510876
research-article2013
QIXXXX10.1177/1077800413510876Qualitative InquiryTanggaard
Article
Ethnographic Fieldwork in
Psychology: Lost and Found?
Lene Tanggaard1
Abstract
It is argued in the present article that ethnographic fieldwork can serve useful methodological ends within psychology and
open the discipline to the cultural landscape of psychological phenomena in everyday life in social practices. Furthermore,
a positive case is made for the soundness of ethnographic fieldwork. That is, rather than disputing the claim that qualitative
methods can serve scientific ends, it is argued that ethnographic fieldwork is suitable for studying the constitution of
psychological phenomena in social practices across time.
Keywords
fieldwork, psychology in everyday life, qualitative inquiry, social practice
Ethnographic fieldwork represents the attempt to enter
“often for an extended period of time, the place where peo-
ple live and form personal relationships with them”
(Packer, 2011, p. 209). As a psychologist, Packer is con-
vinced that ethnography is well-suited for a psychology
attempting to circumvent its inherent dualism. Ethnography
may help us recognize that practical activity occurs prior to
the separation of subject and object, and is therefore the
locus for constituting social order and the knowing subject.
According to Packer (2011) a psychology interested in the
constitution of psychological phenomena in everyday life
needs ethnography.
The main thesis in the present article is that ethnographic
fieldwork represents an important, and to some extent still
somewhat marginalized approach to psychological study.
As mentioned by Langenhove in 1995, Wundt, the founder
of modern psychology, never saw the experimental method
as the only possible method for gaining experimental
knowledge. He also called for a psychology based on ethno-
graphic studies of human culture (the so-called “Völker-
psychologie”). However, “The Wundtian approach to
psychology did not establish itself as a suitable method”
(Langenhove, 1995, p. 17). The attention quickly shifted to
making psychology a natural science, and the human being
was treated more and more as a natural object.
As such, in the present article, the intention is to try
again to broaden the repertoire of available methods within
psychology. It is argued that ethnographic fieldwork can
serve useful methodological ends within psychology and
open the discipline to the cultural landscape of psychologi-
cal phenomena in everyday life in social practices.
Furthermore, a positive case is made for the validity or
Qualitative Inquiry
2014, Vol. 20(2) 167­–174
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DOI: 10.1177/1077800413510876
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soundness of ethnographic fieldwork. That is, rather than
disputing the claim that qualitative methods can serve sci-
entific ends, it is argued that ethnographic fieldwork is suit-
able for studying the constitution of psychological
phenomena in social practices across time. The author
hopes that the article will assist psychological researchers
aiming at conducting ethnographic fieldwork and help both
to communicate and evaluate their studies.
The remainder of the article is structured as follows:
First, the (forgotten) history of ethnographic fieldwork in
psychology is considered briefly, after which a description
of the characteristics of ethnographic fieldwork is presented
and examples given from the author’s own research. Finally,
there is a discussion of the value of such studies within psy-
chology as a discipline.
Aspects of Ethnographic Fieldwork
As an approach to research, ethnographic fieldwork is
almost synonymous with anthropology or sociology. It
found its early manifestations in the writings of Bronislaw
Malinowski, who held the first chair in social anthropology
at the London School of Economics, and Franz Boas, the
founder of American cultural anthropology. Its primary
method of data gathering is participant observation, ethno-
graphic interviewing, and the writing up of field notes. As
1
Aalborg University, Denmark
Corresponding Author:
Lene Tanggaard, Department of Communication, Aalborg University,
Kroghstræde 3, 9220 Ålborg Ø, Denmark.
Email: lenet@hum.aau.dk
168 Qualitative Inquiry 20(2)
stated by Atkinson and Hammersley (1989), the purpose of
ethnography differs somewhat, ranging from the production
of cultural knowledge a la Spradley, detailed studies of
interactional patterns a la Gumpertz and/or a holistic analy-
sis of cultures to test and develop new theories. According
to Atkinson, Coffey, Delamont, Lofland, and Lofland
(2007), “ethnographic research has always contained within
it a variety of perspectives” and has been inspired by “aes-
thetic and literary models as much as on models of ‘scien-
tific’ research” (Atkinson et al., 1989).
