ETHNOGRAPHY

ETHNOGRAPHY

ETHNOGRAPHY

Ethnography (from Greek ἔθνος ethnos "folk, people, nation" and γράφω grapho "I write") is the systematic study of people and cultures. It is designed to explore cultural phenomena where the researcher observes society from the point of view of the subject of the study. An ethnography is a means to represent graphically and in writing the culture of a group. The resulting field study or a case report reflects the knowledge and the system of meanings in the lives of a cultural group.

Features of ethnographic research

•      Involves investigation of very few cases, maybe just one case, in detail.

•      Often involves working with primarily unconstructed data. This data had not been coded at the point of data collection in terms of a closed set of analytic categories.

•      Emphasizes on exploring social phenomena rather than testing hypotheses.

•      Data analysis involves interpretation of the functions and meanings of human actions. The product of this is mainly verbal explanations, where statistical analysis and quantification play a subordinate role.

•      Methodological discussions focus more on questions about how to report findings in the field than on methods of data collection and interpretation.

•      Ethnographies focus on describing the culture of a group in very detailed and complex manner. The ethnography can be of the entire group or a sub part of it.

•      It involves engaging in extensive field work where data collection is mainly by interviews, symbols, artifacts, observations, and many other sources of data.

•      The researcher in ethnography type of research looks for patterns of the group's mental activities, that is their ideas and beliefs expressed through language or other activities, and how they behave in their groups as expressed through their actions that the researcher observed.

•      In ethnography, the researcher gathers what is available, what is normal, what it is that people do, what they say, and how they work.

Procedures for conducting ethnography

•      Determine if ethnography is the most appropriate design to use to study the research problem. Ethnography is suitable if the needs are to describe how a cultural group works and to explore their beliefs, language, behaviours and also issues faced by the group, such as power, resistance, and dominance.

•      Then identify and locate a culture-sharing group to study. This group is one whose members have been together for an extended period of time, so that their shared language, patterns of behaviour and attitudes have merged into discernible patterns. This group can also be a group that has been marginalized by society.

•      Select cultural themes, issues or theories to study about the group. These themes, issues, and theories provide an orienting framework for the study of the culture-sharing group. As discussed by Hammersley and Atkinson (2007), Wolcott, and Fetterman (2009). The ethnographer begins the study by examining people in interaction in ordinary settings and discerns pervasive patterns such as life cycles, events, and cultural themes.

•      For studying cultural concepts, determine which type of ethnography to use. Perhaps how the group works need to be described, or a critical ethnography can expose issues such as power, hegemony, and advocacy for certain groups.

•      Should collect information in the context or setting where the group works or lives. This is called fieldwork. Types of information typically needed in ethnography are collected by going to the research site, respecting the daily lives of individuals at the site and collecting a wide variety of materials. Field issues of respect, reciprocity, deciding who owns the data and others are central to Ethnography.

Ethnography of Communication: A Person-Centered Approach

•      Setting: The resident’s room in the nursing home

•      Participants: A person with dementia and a graduate student in speech-language pathology

•      Ends (goals): These are difficult to ascertain in the case of the person with dementia. However, the graduate student has both overt goals (e.g., to learn about the resident’s life, and to spend time visiting with him/her) and covert goals (e.g., to collect data in order to study and treat dementia)

•      Acts sequence: The types of communication used (e.g., a question-answer format)

•      Key: Whether the interaction is informal or formal

•      Instrumentality: The mode of communication (e.g., conversation or sign language)

•      Norms: Polite conversation

•      Genre: Possibly a friendly chat or “small talk”