ethnography Qualitative research design in which a researcher looks in

depth at a cultural group in its natural setting.

What is The Purpose?

 The purpose of ethnographic research is to attempt to understand
what is happening naturally in the setting and to interpret the data
gathered to see what implications could be formed from the data.
 The purpose of the ethnography research study is to close up the
distance between an outsider's interpretation (the etic
perspective) of social order and the real meaning of life experience
to those under study (the emic perspective).

What are the methods of Data collection?

 Typical ethnographic research employs three kinds of data
collection: interviews, observation, and documents. This in turn
produces three kinds of data: quotations, descriptions, and
excerpts of documents, resulting in one product: narrative
description. This narrative often includes charts, diagrams and
additional artifacts that help to tell "the story."

What are the methods of Data Analysis?

 there appear to be at least three levels at which analysis is warranted. The first is a macro-
analysis of structural relationships where governmental regulations, federal, state, and local tax
support and the presence or absence of organized political and religious pressure all affect the
classroom experien ce.... The milieu of a particular school appears to be the second area of
analysis in which one may examine facilities, pupil-teacher ratios, racial and cultural composition
of the faculty and the students, ... all of which may have a direct impact in the quality as well as
the quantity of education a child receives. Analysis of an individual classroom and the activities
and interactions of a specific group of children with a single teacher is the third level at which
there may be profitable analysis of the variations in the educational experience

What are the focus?

 focuses on developing a complex, complete description of the culture of a group, a culture-
sharing group;” that ethnography however “is not the study of a culture, but a study of the
social behaviors of an identifiable group of people;” that the group “has been intact and
interacting for long enough to develop discernable working patterns,”
  . The focus of investigation is on the everyday behaviors of the people in the group (e.g.,
interactions, language, rituals), with an intent to identify cultural norms, beliefs, social
structures, and other patterns.
 Whereas ethnographies once focused on longstanding cultural groups (e.g., people living on the
island of Samoa), more recently they have been used to study such “cultures” as those of adult
work environments, elementary school classrooms, exclusive social cliques in adolescence,
violence-prone adolescent groups, and Internetbased communities1 (e.g., Bender, 2001;
Kozinets, 2010; McGibbon, Peter, & Gallop, 2010; Mehan, 1979; Merten, 2011).

An ethnography is especially useful for gaining an understanding of the complexities of a particular

sociocultural group. It allows considerable flexibility in the methods used to obtain information, which
can be either an advantage (to an experienced researcher who knows what to look for) or a
disadvantage (to a novice who may be overwhelmed and distracted by unimportant details). Hence, if
you decide that an ethnography is the approach most suitable for your research problem, we urge you
to get a solid grounding in cultural anthropology before you venture into the field (Creswell, 2013).

WHAT ARE THE TYPES OF ETHNOGRAPHIC DESIGNS?

◆The realist ethnograph
◆The case study
◆The critical ethnography
A realist ethnography is a popular approach used by cultural anthropologists.
A realist ethnography is an objective account of the situation, typically written in the third-person point
of view, reporting objectively on the information learned from participants at a fi eld site. In this
ethnographic design:

Popular Forms of Data Collected by Ethnographers

• Casual conversation
• Life history, life-cycle interview
• Key informant (participant) interview
• Semi-structured interview
• Structured interview
• Survey
• Household census, ethnogenealogy
• Questionnaire (written and/or oral)
• Projective techniques
• Observations (nonparticipant to participant)
• Tests
• Content analysis of secondary text or visual material
• Focus group interview
• Elicitation techniques (e.g., looking at a scrapbook and talking about memories)
• Audiovisual material (e.g., audio or visual record, such as camera recording)
• Spatial mapping (e.g., recording ways data vary across units, such as group and institution)
• Network analysis (e.g., describing networks in time and space)