Briefly put, there are at least two components of ethno-
graphic fieldwork. The first is the field as the place where
the researcher goes, the scene of ethnography and the object
of investigation. The other is the work that is done there
(Packer, 2011, p. 211). Within the early tradition of ethnog-
raphy, the field was often equated with a place, a whole or a
clearly bounded culture—in the paradigmatic case, an
island (Packer, 2011, p. 233). However, for various reasons
and related to the linguistic, interpretative, and rhetorical
turn or simply the turn, this conception has become dis-
puted and there is now a growing awareness that the object
of ethnography is dispersed in (diffuse) space-time relations
and contested. It is never just “there” to be seen by the eth-
nographer from a possible “anywhere.” The field needs to
be worked out and constructed through years of academic
practice and continual thinking and communication, in most
cases, by the researcher. Furthermore, the idea that the
researcher can “go native” and become fully absorbed in
another culture by way of observation, has also been con-
tested. There is therefore a growing awareness that the
researcher can never become “the other” in any absolute
sense. She will continue to be an outsider, even if trying to
achieve full membership in a particular field, and she is not
only discovering culture but also more precisely writing it
up. In essence, fieldwork is a meeting between two cultures
or systems—that of the researcher and the researched—a
meeting that enables in situ observation of specific
sequences of activities in and across different sites, the use
of researcher subjectivity as a research instrument and a
grounding of the phenomena observed in the field
(Baszanger & Dodier, 2004; Toren, 1996).
Ethnographic Fieldwork as Central to
the History of Psychology?
Ethnographic fieldwork in everyday life outside the labora-
tory is not frequently chosen by psychologists as the funda-
mental design. Indeed, for many, experimental work is the
sine qua non of scientific inquiry (Hammersley, 1996). One
main reason for this is that quantitative methods have been
advocated as the methods legitimizing psychology as a
valid and objective natural science. Quantifiable psycho-
logical constructs, such as IQ or personality test items, have
furthermore served the need for social control in Western
societies, by providing quantified outcomes, whether the
task was that of recruiting for the military, the conventional
job market or solving learning problems within the educa-
tional system (Rosenbaum & Valsiner, 2011). As a result,
study topics within psychology have often been chosen in
accordance with the experimental and/or quantitative
imperative, all too often at the expense of qualitative
approaches. Michell (2003) argued that psychologists rarely
raise the question of whether all kinds of psychological phe-
nomena are quantifiable. A possible side-effect is that the
practice of selecting study topics is frequently based on the
methods available, with a resulting reluctance toward study-
ing nonquantifiable topics outside the domain of experi-
mental-laboratory studies. However, exceptions to generally
dismissing fieldwork can indeed be found in mainstream
psychology. A famous example of participant observation
in psychology is the study by Festinger, Riecken, and
Schachter (1964) of a religious sect in the United States,
conducted with the aim of testing cognitive dissonance the-
ory. In a more critical vein, Toren (1996) argues in favor of
ethnographic studies as a way to critically address the con-
cepts that have been taken for granted in psychology, such
as that of the individual, gender and the concept of science.
Elsass (2003) sees ethnographic fieldwork as a common
approach in the relatively new field of cultural psychology.
In developmental psychology, the interest in sociocultural
differences in developmental patterns has evolved from eth-
nographic fieldwork in other cultures (Hundeide, 2004),
and Hedegaard (1990) has described how to advance par-
ticipant observation of children as an alternative to for-
malized testing within educational and developmental
psychology. Furthermore, researchers within organizational
psychology (Carrero, Peiro, & Salanova, 2000) and applied
sports psychology are beginning to publish papers based on
ethnographic field studies (Krane & Baird, 2005). The
above emphasis on fieldwork involves close interaction
between researcher and informants and extensive research
time in the field.
As the above short description illustrates, ethnographic
fieldwork does play a role within certain disciplines in psy-
chology, but typically found outside the mainstream cogni-
tive or clinical areas. However, as mentioned briefly in the
introduction, Wundt, the founder of modern scientific psy-
chology often associated with the laboratory, also studied
Völker-psychologie and this approach used historical, rather
than experimental methods. Folk psychology more closely
resembles anthropology, in that it deals with language, cul-
ture, religion, and myths. Wundt thought that although
experimental methods were important and necessary in the
study of psychology, they could not be the only method of
investigation. Language, Wundt argued, is one of the most
important parts of mental processing in thinking, and he did
not believe that one could learn about these things through
experimentation. He wrote a two-volume work on this
Tanggaard 169
subject titled “Lectures on the Human and Animal Mind.”
