Ross Woods, rev. 2022, '24
Ethnography is basically cultural description. It usually depends on participant observation, and nearly always depends on getting people's answers to your questions. However, you can also use other methods as part of an ethnographic project, and in larger projects it would be normal (or even required) to use a variety of them.
To be research, ethnography needs explanatory power.
Put one way, cultural description can demonstrate that cultural factors are the cause of the phenomenon being investigated.
Ethnography is a research methodology, not a solution in itself. It is most useful when the problem investigated is cultural. It can be used with other research methods, it would be normal (or even required) to use more than one method in larger projects. For example, ethnographies usually include some linguistic and demographic data, and not unusually include some statistics.
Although the home of ethnography is cultural antropology, it also works in many other contexts, in fact, anywhere that people develop their own subcultures and value systems:
Ethnography depends on an emic viewpoint. "Emic" means seeing things from the viewpoint of the people in the target culture. Their way of life probably makes perfect sense to them, even if it seems illogical or frustrating to outsiders. There are almost certainly very good reasons why they are like they are.
Ethnography usually includes participant observation. This means that, as a researcher, you actually take part in the activity rather than observe in the role of a neutral or hidden bystander. Ethnographers found out that they learnt more and understood events better than when they were actively involved:
To some extent, you're observing yourself but that is not a problem. You may need to commit yourself to a longer period of time that you anticipate. Otherwise, the procedures are the same as other ethnographic researches.
Views are mixed on taking photographs. In some contexts, photographs are very practical. In other situations, however, people act very unnaturally if they know they are being photographed, which is not only frustrating for the ethnographer, but can result in information that is quite misleading.
Other:
The US Code of Federal Regulations allows several avenues of exemption from its more onerous procedures for informed consent. One of them is interview procedures
(CFR 46.104), if subjects are unidentifiable and/or at no risk of harm.
The institution's ethics committeed is then entitled to set its own requirements if they see them as necessary. Consequently, researchers can ethically conduct research, even on sensitive topics.
However, ethnography also has its own set of ethnographic expectations:
As an underlying principle, you are required to treat people as valuable and worthy of trust. This brings up issues of your personal ethnocentricity and prejudices, potential favouritism toward some individuals, and your bias toward some viewpoints.
Clearly, you do not need to agree with everything that people say and do, and you could be exposed to practices that may be seen as grossly immoral. Nevertheless, your starting point is your respect toward them.
You only need to need to ask them orally; in fact anything more might make them suspicious or act unnaturally. For example, "I'm new here and I'm learning your culture. I don't understand some things. Could you help me please?" (Of course you'd adapt the example to your situation.) Then, as much as possible, keep interviews to friendly conversations and make notes immediately afterwards, not during the conversation. Technically these are called "free informal interviews". They also enhance your security.
Some interviewees give permission to be quoted with their names, especially on matters that are not sensitive and perhaps enhance their prestige. You can reference them fully as formal interviews.
In some countries, privacy laws require you to obtain the written consent of informants, but the general trend this that this does not apply to free informal interviews if you keep specific identities confidential.
Some topics become impractical if laws require you to disclose fully the nature of the research project for getting informants' or subjects' permission. In many cases, providing that information is just unscientific, because it predisposes people toward particular responses, making your conclusions invalid.
Keep people’s personal information private and confidential unless they have authorized its release. This is also a legal requirement under privacy laws.
Unless you have explicit consent, you should keep informants' quotes anonymous in the final work, and maintain the integrity of the informants' information by keeping it distinct from your analysis and comments. Readers should not be able to identify your informants from the way you have written about them. Informants might also validly perceive audio or video recordings to be a risk. What if someone recognizes my voice? Or sees my face?
It is generally better simply to add a note in your introduction that informants are not identified for ethical reasons. You might find pseudonyms helpful.
However, you should record identities (as much as you know), places, and times of interviews in your field notes. These records are helpful when you need to establish the authenticity of your field information with your supervisor, but these records must then be handled according to security procedures.
