Ethnography

History

Ethnography emerged in the study of exotic cultures in the late 1800s and early 1900s, because the scientific method of hypothesis testing seemed unsuitable for studying the complexity of human societies. Ethnography grew in popularity because it emphasized listening to group members in natural settings rather than manipulating subjects under contrived experimental conditions.

Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski was an early pioneer in ethnography, publishing a groundbreaking study of the Trobriand Islanders of New Guinea in 1922. Almost a half-century earlier, Frank Hamilton Cushing's study of the Zuni people of the American Southwest for the Smithsonian Institution was the first example of an anthropologist living with the people he studied for an extended period of time. Sociology also relies on ethnographic methods. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Chicago School of sociology studied inner city issues firsthand, such as crime and vice, homelessness, prostitutes, and gangs. Ethnography became popular in educational research in the 1970s in studies with school-age students. Schools, classrooms, playgrounds, and teacher's lounges constitute some of the many areas of ethnographic exploration in education.

Unique Characteristics of the Ethnographic Process

As mentioned at the outset, ethnography as a process relates to a family of methods involving researchers' sustained immersion in particular social or cultural contexts. Specifically, ethnography differs from other types of research in its study design, the process of data collection, and the role of the researcher.

The process of ethnography begins with a broad research question or focus, but the emphasis evolves during the course of fieldwork. The design of ethnographic research does not follow a predetermined course. Instead, meaning is constructed through an iterative process of gathering information, refining questions, and analyzing insights throughout the researcher's extended firsthand experiences among community members.

Participant observation is a fundamental method of gathering ethnographic data. It reflects the researcher's active participation in the community's daily life, simultaneously experiencing, observing, and recording social interactions among individuals in their natural environments. Although the unwritten rule in anthropology has been for fieldwork to extend across four seasons of a yearlong engagement, studies today are often compressed into a much narrower time frame. Modern ethnography, particularly outside of anthropology, also finds the researcher engaged in community activities but perhaps not living among community members. In addition to gathering information through participant observation, ethnographers also learn from interviews, key informants, and textual and visual materials.

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