This work covered such issues as speech, religion, and cul-
ture. Thorndike, one of the founders of educational psychol-
ogy who was himself an experimenter, also argued in favor
of other kinds of methodological approaches beyond those
applied in laboratories (O’Donnell & Levin, 2001).
Furthermore, some researchers even claim that ethno-
graphic fieldwork is a necessary part of all empirical work
in psychology, even though this tends to be neglected. In his
book on “Radical Psychology,” Parker (2005) states that all
psychological empirical work involves some aspects of
ethnography:
All good, empirical psychological research is ethnography of
one kind or another, and some of the most innovative studies
in the discipline have included this methodology as part of the
work. The question is what level of ethnographic description
is produced. (Parker, 2005, p. 36f)
Parker (2005) argues that the laboratory-based, experi-
mental approaches would not be able to produce any
“data” at all, if the researcher did not closely observe the
behavior of the subjects (p. 37). Nonetheless, observation
as part of a laboratory experiment occurs at a different
level than in a field study. The time spent on observations
in ethnographic fieldwork is substantial. A field study may
involve many years of moving in and across different
communities over time and with substantial commitment
to the people studied, which is often avoided in laboratory
experiments, in favor of distanced observations. It is also
true that the possible and positive effect of participant
observations involved in many laboratory-experimental
studies are frequently not reflected upon in the research
report, which often consists of only results in the form of
numbers. Consequently, large amounts of activities in the
laboratory are seldom reported in the “official” research
publications.
In the following section, a few examples from the
author’s own fieldwork serve to illustrate aspects of ethnog-
raphy in psychological research practice, before relating the
discussion more extensively to the value of ethnographic
fieldwork within psychology as such.
Ethnographic Fieldwork as the Study
of Social Practices in Everyday Life
The main thesis of this article is that ethnographic fieldwork
is relevant to the study of (psychological) phenomena in the
social practice of everyday life. Because of the often exten-
sive time spent in the field, the social dimension of field
research frequently described as central:
Fieldwork asks the researcher, as far as possible, to share
firsthand the environment, problems, background, language,
rituals, and social relations of a more-or-less bounded and
specified group of people. The belief is that by means of such
sharing, a rich, concrete, complex, and hence truthful account
of the social world being studied is possible. (Van Maanen,
1988, p. 3)
Van Maanen refers not only to the anthropological tra-
dition of studying the culture of exotic and geographical
foreign groups of people. The character of the research
questions and the objects of research are considered as
legitimization of the field study approach (see also
Hastrup, 1990, 2011; Wadel, 1991). Through this per-
spective, the specific socially and culturally mediated
encounter with people, in or out of one’s own culture,
serve as a precondition for a scientific understanding of a
complex sociocultural world. Field studies may grasp the
lived and local reality of what it means to be a human
subject, by allowing the research report to reflect on the
sharing of life between researchers and the other field
participants in a specific context. While the experimental-
laboratory method is conditionally based on a distance to
and a reconstruction of isolated situations in everyday
life, the field researcher works in the midst of the lived
reality of the phenomena he or she studies. The field
researcher may apply methods such as the semistructured
interview, surveys, memory-work, descriptions of net-
work, and genealogical relations, but remains a researcher
in the field. At least three kinds of access to data can be
said to distinguish the field study as I define it in the pres-
ent article:
1. In situ social interaction. The field study design is a
research approach which allows the researcher
access to in situ social interaction. Observations of
social interaction in a particular field, combined
with conversations and interviews with the partici-
pating subjects, create conditions for nuanced
description, analysis, and discussion of events and
everyday life. Access to in situ activities is a feature
of ethnographic fieldwork, also shared with the lab-
oratory experiment, although the activities in the
laboratory often take place according to more strict
criteria than in “naturally” occurring situations.
Raeithel (1996, p. 320) argues that the ethnographic
method can facilitate “thick descriptions”—detailed
and in-depth descriptions of everyday life situa-
tions. These descriptions of situations or particular
persons in situations may serve as prototypical,
empirical examples to be discussed and developed
further by others in the research community. In the
words of Rock (2007), ethnography “is interactive
and creative, selective and interpretive, illuminating
patches of the world around it, giving meaning and
suggesting further paths of enquiry” (p. 30).