Similarly, you may not mention in a public document an organization by name without its permission unless its activities are on public record in the location of their activities. Some organizations need to operate out of the public eye, and being mentioned in a public document may endanger their personnel or their activities.
First, avoid any way in which informants' cooperation and personal information could be used against them. In some cases, people can be arrested and imprisoned based on your information. For example, Spradley's ethnography of the homeless in the US could have been used to arrest many of his informants had it been published locally. The danger is even greater in countries with oppressive regimes or persecution policies.
Your research could lead you to knowledge of illegal activities. Your commitment to your informants generally means that you should prefer to protect their interests. In some cases, you might even need to pull the plug
on your research to protect a victim. Besides, simply by being present and observing an illegal act may lead you to be deemed an accomplice.
Second, your research, including your relationships with informants and any means used to acquire information, may not be exploitative, or seen to be so. Besides the obvious problems of inappropriate relationships (e.g. romantic entanglements), your information gathering gives you the ability to become power-broker or mediator, which is a potentially exploitive position. You also have a duty to protect them from exploitation.
Third, maintain a safe environment for yourself and others. Kind of obvious, with the emphasis on WHS and the current aversion to risk.
Your reporting needs to be honest and representative of what you have observed, read, and heard. You need to protect the intellectual property of authors, informants, colleagues and research assistants.
The list of prohibitions is more illustrative of the kinds of potential problems:
• You may not use fictitious information. This includes not just manufactured information, but also bending, adjustingor exaggerating aspects to suit your own ends.
• You may not delete information that would create an impression different from taht which you had observed.
• Reference the source if you use other people’s ideas or data. You may not plagiarize or submit work resulting from unauthorized collusion.
While it is normal to select information that you should disclose, you may not provide misinformation.
Presumably, you have made friends with people who have helped you and given you their personal information. Even after your research report is finished, it is proper to maintain those personal links if you can. This will avoid the problem of leaving people feeling used
after your paper is done.
Getting permission to do research in an organization can be very difficult, because people are afraid you will hang out their dirty washing, get access to confidential information, or waste their time.
You will learn much more than you think about the organization by finding the entry channels and dealing with its people to gain admission. You are figuring out who the doorkeepers are and what the passwords are. It can be very frustrating at the time, because you are often working with inadequate information and might not know the doorkeepers. However, you'll learn much more than you think about the organization by finding the entry channels and dealing with its people to gain admission. You are figuring out who the doorkeepers are and what the passwords are.
Be encouraged, and keep good notes. You will probably learn so much but don't quite know what it is that you're learning, and then by the time you're in, it starts to feel familiar. Like many cultural learning experiences, it will make much more sense in hindsight.
You might find that access is limited (perhaps for good reasons), but you can modify your topic according to the extent of access you have. Besides, when you're in and trusted, they might provide greater access.
At some stage, the ethnographer needs to enter the target culture. In some cases, researchers choose the research problem based on their familiarity with a particular culture. In other cases, people choose the topic first, and must then enter the culture to start research.
The best time to start an ethnographic project is when you land in a new culture. You can learn from the initial adjustment. During the early stages of cultural adaptation. You'll initiate basic social contact and learn how to use routine etiquette in normal social situations. If it involves language learning, you'll start with simple greetings in the local language.
Maintain a diary as a contemporaneous written record of the learning experience.
Take the role of a learner. Account for your own cultural predispositions by identifying and making them explicit. Develop a list of ethnographic questions and revise them as you learn more.
Describe the process of personal cultural adjustment. Report the effects of culture shock on yourself and on your relations with others. Identify major influences and issues pertaining to inter-cultural communication that impinge on personal relationships.
Describe major features of normal lifestyle:
Keep a diary as a contemporaneous written record of your experiences; don't try to work from memory long after the event. In your diary, keep an outline of the timeframe and location (when and where) of orientation, and of your observations and converstations. Record what you found out through debriefing and the lessons you learnt from hindsight. Make your own personal assessment of your growth in cognitive understanding as well as your social and emotional learning.
