RESEARCH DESIGNS - QUALITATIVE

ETHNOGRAPHY

Meaning

Ethnographic studies are usually holistic, founded on the idea that human beings are best understood in the fullest possible context, including the place where they live, the improvements they have made to that place, how they make a living and gather food, housing, energy and water for themselves, what their marriage customs are, what language(s) they speak and so on. Ethnography is a form of research focusing on the sociology of meaning through close field observation of socio-cultural phenomena.

Typically, the ethnographer focuses on a community (not necessarily geographic, considering also work, leisure, classroom or school groups and other communities). Ethnography may be approached from the point of view of art and cultural preservation and as a descriptive rather than analytic endeavour. It essentially is a branch of social and cultural anthropology. The emphasis in ethnography is on studying an entire culture. The method starts with selection of a culture, review of the literature pertaining to the culture, and identification of variables of interest - typically variables perceived as significant by members of the culture. Ethnography is an enormously wide area with an immense diversity of practitioners and methods. However, the most common ethnographic approach is participant observation and unstructured interviewing as a part of field research. The ethnographer becomes immersed in the culture as an active participant and records extensive field notes. In an ethnographic study, there is no preset limit of what will be observed and interviewed and no real end point in as is the case with grounded theory. Hammersley and Atkinson define ethnography as, "We see the term as referring primarily to a particular method or sets of methods. In its most characteristic form it involves the ethnographer participating, overtly or covertly, in people's lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions—in fact, collecting whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of the research. Johnson defines ethnography as "a descriptive account of social life and culture in a particular social system based on detailed observations of what people actually do."

Assumptions in an Ethnographic Research

According to Garson, these are as follows:

a. Ethnography assumes that the principal research interest is primarily affected by community cultural understandings. The methodology virtually assures that common cultural understandings will be identified for the research interest at hand. Interpretation is apt to place great emphasis on the causal importance of such cultural understandings. There is a possibility that an ethnographic focus will overestimate the role of cultural perceptions and underestimate the causal role of objective forces.

b. Ethnography assumes an ability to identify the relevant community of interest. In some settings, this can be difficult. Community, formal organization, informal group and individual-level perceptions may all play a causal role in the subject under study and the importance of these may vary by time, place and issue. There is a possibility that an ethnographic focus may overestimate the role of community culture and underestimate the causal role of individual psychological or of sub-community (or for that matter, extra-community) forces.

c. Ethnography assumes that the researcher is capable of understanding the cultural mores of the population under study, has mastered the language or technical jargon of the culture and has based findings on comprehensive knowledge of the culture. There is a danger that the researcher may introduce bias toward perspectives of his or her own culture.

d. While not inherent to the method, cross-cultural ethnographic research runs the risk of falsely assuming that given measures have the same meaning across cultures.

Characteristics of Ethnographic Research:

According to Hammersley and Sanders, ethnography is characterized by the following features:

 (a) People's behaviour is studied in everyday contexts.

(b) It is conducted in a natural setting.

(c) Its goal is more likely to be exploratory rather than evaluative.

(d) It is aimed at discovering the local person‘s or ―native‘s‖ point of view, wherein, the native may be a consumer or an end-user.

 (e) Data are gathered from a wide range of sources, but observation and/or relatively informal conversations are usually the principal ones.

 (f) The approach to data collection is unstructured in that it does not involve following through a predetermined detailed plan set up at the beginning of the study nor does it determine the categories that will be used for analysing and interpreting the soft data obtained. This does not mean that the research is unsystematic. It simply means that initially the data are collected as raw form and a wide amount as feasible.

(g) The focus is usually a single setting or group of a relatively small size. In life history research, the focus may even be a single individual.

(h) The analysis of the data involves interpretation of the meanings and functions of human actions and mainly takes the form of verbal descriptions and explanations, with quantification and statistical analysis playing a subordinate role at most.

(i) It is cyclic in nature concerning data collection and analysis. It is open to change and refinement throughout the process as new learning shapes future observations. As one type of data provides new information, this information may stimulate the researcher to look at another type of data or to elicit confirmation of an interpretation from another person who is part of the culture being studied.

Guidelines for Conducting Ethnography

Following are some broad guidelines for conducting fieldwork:

1. Be descriptive in taking field notes. Avoid evaluations.

2. Collect a diversity of information from different perspectives.

3. Cross-validate and triangulate by collecting different kinds of data obtained using observations, interviews, programme documentation, recordings and photographs.

4. Capture participants' views of their own experiences in their own words. Use quotations to represent programme participants in their own terms.

5. Select key informants carefully. Draw on the wisdom of their informed perspectives, but keep in mind that their perspectives are limited.