170 Qualitative Inquiry 20(2)
2. Larger networks of persons and different spaces.
The field study allows the researcher to focus on
larger networks of people and different spaces in
social practices, rather than merely isolated social
interactions or the old notions of cultural “wholes”
bounded by a particular place. The researcher may,
for example, follow the cross-contextual moves of
the participants across both virtual and “real” sites
in the field (see also Hastrup, 2011). This continual
movement of the researcher in following the cross-
contextual life of participants is rather different
from the single-context setting of a qualitative inter-
view. Due to the dispersed character of the research,
what ethnography can contribute is a disciplined
unraveling of the breath and complexity of relations
and places in the social world (Rock, 2007).
3. Subjectivity as a gateway to data. Ethnographic
fieldwork builds on the assumption that the research-
er’s own experience from participating in the field is
valuable data and is indeed one of the most impor-
tant gateways to getting knowledge of the field.
Rather than viewing subjectivity as a bias to be
managed, so that the collection and analysis of data
is protected from the constraining effects of possible
observer bias, the subjectivity of the field researcher,
combined with long and intensive training in the
practice of academic research, is what allows the
researcher to identify patterns of social interaction
in the field and to obtain data which may either con-
firm or alter the initial research assumptions guiding
the study. How exactly these three dimensions of
ethnographic fieldwork and in particular, the view
of subjectivity as a resource rather than a bias in the
process of data collection, is elaborated below.
The Cross-Contextual Character of
Ethnographic Fieldwork
The following text represents an example of the extensive
field notes written on the first day of a PhD study of appren-
ticeship learning conducted by the author. The text intro-
duces an analysis of the researcher’s subjectivity and
movements across contexts as a central tenet of the field
study:
Field notes from February 2, 2001: Beginning at 8 o’clock.
It’s cold.There is snow on the grass, on the roofs and on the cars.
I’m about to enter the company, where I will do ethnographic
fieldwork for the next year. I need to pass the porter and go
through a large wrought-iron gate. My eye catches a radar instal-
lation on the top of one of the roofs. The company looks like a
miniature industrial town with large buildings and offices on both
sides of the roads. Large wrought-iron gates surround the entire
area. I have an appointment with Morten. He is an apprentice in
electro-mechanics at the company. He is already waiting for me
behind the large glass-door at the reception.
Morten and I are on the way down to the cellar. I notice a
special lamp with a lot of lights, a model aircraft hanging down
from the ceiling and a diploma from some kind of exhibition.
Morten is my first victim. Right now I feel nervous. Morten is
confident with everybody, and he can find his way around the
company—I’m the stranger.
We start walking through a large department of the factory—
there is a faint motor sound from the air extraction device,
pastel colors on the wall, large windows and a lot of pipes
along the ceiling. The hall is filled with long tables with women
working on small green printed boards under sharp lamps. I
recognize the soldering iron and oscilloscope from the physics
department at my former secondary school. I am now the
professional stranger. While we are walking, I try to talk as
naturally as possible with Morten. At the same time, I am the
distanced observer of the building, the rooms, working sta-
tions of the apprentices and other employees. I also try to put
myself in Morten’s place—which is impossible. To whom does
he talk, how do they respond to him, how does it feel to be an
apprentice here? But of course, I am not the only observer.
Everybody around me seems to look at me, and I believe they
are asking: Who is this stranger hanging around with Morten
carrying a laptop and a tape-recorder? Why is she here?
We finally arrive in the cellar. It is a little dark in the rooms
down here, and they have low ceilings. A small sign shows the
way to the service department for electronics. “Oh, now you
are here” say some of the employees. They know who I am
from my first visit to the company a few weeks ago, which I
made to obtain agreement on the field study. I have this feeling
of too many eyes upon me. It takes a while to become a fly on
the wall—if ever. Right know, I feel much too visible. After a
short conversation and a cup of coffee, I arrange my laptop in
the corner. I need to just concentrate a few minutes to write
this text, reconstructing my first impressions from the short
walk down here. I have only been here for two hours, but I am
already exhausted from trying to grasp as much information as
possible and from the general stresses of the situation.