When entering a new culture for the first time, choose a suitable location to live, make some friends, and build some acceptance with people in the target population. You can sometimes learn a lot from the initial adjustment, because everything is different and new. Follow cultural adaptation guidelines and start making basic social contact using simple greetings in the local language. At this stage, you'll learn how to use routine etiquette in normal social situations. Describe the process of personal cultural adjustment, such as the effects of culture shock on yourself and on your relations with others, and what factors seem affect to inter-cultural communication and impinge on personal relationships. People will generally be quite accepting if you take the role of a learner. During this stage, you can also describe major features of people's normal lifestyle, for example:
At this stage, you might be learning something about yourself, but you might simply feel the change intensely and not understand much. In reality, however, you will probably only understand many things in hindsight. At the time, you probably won't be able to identify aspects of your own culture that affect adjustment or your own cultural predispositions.
Interviews are usually an excellent way to get detailed information, although there are practical limits about how many people you can meet. They lend themselves best for open-ended questions and information that is not statistical, but can also work well for closed questions that generate statistical information.
The idea is simply that you write a list of questions and then interview people. The advantages are:
You can also make them feel like they know something valuable; most people love to share their knowledge.
While most interviews will be with individuals, you can also interview couples or groups, and it can become much more like a focus group. In some cases, the group dynamics might tell you as much as people's answers. Whether you interview individuals, couples or groups, you should also observe body language.
Because a list of questions can evolve very quickly and naturally, it is easy to start before the questions are properly developed. It is better to have a list of good questions first, so that the first interviews are not wasted.
Interview questionnaires are often excellent for getting detailed information, although there are practical limits about how many people you can interview. They lend themselves best to open-ended questions and information that is not statistical, but can also work well for closed questions that generate statistical information.
The idea is simply that you write a list of questions and then interview people. Technically these are called free informal interviews.
One successful approach is to write a list of questions and use them in the following way.
getting to know youquestions for introduction. However, they often also disclose identity, that is, how people define themselfes, e.g. by place family, occupation, tribe, or status symbol.
Have you stopped beating your wife?(Whether you answer yes or no, it still means that you have been beating you wife.)
How much is a one-dollar candy?(The answer is so obvious that it can be frustrating, and it seems like you're fishing for another answer.)
Keep interviews to friendly conversations, often in informal home visits, and memorize responses. In those circumstances, subjects explain at length and provide very good information:
getting to know youand later visits are given to more complex information.
It's important to put people at ease and create a situation that creates openness and honesty. Don’t appear threatening. To put people at ease, ethnographers can memorise their questions so that they are naturally part of normal conversations and are useful in high-security situations. It also makes it easy to ask follow-up questions as the opportunities arise.
It's important to put people at ease and create a situation where they are free to speak openly and honestly. You can also make them feel like they know something valuable, and most people love to share their knowledge.
Good questioning preparation and techniques can help prevent or minimize the follow problemmatical responses from interviewees:
safe, untrue answers; they give answers that sound good and protect themselves and others.
Here's how not to do it. Go through and identify each part that would make people uncomfortable:
I am the famous Dr. Helmut Von Schmidt, Professor of Philosophy at Vienna University. I’m conducting some research and would like you to help.
You must sign a form to be involved. Please read all five pages of fine print.
My interview will follow a questionnaire. It has only 200 questions and will take three days.
We can interview you at my office at the University, room no. 3072, in the philosophy department.
Do you mind if I have these three other professors observe you?
I need to record every word you say during the interview; I’ll put the microphone near your mouth so we get a good recording.
Every word you say will be carefully analyzed by my team of scientists in the back room.
Questioning is a basic research technique, and you can be required to master it. Your goal is to get interviewees doing all the talking with you only keeping it on track.
