Ethnography is the direct description of a group, culture or community.

The meaning of the word

ethnography can be ambiguous; it is an overall term for a number of approaches. Sometimes
researchers use it as synonymous with qualitative research in general, while at other times its meaning
is more specific. In this chapter, we adopt the original meaning of the term, as a method within the
social anthropological tradition. The research methods are as follows:

- Immerse themselves in the culture or subculture they study and try to see the world from a cultural
member‘s point of view. Data are collected during fieldwork through participant observation and
interviews with the key informants as well as through documents. Researchers observe the rules and
rituals in the culture and try to understand the meaning and interpretation that informants give them.

- They compare these with their own ethnic view and explore the differences between the two.

- Field notes are written throughout the fieldwork about the events and behavior in the setting.

- Ethnographers describe, analyze and interpret the culture and the local, ethnic perspective of its
members while making their own ethnic interpretations.

- The main evaluative criterion is the way in which the study presents the culture as experienced by its
members.

While the study focuses on a very local orientation, it takes cognizance of the community‘s enrollment in
a bigger polity: national and global economic and political spaces. Thus, the study focuses upon what
local life means and exemplifies in the epoch of globalization and how local practices are instantiated
amidst talk of a fast globalizing world. It highlights the enduring importance of the local linked in this
case to the people in the fishing community‘s relative immobility and marginal position in the sphere of
the Philippine economy in particular and the global economy in general.

Research titles

- A Balikbayan‘in the field: Scaling and (Re) producing insider‘s identity in a Philippine fishing community.

- The Kinship of Everyday Need: Relatedness and Survival in a Philippine Fishing Community

- Bagong Silang Community: An Ethnographic Study of Strategies of Survival

- A Story of High School Inclusion: An Ethnographic Case Study

Grounded Theory

Data usually are collected through non-standardized interviews and participant observation but also by
access to other data sources. Data collection and analysis interact. Researchers code and categorize
transcripts from interviews or field notes. The researcher has a dialogue with the literature when
discussing categories. Throughout the analytic process, constant comparison and theoretical sampling
takes place. Memos— theoretical notes—provide the researcher with developing theoretical ideas. The
theory that is generated has ‘exploratory power’ and is grounded in the data.
Narrative Inquiry includes stories that reflect on people‘s experience and the meaning that this
experience has for them. Narrative research is a useful way of gaining access to feelings, thoughts and
experience in order to analyze them. For many decades, health research had focused on the decision-
making and thoughts of professionals and their measurement of the treatment outcomes, while the
feelings and ideas of the patient, the ‘insider’, tended to be neglected. The perspectives of patients are
uncovered through their stories. Narratives are tales of experience or imagination and come naturally to
human beings. Narratives are rarely simple or linear, and they often consist of many different stories
rather than of a clearly defined tale. Illness narratives are expressions of illness, suffering and pain.
Narratives are often tales of identity. Health professionals gain knowledge of the illness experience from
their patients who assists in understanding the condition and the person. There are a number of
different ways of analyzing narrative data, and all are legitimate. In narrative inquiry the final story is
constructed by participant, researcher and reader. Illness and professional narratives are always located
in the socio-cultural.

Phenomenology is a 20th century school of philosophy rooted in philosophy and psychology which
focuses on the subjective experience of the individual and seeks to understand the essence or structure
of a phenomenon from the perspective of those who have experienced it. Writers developed different
conceptual formulations, (very broadly) descriptive (Husserl), interpretive (Heidegger) and ontological-
existential (Sartre) which have been adapted as methods of inquiry by researchers. Researchers who use
phenomenological methods have formulated various methods of data analysis. The approach should not
be mechanical but insightful and illuminate the phenomenon under study and capture its essence.

Case Study is a bounded system, a single entity, a unit around which there are boundaries. It has definite
quality (time, space and/or components comprising the case). It has “no particular method for data
collection or data analysis.” A case study uses an interpretative research. It is chosen precisely because
researchers are interested in insight, and discover rather than the testing of a hypothesis.’ Yin defines a
case study as an empirical enquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life
context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident.