Q

417

Review essay
The dictionary, the reader and the handbook: approaches to
qualitative research
R
Qualitative Research
Copyright © 
SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
vol. (): -.
[-
() :;
-; ]

THOMAS A. SCHWANDT (ed.), Dictionary of Qualitative Inquiry (2nd edition).

Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 2001. 281 pp., (no index). ISBN 0 7619
2165 6 (hbk); 0 7619 2166 4 (pbk)
STEPHANIE TAYLOR (ed.), Ethnographic Research: A Reader. London: Sage,
2002. 377 pp., (including index). ISBN 0 7619 7393 1 (pbk)
PAUL ATKINSON, AMANDA COFFEY, SARA DELAMONT, JOHN LOFLAND
and LYN LOFLAND (eds), Handbook of Ethnography. London: Sage, 2001, 507
pp., (including index). ISBN 0 7619 5824 X (hbk)

These three recently published volumes are all general reference works deal-
ing with qualitative and/or ethnographic research. However, in spite of their
basic topical similarity, their approaches, the scope and focus of their subject
matter, and the audiences to which they are likely to be relevant are quite dis-
parate. The volume by Schwandt has a dictionary format, hence providing
concise discussions of terms used in and about qualitative research. Format
notwithstanding, Schwandt rejects the dictionary’s usual goals of complete-
ness and authority in respect of both the range of entries and the content of
individual entries. Thus there are no entries for named individuals, although
the reader will find mention of Garfinkel under ethnomethodology, Giddens
under double hermeneutics, and so forth. The author’s own perspective based
in the general area of hermeneutics and education is reflected in the selection
and content of many entries. For example, there are several entries relating to
hermeneutics and a comparatively lengthy, and informative, discussion of the
perspectives of Gadamer and Habermas under ‘praxis’, but no entry for criti-
cal realism and little under ‘realism’ on the work of Bhaskar. Nor does
Schwandt strive for final authority: ‘Entries are more like annotations (critical
and explanatory remarks) than definitions’ and are not intended ‘to dampen
discussion by offering (as does a genuine dictionary) the generally agreed-on
definitions and usage of a word’ (p. xviii). Given this perspective, the volume
provides clear and engaging brief discussions of a good selection of terms and

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418 Qualitative Research 2(3)

concepts central to qualitative research. It is a useful starting point for under-

standing these terms and the references to other related publications provid-
ed after each entry encourage further investigation of the ideas presented.
This feature and the clarity of the writing make the volume a very good tool
for undergraduates as well as a useful starting point for post-graduates study-
ing research methods.
Taylor’s Ethnographic Research: A Reader is an edited collection of 10 previ-
ously published empirical studies on a variety of social issues. The studies are
organised in pairs, each pair dealing with the same general topic area, specif-
ically: the experience of marginality among Puerto Ricans in the United
States (Bourgois) and drug users in Australia (Maher and Dixon); the con-
struction of male and female gendered identities within schoolgirl friendship
groups (Hey) and black youth peer groups (Alexander) in England; workplace
practices in an electronics factory in Mexico (Salzinger) and among an
American airline flight crew (Hutchins and Klausen); the consumption of
cultural products – the Taj Mahal by tourists (Edensor) and television by
Christian Maronite youth in Lebanon (Kraidy); and decision-making process-
es regarding the provision of medical services in a mental health team in
Wales (Griffiths) and a hospital emergency room in France (Dodier and
Camus). As this list indicates, the collection provides a good range of topics
with an international spread, while still allowing some scope for comparison
of findings and without sacrificing a degree of thematic unity. Four of the
contributions are edited selections from book-length studies and exhibit the
deficiencies of such abridgements in usually leaving the reader feeling that
either the argument or the evidence is somehow incomplete (as indeed it is!).
Also missing are any notes on contributors. However, the book is intended for
students as an introduction by means of examples to ‘the broad field of con-
temporary ethnographic research in the social sciences’. As such, it is a use-
ful collection and a valuable resource for undergraduates studying research
methods and is particularly to be praised for its inclusion of only recently pub-
lished research (since 1995). Its utility is further enhanced by the discussion
questions provided at the end to focus thinking on the individual contribu-
tions and encourage comparisons between the pairs in each topic area.
My main criticism of the book is its rather careless and I believe misleading
claim to represent ethnographic research while in fact leaving it insufficient-
ly specified and indeed providing no real basis for distinguishing it from qual-
itative research more generally. In her introductory chapter, Taylor raises the
question ‘What, then, characterizes ethnography?’ However, her response is
disappointing:
‘The term is wide ranging, with different associations and traditions within
different disciplines. Some common features which are often identified are that
it involves empirical work, especially observation in order to study people’s lives,
defined broadly’ (p. 1).