When it come to asking questions, as much as possible, keep interviews to friendly conversations and make notes immediately afterwards, not during the conversation. Technically these are called free informal interviews.
Other than that, there are certain important attitudes and rationales in ethnography.
People almost certainly have very good reasons for what they do. Try to find out those reasons. I am consistently surprised that cultures are so logical, even when I don't agree with some values.
Some people will give better answers than others and some answers might not seem to make much sense. It might be that they do make sense, but you haven't figured out why yet because you haven't gone far enough into the mindset.
Some people give partial answers simply because they are speaking spontaneously and don't have time to think out their entire rationale. And of course there will always be people who simply don't know why or who deliberately give you a poor answer because they are shy or feel threatened.
There will probably be cultural aspects to asking good questions. For example, people of one culture differentiate sharply between the purpose (hidden agenda) of the question and what it is that is asked (direct intent). They might not answer what you asked, but respond according to what they perceive your purpose to be.
As another example, they might answer your question very well, but their idea of a reason might not seem logical to you. In that case, you need to identify what kind of cultural logic they are using. If you dismiss the answer, you have dismissed an excellent learning opportunity.
People might become embarrassed if you push them for an answer and they honestly don't know. It might be totally inappropriate to ask a person of the opposite sex, or of particular age groups.
Some people will be recognized as knowing more than others. People will generally know who has the job of safeguarding their cultural knowledge. Those people may be university staff, shamans, reclusive mystics, artisans, or grandmothers. They maintain their knowledge, perhaps act as a resource to the general population, teach it to others, and pass it onto their replacements in the next generation.
Some safeguarded knowledge might deliberately be kept secret, and some knowledge is considered too "deep" for most people to understand. They may also use specific terminology that is different from the general populace.
Be aware that your race, age, gender, apparent class or role could affect the research. For example, if you are a male, then you might have limited access to women informants in some societies and only be able to research amongst men.
Alternatively, you might receive very different answers from a female researcher. This is not bad, but you need to realize that your identity is a factor in what you can learn. Obviously, then, a woman might be able to do very good research amongst women if only men had previously researched that group of people.
If they think you are a genuine friend who wants to learn, they are more likely to give you an honest answer. But if you say that you are writing a graduate dissertation, they can feel threatened by your role and very pressured to provide a clever answer. They might decline, especially if they have much lesser formal education, or they might manufacture a fictitious answer to sound academic.
There are also cases when researchers have become disrespected, and people deliberately create spurious, fictitious answers.
Try the following approaches to get people to talk. It is not usually difficult; most people liketo talk about what they thing they know.
Interviewees are sometimes reluctant to speak. In these cases, you have several options:
What about you, Krissy? What do you think?then follow it up with:
Mel, what do think?However, some people want to just be listeners and don’t want to speak. It’s okay; they might contribute later when they are more comfortable in the group.
In a group, make sure that everyone who wants a say gets a say.
The people on that side of the room have been quiet; what do you think?; Close people down only when you have no choice.
I think we need to give someone else a turn.
Silent periods, however, are not always bad. A silent period allows everybody to think about something in particular before they answer. You can get them to give answers by staying quiet, but you lose the opportunity if you talk too much. Put another way, you can give them a reflection time, which is very helpful if the group is accustomed to talking without thinking. You can build on new discussion once the silence has finished.
Anecdotes are very good evidence of the beliefs of the person giving the anecdote, so they are very useful for investigating cultural phenomena. At an individual level, an individual's anecdotes are essential to defining his/her identity and watersheds. At a group level, anecdotes reflect the values and beliefs of a community. For example, people in organizations use them as folklore to maintain their organization's unique culture and identity.
This does not mean that anecdotes are true, so they are considered unhelpful in most other kinds of research.
Guess what's on my mind.
Postmodern philosophy has greatly affected ethnography. Postmodernism is largely the re-emergence of subjectivism in the human sciences, and one of its interests is the mystique of human personality.
