Over three years (from November 1994-1997) in downtown San Francisco, Philippe Bourgois and his ethnographic colleagues studied the daily lives of homeless heroin addicts through participant observation with the use of tape recordings, photographs and videotapes. This ethnographic research “The Moral Economies of Homeless Heroin Addicts” (1998) focused on reporting the complex dynamics of heroin addiction in context of everyday violence, homelessness and the risk of contracting HIV (HIV risk). This paper seeks to address the following question: “Why did P. Bourgois choose participant observation/ethnographic methods to study the link between homelessness, HIV/AIDS and drug abuse?.”
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