SOC 301/ CRM 301 Ethnography

Ethnography, also called participant observation, is a research method where…

Researchers immerse themselves in the lives and social worlds of the people they want to understand.

• The goal is to understand the world as the research participants experience it… or to the best of their ability, anyway.

• Ethnographers do not simply tell stories; they still create and contribute to social science theory.

Who conducts ethnography?

• Sociologists vs. Anthropologists

Subculture:

A group within a larger culture; a subset of people with beliefs and behaviors that differ from those of the larger culture.

Community study:

A study that takes the entirety of social life into account but within a bounded community such as a small town or a neighborhood.

Field notes:

The data produced by a fieldworker, including observations,

dialogue, and thoughts about what is experienced in the field.

Field Jottings:

Researchers typically aren’t able to take long form notes during the course of fieldwork. Instead, researchers will first produce a set of field

jottings. Jottings might take the form of short notes, bullet points, or key quotes.

Grounded theory:

A systematic, inductive approach to qualitative research that suggests that researchers should extrapolate conceptual relationships from data rather than formulate testable hypotheses from existing theory.

extended case study approach

An approach to theory in qualitative research in which the researcher starts with an established theory and chooses a field site or case to improve upon or modify the existing theory.