First, ethnography reflects the person of the ethnographer. Ethnographers follow a unique path inward when learning culture, being transformed from an etic to an emic viewpoint through people they meet and a unique set of learning experiences.
The main research instrument of an ethnographer is him/herself as a person. Their findings can be colored by their personalities and the kinds of relationships that they have with informants. Consequently, another researcher in the same community might follow a different unique path and quite validly come up with different conclusions.
Besides, simply asking questions can stimulate cultural change. If people have never before articulated their thoughts on an issue, or have never before consciously thought through an issue, their views may be changed as they seek answers. And once the issues have been raised, there is usually no way for them to return to the former state. An ethnographer's incisive questions may stimulate a new perspective from which people view the topic.
In method, it is now more acceptable for ethnographers to refer to themselves personally and to include longer first-person quotes from informants.
Second, ethnographic data is soft, much softer than was previously thought. An informant's opinions may be valid data, but they might change with mood and circumstance. An informant may not have clearly articulated his/her thoughts when asked the first time, and may express them better when asked again later. The first was incomplete or inaccurate, but the improved version may have been artificially developed. Informants can also intentionally lie or make up fictitious answers to save face. In principle, soft data is still usable, but it affects the epistemology of the research.
As people are very idiosyncratic, generalizations are necessarily less accurate and less representative of the data than was thought. Even firmly enforced rules may be viewed or interpreted differently by different individuals. Consequently, there is a tendency to avoid generalizations whenever possible.
Researchers once tried to confirm data and results independently from more than source (called triangulation). It is a good idea but doesn't always work. Researchers have limited ability to triangulate because data is idiosyncratic and variable, and other researchers will not have exactly the same inward path.
Postmodernism rejects constructivism, the idea that a researcher uses data to construct a theory. Such a theory is separate from the data itself. It is the personal creation of the researcher and reflects his/her persona. One of the ways that researchers determine theory is by choosing questions to start with, so researchers now take more care to avoid prescribing questions and let questions come from the data.
This has led to post-constructivism, that is, attempts to develop theory much nearer to the data. It lets the data speak for itself as much as possible rather than being colored so much by the interpretation of the researcher.
Another development in postmodernism is the idea of alternative realities. In the constructivist era, scientists attempted to develop theories that explained all reality in their respective disciplines. Eventually it was conceded that reality is too complex to be explained by any one theory.
It then became acceptable to have multiple theories, all of which were to some extent justifiable, and which were not necessarily consistent with each other. Each theory became one tool in a toolkit. One development of this idea was that different people (or groups of people) could construct different realities, which are not fictions and not subject to examination from other realities. To some extent, these are much the same as worldviews.
Another development was that chaos is not too far away; that is, that part of reality is unordered and chaotic, and not amenable to ordered theory. Yet even then, there are rules of a different order governing or describing chaos. Acceptance of chaos is a natural result of accepting that no single theory can explain all reality. It follows that reality is not mechanistic, that is, a big machine that plods on predictably according to fixed rules.
Another aspect does not affect what you do or write, but the interpretation of the written report.
The report itself is an interpretation. It is linear and verbal. That is, it is written down in language that starts on page one and goes through to the end. However, the events of the ethnographer's field experience almost never occur in the same order as the contents of the written report. Besides, the experience was holistic while the written report contains selected particulars.
Another postmodern trend has been to note that readers often project their own persona onto what they read, so their interpretation might be more a reflection of themselves than an understanding of what the writer wrote.
In practice, it means you must read an ethnography between the lines to see what really happened to the ethnographer on the field.
Conclusion. Postmodern concepts of ethnography have exposed serious weaknesses in previous views. However, postmodernism has major faults of its own and there is no need to push it too far. (In fact, postmodernism is already showing signs of losing impetus and it isn't yet clear what will replace it.) Ethnographies can still represent real people out there, and need not be swamped by the ethnographer's or the reader's personality. And it is possible to make mistakes and for others to conduct research that exposes them.
