I conducted this research for my Master’s in Social Anthropology. I performed hundreds of hours of field work and conducted unstructured and semi-structured interviews, a survey, document analysis and discourse analysis.

The topic was a social movement in Mexico City—or, more specifically, the core beliefs of a small group within the city’s vast, long-running movement for social housing.

The study included a longitudinal component: I collected data about the group over an extended period, both directly, through field work spanning 1.5 years, and retroactively, using documents and interviews about the group's past activities.

One core group belief I identified was that certain activities were the proper sphere of group action (that is, they should be carried out entre todos, or “everyone together”), while others could be performed for private gain (hacer negocio or “doing business”). Analysis of this belief helped me interpret the group’s political activity.

Approach

The direct sources for information on group beliefs were field work, interviews and open-ended survey questions.

Other sources, including documents and multiple-choice and numerical survey questions, provided background information about the group’s history, activities and socioeconomic composition. I selected survey participants randomly from among the group’s members.

Numerous interviews included discussions of documents about the group. For example, one participant kept a diary of group activities, which we reviewed together over several sessions. And, during group interviews, participants were shown newspaper articles and videos of group activities.

The concept of a group’s core, or axiomatic, beliefs comes from Teun van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis, which I used for the theoretical framework.