The most effective way to analyze the work done in funeral homes would be to conduct an ethnography along with an interview. Goffman's dramaturgical analysis emphasizes that there are both internal and external roles that we play in our lives and work. An ethnography will be useful to see firsthand how workers interact with colleagues and customers, or what their outsourced role is, and interviews will be used to determine how workers handle a job where they are required to deal with death on a daily basis. basis, since it is something that is not observable. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay By conducting an ethnography, I would have information about how workers interact with their customers. I would specifically observe one worker every day of the week for a month, observing his interactions with customers and colleagues. 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 directors usually occurs at one of the worst times in their clients' lives, a month at each funeral home would give me enough time to get enough clients' consent to observe them. The probing questions I would try to answer are: Is there a systematic way that funeral home operators handle each customer? How personal do they have to be with their clients to learn enough about the deceased they are planning a service for? How do they handle death as a job, and are colleagues an outlet to talk to if handling death becomes too much? Ethnographies are subject to the Hawthorne effect, but in funeral home work, workers are not necessarily expected to act like themselves, since dealing with death is not normally a topic that people encounter on a daily basis. Funeral workers are expected to act unnaturally towards their clients: they must sympathize with the client for their loss, but be sufficiently detached from the death to do their job properly and plan the service. When facing death in this outwardly removed way, there is much that workers internalize and take home with them. This is where interviews would come into play. While ethnographies will be useful for me to visually assess worker interactions, an interview is the only way to truly know how workers feel and understand what toll their work is taking. By interviewing workers every day at the end of the day, I would get a sense of how much of their work they internalize and take home with them. The questions I would ask them would be: How are you feeling today? What was the hardest thing you faced today? If you struggled with something today, how do you plan to deal with it? These interviews would give me insight into who the workers really are and allow me to learn about their emotions, something I wouldn't get with ethnography alone.