This text is one of more than 100 pages of field notes
from the particular study on apprenticeship learning which
took place within two periods of 3 months each, from
February 2001 until February 2002. It is strongly focused on
in situ observations and on my own experiences and feelings
as a novice field researcher. Apart from the signs of subjec-
tivity in the notes (to which I will return!), the text illustrates
how ethnographic work often focuses on the different kinds
of space that operate inside a community. In this case, it was
enabled through the actual movement of the field researcher
across contexts inside the community. What the researcher
(I) did not realize at this particular moment, on the first day
of fieldwork, was that the service unit in the cellar was the
most important learning space for the apprentices in the
Tanggaard 171
workplace. The cellar was the final station for the appren-
tices during their training in the company. The journeymen
down here were responsible for ensuring that the apprentices
would learn everything they needed to pass the journey-
man’s test. For the younger and inexperienced apprentices,
the cellar was a space they waited to escape into as a “dream-
land” of learning opportunities, to which they did not always
have access in the first year of practice. The identity of being
an electro-mechanic was associated with working in this
place in the company. It was evidently also the place that the
company wanted me to see first—the jewel of their learning
landscape for apprentices. As stated by Monahan and Fisher
(2010), fieldwork is perfectly suited for making it evident
how a particular community wants to and/or typically pres-
ents itself to strangers. However, a more traditional research
method within psychological research on learning such as an
experiment in problem-solving puzzles would probably not
focus on the meaning of physical landscapes in relation to
learning, but would primarily explain learning by reference
to concepts such as mental or cognitive representations
related to the individual mind. In her recent book on appren-
ticeship in critical ethnographic practice, Jean Lave describes
how her yearlong fieldwork experiences among Vai and
Gola tailors in Liberia made her realize how such concepts
as learning, formal education, and learning transfer depend
on the institutional practice of schooling and the associated
social arrangements (Lave, 2011). However, within main-
stream cognitive research on learning, the concept is only
loosely connected with the influence of context (Lave,
2011).
From Strangeness Into Familiarity
Parker (2005) describes how the really difficult part of
doing ethnographic fieldwork is to keep noticing the unex-
pected and significant events in the field. The transforma-
tion of strangeness into familiarity is a key point to be aware
of as a field researcher. Keeping a diary can be helpful for
retaining a constructive strangeness in relation to the field.
This enables the researcher to notice every detail of what
happens in the field—as the above text shows with respect
to the researcher on the first day of fieldwork.
Field notes may also create a framework for an initial
theoretical conceptualization of the empirical material. As
evident from the above description, the notes can, in addi-
tion, be a space for more personal reflections and comments
on being a (novice) fieldworker. In this case, detailed field
notes helped me to later realize the processes of both
“invention” and “decomposition” of the community in
fieldwork—terms inspired by Parker (2005, p. 40f). Parker
sees ethnographic work as having two parts. Invention of
the community consists of developing a commitment to the
community; what is happening and what can be learned
from this? In the second decompositional part, the researcher
is more skeptical about the claims made by the participant,
and she may now begin to decompose the community into
different subcultures, conflicting parts, and spaces. This
entails beginning to see the various physical and virtual
spaces of resistance that exist within the community and the
networks of communication and patterns of power can
become more explicit to the researcher. In this particular
study, the processes of invention and decomposition
involved, for example, the realization that the apprentices
had very different opportunities for learning related to their
placement in the company, for example, in the service unit
in the cellar or just working with routine tasks in the pro-
duction as unskilled workers. To register the bits and pieces
of data which may contradict each other or alter the initial
assumptions guiding the study, the key is to keep moving
back and forth between the diverse kinds of data and theo-
retical suppositions guiding the study, so as to arrive at a
sense of the constitutional processes in the field.
The above realization of the importance of access to
learning in a really physical or social sense, is one of many
possible illustrations of what it means to address learning
and cognition (two central concepts in psychology), as cul-
tural activities of human beings intrinsically related to their
world. Kvale (1998) argues that this conceptualization of
learning as culturally bounded and situated is only facili-
tated through investigating learning inspired by anthropol-
ogy and ultimately by ethnographic fieldwork:
Today we see anthropology taking the lead in socially significant
studies of learning and cognition, the earlier laboratory-protected
strongholds of psychology. In contrast to a psychology bound to
the individual and its internal psyche as the basic unit,
anthropology moves at large in the current culture, addressing
learning and cognition as cultural activities of human beings
intrinsically related to their world. (Kvale, 1998, p. 22)
Addressing learning and cognition as cultural activities
of human beings intrinsically related to their world requires
research to effectively “move” in the current culture. In this
sense, conditions for learning are seen as related primarily
to the distribution of learning opportunities for the appren-
tices to realize trajectories of participation in social prac-
tices. Rather than the internal psyche, the basic unit in this
type of sociocultural psychological analysis of learning
becomes the human subject in a world of opportunities for
and constraints to learning.
