Ethnography

Ethnography, the study of people in a natural setting, provides an opportunity for researchers to conduct a detailed study of a group of people while being immersed in the culture of that group. Ethnography(ethno, “people” or “folk,” and graphy, “to describe something”), sometimes referred to as participant observation or field research, involves the study of people or an organization though face-to-face interactions in a real-life social setting. There is no deductive hypothesis to follow or any statistical formula. Over time, this interaction yields a rich and detailed account of the culture, history, and characteristics of a social phenomenon.

Ethnography has a rich history. We can see it in the travel logs of early explorers and in the diaries of settlers. In sociology, ethnography is connected to the developments of the early Chicago School, with three primary ideas that emerged from it. First, researchers need to gain access to populations in their natural settings so that they capture the essence of human behavior without it being tainted in a false setting, such as a laboratory experiment. Second, ethnography allows researchers to become intimately familiar with their subjects by talking directly with them. And third, ethnographers gain an understanding of the social world and make theoretical statements about the subjects' perspective, which is the goal of ethnography as a research method.

Ethnography is ideally suited for research topics that are very broad, ambiguous, or have poorly defined boundaries. Topics such as these allow researchers to define the limits of the study, which is sometimes difficult after spending time in the field and continuing to collect data. Topics that are best suited to field research are attitudes and behaviors that we can understood more readily when they unfold over time in their natural settings.