Ethnographic+Methods

= ** Ethnographic Inquiry and Methodology **  =

=** Objectivity **= Using ethnographic methods you put yourself in a strange position. In a foreign country with a new language, you already feel like the outsider coming in. Using ethnographic methods you must let go of your own presumptions and assumptions about a group of people in order to effectively learn anything about them. You cannot look at them the same way you look at people in your own culture. It is important to put aside personal feelings and not to judge, otherwise conflict might arise.

People are intuitive and can sense others feelings. If you disapprove of a native practice, people might close down to you. If you really want to get something specific you have already decided out of your research, you will unwittingly push people in that certain direction. **People, by nature, like to please other people, especially someone who they might have a sense of reverence or respect.** If someone realizes that you want them to say a certain thing, or talk about a certain subject, even when they don’t believe it, they might do so simply to please you. This is a bad thing.

That is the difficulty when performing an ethnographic study. While you may have a certain hypothesis, you cannot let that be known to your study group, and sense your hypothesis was developed on the terms of your own culture, you must be prepared to throw it out.

Remaining objective is essential, but difficult to obtain. For this reason, you must acknowledge your biases and include them when trying to study a culture objectivity in its own terms and without pushing your own reality or judgments upon it. How can you judge one culture based on the ethics of another? Cultural relativity is necessary when approaching new research in order to conduct an effective ethnographic study

= ** Methods **  =

=** media type="youtube" key="gzwGEBJGz8s" width="560" height="315" align="right"Interviews **= Interviewing helps to ascertain what people believe, how they think, and how that affects their life. There are two different forms of interviews: fully-structured and semi-structured. Interviews should be crafted to answer a research question. What is it that you want to learn? This is important because if an interview is aimless, it might not produce anything you can use for your research. If you find that the questions you are using are not giving you the type of responses you want (like they are not giving you details about how the drought affects their life, just implying that it does), you should revise your set of questions until you get one that is effective.

Fully-structured interviews are interviews where the questions are set in stone. You ask the questions to the interviewee, and you do not vary from those questions.

Semi-structured interviews also begin with a set of questions, but you have the flexibility to add additional questions based on the interviewees responses. This form is much more flexible and allows for more specific questions to each interviewee. However, with fully-structured interviews you can more easily compare the responses from one person to the next, and do not have any separate questions that were asked of one person but not the next.

=** media type="youtube" key="hGB4WdfEXRU" width="560" height="315" align="right"Participant Observation **= Participant observation is beneficial to immerse oneself into a community to gain a deep knowledge about the intricacies and inner workings that could not be obtained from literature or a type of method where information is learned second-hand. It yields insights into peoples lives and customs that they would not be able to tell you if you just asked. The researcher lives within a certain context, maintains relationships with people, participates in community activities, and takes extensive and elaborate notes on the experience. It enables the researcher to see the culture without imposing their own social reality on that culture. Years or months of research lead to months of analysis of the journals and field notes to convey the research findings within a theoretical context.

Participant Observation is also useful in order to gauge the difference between what people do and what people say they do.

= = ** Tools ** While the interview and participant observation are widely used and valued qualitative research methods, problems can arise.

=** Interviewing Tools **= It is extremely important to record all of any interviews you may conduct as memory is not a sufficient source for citation. Before a project is begun, you must decide for yourself whether you will perform full or partial transcriptions. The more you transcribe, the more protection provided for your research and analysis. However, the facts remain that full transcriptions are very time consuming, and the majority of your interview will not be useful for your research. Therefore, partial transcriptions are good for transcribing only the necessary or most valuable parts of your interview. You may not know what is the most valuable information you receive when you hear it, which is why it is beneficial to take light notes during the interview and extensive notes of what you remember after the interview. Do not focus heavily on your note-taking so that you miss what your interviewee is saying.

Field notes are an invaluable resource and skill as you collect data. Please review this link and this link for more guidance on how to write field notes. =** Participant Observation Tools **= A research journal for field notes is a very practical way to keep track of your observations. After an extended period, flipping through your journal, you might notice patterns that you had not realized were prevalent as you witnessed them in person. Also, as memory fails it is very important to have detailed notes of what you observed; otherwise your observations are meaningless.

Journals are also valuable for realizing your own biases or prejudices. It is here that you might begin to question some of your interpretations, and here where you might realize possibilities that had not yet occurred to you. When conducting social fieldwork, you should always question yourself to make sure you are not getting in the way of your own research. It can also be valuable if you are having trouble connecting to your interviewees to see what it is you are doing that offends or distances them.

You may choose to review the following participant observation field guide attached below.