Ethnography and Deviance

Much of deviance research involves locating and studying hard-to-reach populations. There is a part of research on deviant behavior that is more structured; for example, research using already gathered statistics on crimes, criminal populations, or agencies. But the heart of deviance research involves uncovering the bizarre, explaining deviant lifestyles, debunking the accepted, and investigating deviant occupations and the industries that foster them. The term hard to find covers populations ranging from the completely undiscovered to the physically hidden, to the accepted but unexplained. The most thorough method for getting descriptions of and explanations for these hard-to-reach groups is ethnography.

In the 1970s, scholars began using the term ethnography in place of participant observation. Before this point, ethnography was associated almost exclusively with the field methods of anthropological research. The reason for the change was that the term participant observation describes only one method, while the researchers were using several methodologies concurrently. The change in terms more accurately reflects actual practices. Ethnography is a complex methodology that can generate description as well as explanation. Consequently, there is no straightforward, simple process to describe ethnography; the diversity and uniqueness of experiences that confront ethnographers and the variety of ways in which they deal with them does not readily permit clear-cut generalizations. Every situation in field research is unique, and several factors contribute to the quality of a project, including luck: being in the right place at the right time, forming relationships and developing rapport with members of the group being studied, and meeting good key informants.

Ethnography in the field of deviance involves participant observation, listening, intensive interviewing, observations of the setting, the collection of documents, an understanding of the culture of the participants and their place in the social structure, and the use of key informants. Some researchers have suggested that ethnographers are not so much interviewers or listeners as they are witnesses. When you read an ethnography, you come away with an intimate grasp of the way of life that is being described and explained.

The type of intensive interviewing used is defined as a guided conversation. The objective of these intensive interviews is to have the participants describe their interactions with others like them and all the meaningful actors in their world and environment and to discover the strategies, circumstances, perceptions, and activities before, during, and after interactions with these actors. This is the method of thick description. The technique should be to let the responses speak for themselves, presenting the subjects' world in full vivid detail, and then to offer both summarization and interpretation. The goal is to elicit rich detailed information from the interviewee that can be used in qualitative analysis. This type of interviewing is very different from the more structured types because what occurs is more of a conversation guided by themes. In addition, each interview expands the knowledge of the researcher, so that each conversation is different. The conversation is guided by a deeper grasp of the part of the social world that is being studied. In ethnographic research, the boundary between an interview and a conversation is not clear-cut; the term solicited account is often used to describe this type of research technique.

...