This scarcely defines ethnography as a distinguishable research strategy, and

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 Davies: Review Essay 419

in this respect Taylor contributes to an unfortunate recent tendency to dilute

expectations regarding the conduct of ethnographic research. For example,
the study by Hutchins and Klausen which analyzes an airline cockpit as a
‘system of distributed cognition’ (p. 140) takes as its primary evidentiary base
a single page of transcribed dialogue. Although their analysis is informed by
what they call ‘ethnographic grounding’ including ‘operational manuals for
the aircraft, the layout of the cockpit instrumentation and controls, crew
training materials . . . interviews with pilots, and observations of pilots in
actual flights’ (p. 142), this is a pale version of the long-term and multi-
stranded research relationships that provide the detailed contextualization
characteristic of good ethnographic research. While the Hutchins and
Klausen study is informative and demonstrates good practice for their partic-
ular research question, its claim to represent ethnographic research is
tenuous at best.
The volume edited by Paul Atkinson and colleagues, Handbook of
Ethnography, is praiseworthy for its clarity on this issue. In their introduction
to the volume, the editors explicitly reject any notion of this being a general
handbook of qualitative research methods:
We believe that there remains a central place in the social disciplines for the
intensive investigation of a research agenda that is characteristic of the ethno-
graphic spirit, and that this is not necessarily captured by the connotations of a
generalist qualitative methods label. Indeed, a good deal of what currently pass-
es for qualitative research has little systematic grounding in the methods and
commitments (intellectual and personal) that we associate with the term
‘ethnography’. Close inspection of the relevant literatures and textbooks sug-
gests that all too often authors and researchers are talking about the conduct of
in-depth interviews – or focus groups – divorced from contexts of social action;
or are amassing textual materials, diaries and biographies independently of the
social contexts in which they are produced or used. These are often important
ways of gaining principled understandings of social life and personal experi-
ence, but should not necessarily be equated with ethnographic research.
Whatever the range of data collection techniques, we believe that ethnographic
research remains firmly rooted in the first-hand exploration of research set-
tings. It is this sense of social exploration and protracted investigation that gives
ethnography its abiding and continuing character. (p. 5)

Doubtless one source for their assertion of the distinctiveness of ethnograph-

ic research is their acknowledgement of its grounding and nurturing in the
research practices of two specific disciplines, Anthropology and Sociology,
although they still accept and investigate the variations within these research
traditions.
The volume is in three sections. In Part One contributors examine the
disciplinary and other intellectual contexts which both contributed to and
benefited from the growth of ethnography as a research strategy. Thus indi-
vidual chapters consider its development within the Chicago School of
Sociology (Deegan) and in British (Macdonald) and American (Faubion)

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420 Qualitative Research 2(3)

anthropological traditions. Other contributors elaborate on the relationship of

ethnography to a range of empirical and theoretical perspectives, for example,
community studies (Brunt), symbolic interactionism (Rock), semiotics
(Manning) and ethnomethodology (Pollner and Emerson). This first section is
immensely valuable in setting out the origins of and variations within the
ethnographic research tradition, as well as in positioning this tradition in rela-
tion to other qualitative methodologies and philosophical perspectives.
The contributors to Part Two consider the application of ethnography to
specific substantive areas, for example, health and medicine (Bloor), educa-
tion (Gordon, Holland and Lahelma), deviance (Hobbs) and childhood
(James). They also look at ways in which ethnographic research per se has
been furthered by its application in these various substantive areas. One of the
most informative in this latter respect is Smith’s chapter on ‘Ethnographies of
Work and the Work of Ethnographers’, which raises concerns, both in assess-
ing existing monographs and for the future conduct of research on work,
about factors that limit ‘researchers’ ability to conduct sustained observation
and participation’ (p. 229). This theme examining the nature of ethnography
as work is usefully expanded in the chapter by Wellin and Fine in Part Three.
Most of the chapters in Part Two deal with ethnographies that are site-
specific, such as factories, schools or homes, but the final four are concerned
with aspects of culture with less specific spatial locations, for example, the
ethnography of communication (Keating) and visual ethnography (Ball and
Smith), which the editors consider to be ‘the topics around which ethno-
graphic methods will be developed in the next 20 years’ (p. 176).
Part Three of the Handbook looks at various aspects of ethnographic prac-
tice, both the specific methods that ethnographers characteristically employ
and theoretical debates about the meaning and future direction of their prac-
tice. Chapters dealing with topics such as participant observation (Emerson,
Fretz and Shaw), interviewing (Heyl) and life histories (Plummer) rather than
reproducing the kind of material available in general treatments of research
methods, discuss more problematic aspects of these methods. Thus the chap-
ter on participant observation provides an insightful discussion of the pro-
duction of fieldnotes and their relationship to the research process. And the
chapter on interviewing considers the distinction between ethnographic
interviewing in which ‘interviewers have established, respectful, on-going
relationships with their interviewees’ (p. 369) and other forms of unstruc-
tured interviewing. Contributors in this section also examine significant and
on-going debates among ethnographic researchers. The particular centrality
of reflexivity to ethnographic research practice is discussed in several chap-
ters, for example, in Cortazzi’s discussion of narrative and Reed-Danahay’s
contribution on autobiography, as is the related issue of representation in
examinations of the relationship of ethnography to feminism (Skeggs) and
postmodernism (Spencer; Lather). Possible future directions for ethnographic
practice are explored for such diverse areas as computer applications

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 Davies: Review Essay 421

(Fielding) and ethnodrama (Mienczakowski).

The Handbook of Ethnography provides an informed and sophisticated per-
spective on the nature of ethnography, its historical grounding and substan-
tive applications, the variety of practices that constitute it, and its likely future
directions. As such, it is a very valuable resource for post-graduates and experi-
enced researchers alike and is an important contribution to the literature on
social research methodologies.

Dr Charlotte Aull Davies

University of Wales, Swansea
[email : C.A.Davies@swansea.ac.uk]

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