What is Ethnography Martyn Hammersley The Open University
- Slides: 8
What is Ethnography? Martyn Hammersley The Open University 9/17/2020 NCRM Research Methods Festival 2008
A Contested Concept • Definition: uncertain and disputed. • History: from anthropology through sociology to the rest of social science.
Methodology or Method? • One, both, or neither? • In an only partly mythical past, ‘ethnography’ referred to a distinctive mentality embedded in the use of a particular set of methods. • Today, there is more diversity in both principle and practice. • The meaning of any methodological label is defined partly by its relations with associated terms, in contexts of use.
The Ethnographic Mentality: A Tortured Soul Key components: • Understanding (But is it possible? ) • Process (But also structure? ) • Discovery (But also construction? )
Sources of data • Participant observation and its variants. • Interviews (Can there be ethnographic studies that are entirely interview-based? ) • Documents and artifacts (Official statistics, material culture, and virtual ethnography. ) • Structured data? (Ethnosemantics, questionnaires. ) • Ethnographic work as mixing methods?
Processing data • Fieldnotes versus electronic recording. • Audio- versus video-recording. • Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS): friend or foe?
Forms of analysis • Theme analysis • Thick description • Comparative method • Discourse and narrative analysis
Some divisive issues • • • What is the role of theory? The problem of focus: discourse versus action/practice? What is context? Macro versus micro, actual versus virtual. The problem of representation: writing, the visual, multi-modality. Theoretical versus applied? Valueneutral or ‘critical’?