The Subjectivity of the Researcher as a
Research Instrument
This subjectivity is a central element of ethnographic field-
work. This point is emphasized by Lave and Kvale (1995),
who argue that the humanity of the researcher makes her the
only instrument sophisticated enough to grasp human life.
172 Qualitative Inquiry 20(2)
In contrast to looking at subjectivity as a bias preventing an
objective representation of the world, the subjectivity of the
researcher is in fact considered the only way to really learn
about the culture of the field. The field researcher learns
about the culture through a gradually changing participation
and positioning in the field, in which the relation to other
participants also change. For example, some of the appren-
tices in the PhD study mentioned earlier became key infor-
mants and some remained more marginally dependent on
the degree of access to interviews with them and how they
generally responded to the opportunity to become part of
the research process. I tried not to let my personal prefer-
ence guide who became key informants, but retrospectively,
I did spend more time with those apprentices who showed
an interest in my questions and who had reflected relatively
more on their situations and lives as apprentices. There is no
point in trying to eliminate the apparent resources and con-
straints in the everyday life of the field researcher, but a
sound reflection on the meaning and consequences of the
building of social relations during the study, ensures a pru-
dent and evident degree of transparency for readers.
As such, it is considered appropriate that the researcher
draws on her own experiences, personal relations, and reac-
tions as valid information about the field (Coffey, 1999;
Hastrup, 1990; Lave & Kvale, 1995; Wadel, 1991).
Accordingly, there is no such thing as an innocent “being
there” to be described from a position of “nowhere.”
Fieldwork is better conceived of metaphorically as a meet-
ing place between two cultures or even networks. The first
is that of the researcher, her experiences and the academic
culture, requiring her to write up the details of the meeting
in a legitimate and academically sound form and the second
refers to the participants in the field and the readers of
reports from the fieldwork. Accordingly, the researcher’s
own reactions and experiences are sources of information
that are just as important as the experiences and consider-
ations of informants. Coffey (1999) elaborates on this point
and argues that the blind spots and assumptions of the
researcher herself need to be reflected upon during the pro-
cess of writing the research reports. The story of the pro-
gression of the researcher’s participation and the different
relationships with informants influence the knowledge pro-
duced. The changing positions and perspectives of the field
researcher mean that she will also change her ideas about
the field—and about herself—during the process (see also
Lather & Smithies, 1997). Few other research approaches
allow the researcher to reflect in this manner on the more
personal learning experience among the participants in the
research process. Psychology, as traditionally conceived,
casts the researcher as an impersonal, mechanical subject
that doesn’t learn, or change in the process of research.
In the above analysis, ethnographic fieldwork approaches
have been described. The text is based on the simple point
that one of the ways to bring ethnographic fieldwork into
the horizon of research repertories within psychology is to
actually describe them. Readers may disagree with the
descriptions and find other, arguably more appropriate strat-
egies and work modes. For inspiration, the reader may turn
to Wolcott’s (2010) recent primer on fieldwork, in which
the characteristics of ethnographic fieldwork are described
in impressive detail. However, in the present context,
another, equally important task is undertaken in the follow-
ing and final parts of the article. The question guiding the
remaining sections is the following: Is there something
about the character of psychological phenomena that sug-
gests that field studies are an appropriate and valid
methodology?
What About the Value of
Ethnographic Fieldwork Within
Psychology?
In the above sections of this article, it was argued that eth-
nographic fieldwork represents a possible broadening of the
legitimate repertoire of methodologies within psychology.
Field studies may grasp the lived and local reality of what it
means to be a human subject in and across social practices.
That said, ethnographic fieldwork is likely to encounter
problems legitimizing itself within a discipline mainly con-
cerned with numbers, rating scales, and quantifiable items.
