Ethnographic Research

During the final quarter of the 20th century, ethnographic research methods became widely accepted in a number of fields, including the field of curriculum studies. In curriculum studies, for instance, acceptance of ethnographic methods permitted researchers to study the so-called hidden curriculum phenomenon empirically and conceptually. Ethnographic methods also served as a foundation for a range of other qualitative research strategies that segments of the curriculum studies field enthusiastically embraced. One example would be curriculum theorist Elliot Eisner's educational criticism approach to inquiry. To be sure, Eisner based his educational criticism approach to inquiry on criticism in the arts, but at least in the early years, educational critics often borrowed and adapted their empirical research strategies from ethnographic research.

Historically, the term ethnographic research referred to the sort of field-based inquiry practiced by social anthropologists in England and cultural anthropologists in the United States. Social and cultural anthropologists immersed themselves for extended periods of time in the lives and folkways of isolated, so-called tribal cultures to understand either their social structures or their very different ways of thinking and acting. Over time, the distinction between the social and cultural schools of anthropology began to blur, and most anthropologists today employ what might be best characterized as a sociocultural perspective. Today, and in the past, however, both the field studies that sociocultural anthropologists do (and have done) and the research reports they produce (and have produced in the past) are labeled ethnographies; the anthropologists themselves were—and are—called ethnographers.

Today, of course, there are few isolated tribal cultures left in the world for anthropologists to study. Consequently, contemporary sociocultural anthropologists often study subgroups within their own cultures. They might study a “tribe” of physicists, for example, or do an ethnography of an accounting firm in the wake of an ethical crisis in that profession. Anthropologists, of course, also study contemporary schools as vehicles for cultural transmission.

One other difference between the present and the past is that today fields other than anthropology have begun appropriating both the ethnographic research label and the ethnographic methods that sociocultural anthropologists developed to do their field work. As has already been noted, one of these fields is curriculum studies. Like other educational researchers in the final quarter of the 20th century, many curriculum scholars became dissatisfied with the quantitative research methods that the educational research community had been using throughout the previous three quarters of the century. These researchers found a ready-made storehouse of alternative methods—and a well-articulated rationale for using them—in the sociocultural anthropologist's ethnographic research. Some educational researchers within and outside of the subfield of curriculum studies even began to use the term ethnographic research as a synonym for qualitative research.

The remainder of this entry focuses on three general topics: ethnographic research methods in sociocultural anthropology, the subfield of educational anthropology, and the curriculum studies field's interest in and appropriation of ethnographic research techniques.