Brian Holliday
A central problem of narrative analysis is the control of the voice, or who speaks to the reader or listener. Narrative is all about memory and selection, both remembering and forgetting. What is actively remembered and forgotten can depend on who the audience is, and this is true as the narrative is told both at the interviewee/interviewer stage and at the writer/reader level.
Narrative happens at many levels, and the question often is, Whose narrative is being told?
To throw in an additional wild card, the reader’s grid and interpretation of the narrative is largely beyond the control of the writing process, and naturally and rightly so.
However, the writer influences, wittingly or unwittingly, the production of the work through an extended process of selection as the narrative is edited and re-edited, translated and interpreted. Having end goals in view (before the editing, translation, interpretation process takes place) can deeply compromise the final product.
In ethnography, the only way a reader can assess the original material, and the only way the interviewee can have an unqualified voice, is to include the verbatims in the work. This by no means eliminates the problems of interpretation by the reader, but it is a positive step in terms of voice.
In narrative analysis, where notes rather than verbatims are taken, the editing process has already begun, the narrative is immediately different from the original. How this narrative is controlled is important, and the reader needs to know the range of background and beliefs that inform both the interviewee and the interviewer.
Each informant may have a different view of what is discussed in the narrative, and generalized perspectives are not very helpful. One of the changes in post-modernism was that generalizations, however necessary, are recognized to be the artificial constructions of researchers, as opposed to the authenticity of the original narrative.
Each informant's narrative is unique. For the purpose of a particular research paper, it is important for the researcher to:
The danger with narrative analysis is that it so easily shifts to narrative interpretation, where the interpretation is imposed from a different, usually dominant, cultural narrative. It is easy for the researcher to slip into this mode, and it inadvertently reinforces what largely has been the fate of the narrative of those living under cultural domination. (In hermeneutics, this kind of reading into the text is called eisogesis.)
Clearly all narrative analysis is compromised, and this reflects the everyday reality of our existence together as people with widely differing, interacting narratives.
The process of listening, interpreting, speaking and re-listening is extremely important. It must take place openly and persistently so that we (especially anyone from a dominant culture) increasingly understand the narratives of others.
It then behoves the researcher to be aware, vigilant and open in the personal, and public, on-going process of intercultural communication and understanding.
Due to US legislative requirements for human research subjects to give prior written permission, some US ethnographers have shifted toward “embedded ethnography.” In this approach, the ethnographer works with a team of informants (“co-workers or collaborators”) to write an ethnography.
It works well for organizational ethnography, but disclosure of purpose and permission makes the researcher’s more difficult in cultural studies because it can precipitate subjects’ attitudes that defeat the research:
success.
Reference
Lewis, S. and Russell, A. (2011) 'Being embedded : a way forward for ethnographic research.', Ethnography
, 12 (3). pp. 398-416.
Many books are available, but the following are recommended as starters:
• James P. Spradley The Ethnographic Interview Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1979.
• James P. Spradley Participant Observation Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Fort Worth. 1980
• David M. Fetterman Ethnography Step by Step Applied Social Research Methods Series Vol. 17, Sage Publications, Newbury Park, Ca. 1989.
We mentioned keeping a diary as a contemporaneous written record of your experiences, and warned not to work from memory long after the event. As you progress, the diary will grow into a set of field notes.
You have finished collecting data when:
You have finished analysing data when you can represent the emic viewpoint on your topic.
Write up your document and edit it into a langauge style that will engage your readers. Use direct quotations when relevant; this descreases the distance between your informants and your readers.
One of the unique aspects of ethnography is that the field data and the analysis are combined in the final research report. You might also need to adjust your outline. The following is not a rule or guideline, but might he helpful:
Content 15
Take time to process what you have experienced in meeting with people.
These notes are suitable for a general description of a community. However, if your topic is quite specific, use only the relevant items and expand them as needed.
Content 18
Content 19
Content 20
Content 21
Content 22
Content 23
Content 24
Content 25
Content 26
Content 27
Content 28
Content 29