Ethnography & Research

23/09/2015

Ethnographic fieldwork involves researchers

immersing themselves in the society to collect
descriptive data. As Hammersley and Atkinson
( 2007 , p. 3) contended, conducting fieldwork
involves the ethnographer participating, overtly
or covertly, in people s daily lives for an extended
period of time, watching what happens, listening
to what is said, asking questions through
informal and formal interviews, collecting documents
and artefacts in fact, gathering whatever
data are available to throw light on the
issues that are the emerging focus of inquiry.

Qualitative Field research is especially effective for studying subtle

nuances in attitudes and behaviours and for examining social processes
over time. The main strength of this method, then, lies in the depth of
understanding that it allows.
Weakness of Qualitative Research
Field research has several weaknesses as well. First, qualitative
research is not an appropriate means for arriving at statistical
descriptions of large populations. Observing casual political discussions in
restaurants, for example, would not yield trustworthy estimates of future
voting behaviors of the total voting population. Nevertheless, the study
could provide important insights into how political attitudes are formed.
Field research also has a potential problem with reliability. Reliability
can also be thought of as dependability: If you made the same
measurement or observation again and again, would you get the same
result? In field research, since observations and interpretations are
subjective and personal, the researcher must take pains to address this
and prevent their personal opinions and feelings from biasing their
results.