6. Be conscious of and perceptive to the different stages of fieldwork.

 (a) Build trust and rapport at the entry stage. Remember that the researcher-observer is also being observed and evaluated.

(b) Stay attentive and disciplined during the more routine middle-phase of fieldwork. (c) Focus on pulling together a useful synthesis as fieldwork draws to a close.

(d) Be well-organized and meticulous in taking detailed field notes at all stages of fieldwork.

(e) Maintain an analytical perspective grounded in the purpose of the fieldwork: to conduct research while at the same time remaining involved in experiencing the observed setting as fully as possible.

(f) Distinguish clearly between description, interpretation and judgment.

 (g) Provide formative feedback carefully as part of the verification process of fieldwork. Observe its effect.

(h) Include in your field notes and observations reports of your own experiences, thoughts and feelings. These are also field data. Fieldwork is a highly personal experience. The meshing of fieldwork procedures with individual capabilities and situational variation is what makes fieldwork a highly personal experience. The validity and meaningfulness of the results obtained depend directly on the observer's skill, discipline, and perspective. This is both the strength and weakness of observational methods.

Techniques Used in Conducting Ethnography

These include the following

A. Listening to conversations and interviewing. The researcher needs to make notes or audio-record these.

B. Observing behaviour and its traces, making notes and mapping patterns of behaviour, sketching of relationship between people, taking photographs, video-recordings of daily life and activities and using digital technology and web cameras.

Stages in Conducting Ethnography

According to Spradley, following are the stages in conducting an ethnographic study :

1. Selecting an ethnographic project.

2. Asking ethnographic questions and collecting ethnographic data.

3. Making an ethnographic record.

4. Analysing ethnographic data and conducting more research as required.

5. Outlining and writing an ethnography.

Steps of Conducting Ethnography

According to Spradley, ethnography is a non-linear research process but is rather, a cyclical process. As the researcher develops questions and uncovers answers, more questions emerge and the researcher must move through the steps again. According to Spradley, following are the steps of conducting an ethnographic study .

1. Locating a social situation. The scope of the topic may vary from the  micro-ethnography of a single-social-situation  to macro-ethnograph of a complex society. According to Hymes, there are three levels of ethnography including comprehensive ethnography which documents an entire culture,  the topic-oriented ethnography which looks at aspects of a culture and hypothesis-oriented ethnography which beings with an idea about why something happens in a culture. Suppose you want to conduct research on classroom environment. This step requires that you select a category of classroom environment and identify social and academic situations in which it is used.

2. Collecting data. There are four types of data collection used in ethnographic research, namely,

(a) watching or being part of a social context using participant and non-participant observation and noted in the form of on observer notes, logs, diaries, and so on,

 (b) asking open and closed questions that cover identified topics using semi-structured interviews,

(c) asking open questions that enable a free development of conversation using unstructured interviews and

(d) using collected material such as published and unpublished documents, photographs, papers, videos and assorted artefacts, letters, books or reports. The problem with such data is that the more you have, greater is the effort required to analyse. Moreover, as the study progresses, the amount of data increases making it more difficult and sharp to analyse the data. Yet more data leads to better codes, categories, theories and conclusions. What is 'enough' data is subject to debate and may well be constrained by the time and resource the researcher has available. Deciding when and where to collect data can be a crucial decision. A profound analysis at one point may miss others, whilst a broad encounter may miss critical finer points. Several deep dives can be a useful method. Social data can be difficult to access due to ethics, confidentiality and determination necessary in such research. There is often less division of activity phases in qualitative research and the researcher may be memoing and coding as he proceeds with the study. The researcher usually uses theoretical and selective sampling for data collection.

3. Doing participant observation. Formulate open questions about the social situations under study. Malinowski opines that ethnographic research should begin with ―foreshadowed problems. These problems are questions that researchers bring to a study and to which they keep an open eye but to which they are not enslaved. Collect examples of the classroom environment. Select research tools/techniques. Spradley provides a matrix of questions about cultural space, objects, acts activities, events, time, actors, goals and feelings that researchers can use when just starting the study.

4. Making an ethnographic record. Write descriptions of classroom environment and the situations in which it is used.

5. Making descriptive observations. Select method for doing analysis.

6. Making domain analysis. Discover themes within the data and apply existing theories, if any, as applicable. Domain analysis requires the researcher to first choose one semantic relationship such as ―causes or ―classes‖. Second, you select a portion of your data and begin reading it and while doing so, fill out a domain analysis worksheet where you list all the terms that fit the semantic relationship you chose. Now formulate structural questions for each domain. Structural questions occur less frequently as compared to descriptive questions in normal conversation. Hence they require more framing.