral homes would be to conduct an ethnography as well as an interview. Goffman's dramaturgical analysis emphasizes that we play both internal and external roles in our lives and work. An ethnography will be useful to see first-hand how workers interact with colleagues and customers, or what their outsourced role is, and interviews will be used to determine how workers manage a job where they face death daily. basis, because it is something that is not observable. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay By conducting an ethnography, I would gain insight into how workers interact with their customers. I would specifically observe one worker every weekday for a month, observing their interactions with customers as well as their co-workers. I would do this at three different funeral homes for a total of three months to complete this research. Since the work performed by funeral home employees typically occurs at one of the worst times in their clients' lives, a month at each funeral home would give me enough time to obtain consent from a sufficient number of customers to observe them as well. The probing questions I would try to answer are: Is there a systematic way funeral home workers treat each client? How personal do they need to be with their clients to know enough about the deceased for whom they are planning a service? How do they deal with death as their job, and are their colleagues an outlet to turn to if dealing with death becomes too difficult? Ethnographies are subject to the Hawthorne effect, but in funeral work you don't necessarily expect workers to act like their true selves, because dealing with death is not normally a topic that people encounter every day. Funeral home employees are required to act somewhat abnormally toward their clients: they must be sympathetic to the client's loss, while at the same time being sufficiently detached from the death to perform their job properly and plan the service. When facing death in this seemingly distant way, workers internalize many things and take them home. This is where interviews would come in. Although ethnographies will be useful for me to visually assess interactions between workers, an interview is the only way to truly know how workers feel and understand the consequences of their work. By interviewing workers each day at the end of the day, I would get a sense of how much of their work they internalize and take home. The questions I would ask them would be: How are you feeling today? What was the hardest thing you faced today? If you experienced difficulties today, how do you plan to deal with them? These interviews would give me insight into who the workers really are and allow me to know their emotions, something I wouldn't get with an ethnography alone..