Relatively few psychologists have been formally exposed
to field study methods and may therefore lack an awareness
and knowledge of its strengths. The common critiques of
such studies are therefore not surprising and the assumption
that ethnographic fieldwork is a valid research approach is
therefore not self-evident. For example, ethnographic field-
work and qualitative methods may be accused more gener-
ally of lacking distance to the field, being too subjective,
interrupting the ordinary behavior of participants in the
field and accordingly, resulting in a lack of valid and objec-
tive results.
To understand this critique fully, one must remember
that 20th century science has been and to a certain extent
still is dominated by the positivistic scientific ideal (Packer,
2011). Positivism operates with a correspondence criterion
within which knowledge is generally understood as having
a 1-1 relationship with the world (Kvale, 1996). In relation
to validity, a positivist will ask the rather straightforward
question: Is the collected data a correct representation of the
world or not? However, the conception of knowledge as a
mirror of the world is increasingly under attack from more
postmodern criteria underlining the internal coherence of
the produced facts and the pragmatic utility of research. The
idea of knowledge as a mirror of the world is in retreat and
increasingly being replaced by conceptions of knowledge
as a social construction and/or the more pragmatic dictum
that knowledge must be conceived of as a tool or a disposi-
tion to act in concrete situations. In the above, I gave
Tanggaard 173
examples of ethnographic fieldwork approaches which lead
to a conception of learning as situated in social practices.
More broadly stated, a practice theory of learning does not
place learning in mental qualities, nor in discourse, nor in
interaction as most psychological theories would do, but in
practices understood as any stable configuration of shared
activity involving a certain pattern of dos and don’ts
(Brinkmann, 2008). That is, the field study places learning
in social practices. However, what are the exact implica-
tions of this for psychology? One way forward would be to
argue, as Brinkmann does in the above text, for two basic
sets of psychological phenomena or two psychologies. The
first one is a social psychology resembling Wundt’s folk
psychology. This first psychology is concerned with psy-
chological phenomena seen as aspects of social practices
that unfold in time and space, demanding primarily inter-
pretative methods and field studies. The second psychology
is a physiological psychology demanding methods such as
experiments that trace causal connections between events.
Accordingly, there is no mental psychological level to be
studied between the physiological and the social or cultural
psychology, and psychology could be understood as first
and foremost a discipline concerned with social practices
seen as constitutive of human mental life and with cultures
understood as a human world of meanings, actions, and suf-
ferings. While the details of such a psychological practice
program needs to be spelled out to a greater extent than pos-
sible within the present article, there is no doubt that field
studies of social practices would be central to a discipline
defined as such.
Conclusion
The premise of the present paper has been that field studies
are perfectly suited to investigating psychological phenom-
ena in the social practices of everyday life. Such studies
form a flexible method, allowing the researcher to follow
participant movements across contexts, and their negotia-
tions of meaning and the relations of power in social prac-
tices. The process allows the researcher to use her own
existence and experience as research data, moving the study
of psychological phenomena into everyday life, so as to
overcome the restrictions of artificially designed laboratory
situations. Furthermore, ethnographic fieldwork often rev-
els how abstract most psychological concepts are and there-
fore yields an ideal approach for developing new and more
practice-grounded concepts. Such phenomena as learning
after all, occurs on a practical level and is more dependent
on being in particular places (the cellar!), rather than stay-
ing with a given mental apparatus.
It is my overall conclusion that ethnographic fieldwork
does have a place within a psychology committed to study-
ing the constitution of social life and human beings in prac-
tices, and will produce images of human beings that truly
resemble them. We therefore need to confront and identity
misconceived critiques of qualitative work and field studies
in particular and develop images and concepts of the actual
contributions of fieldwork. If not, we might remain locked
into the mistaken belief that what we do will never be con-
sidered as valid research within the scientific community
and not least with wrong images of what psychology ought
to be.
Acknowledgment
The author would like to thank colleagues and reviewers for their
thoughtful comments to an earlier version of the article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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Author Biography
Lene Tanggaard is a professor of psychology in the Department
of Communication and Psychology at the University of Aalborg,
Denmark, where she serves as director of the QS-research group,
co-director of The International Centre for the Cultural Psychology
of Creativity (ICCPC), and co-director of the Center for Qualitative
Studies (http://www.cqs.aau.dk/). She is regional editor of The
International Journal of Qualitative Research in Education.
Recent publications include: The Socio-materiality of Creativity
(2013), as well as journal articles in Culture and Psychology and
Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung.