Doing Ethnography

Giampietro Gobo,Andrea Molle

• Editorial: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473994379
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Social Science Research & Methodology

Doing Ethnography is invaluable reading for anyone collecting data through observation. Innovative and thought provoking, it is a refreshing take on ethnography stressing both academic rigor and practical necessity. It combines theoretical perspective with tangible action plans and walks you step-by-step through designing, conducting, and evaluating ethnographic research. The book skilfully introduces the varied tasks and decisions you need to consider before entering the fieldhelping you to avoid common mistakes and to conduct safe, ethical research. The redesigned Second Edition has cutting edge case studies and examples from across the social sciences and has an embedded awareness of the importance of digital research tools and social media. It also includes a detailed discussion of:

• Autoethnography
• Digital Ethnography
• Visual Ethnography
• Feminist Ethnography
• Managing and Analysing data

This is an ideal companion for every novice researcher.

Part One The Methodology

1 What Is Ethnography?

When Hermes took the post of messenger of the gods, he promised Zeus not to lie. He did not promise to tell the whole truth. Zeus understood. The ethnographer has not.

Vincent Crapanzano, 1986: 53

Learning objectives

• To gain an understanding of ethnographic methodology.
• To grasp the differences between attitude, belief and behavior.
• To gain familiarity with the main elements of ethnographic methodology.
• To understand the advantages and drawbacks of ethnographic methodology.
• To appreciate the historical roots of its development.
• To identify the most important methodological differences between doing ethnography in sociology and anthropology.

1.1 Introduction

Most forms of knowledge are situated and socially constructed. In other words, they arise from people, following specific purposes, in a given historical context whose features they inevitably reflect, including the tendency to perpetuate stereotypes and prejudices. Ethnography is not immune to this tendency.

As a methodology with more than 100 years of history, ethnography began to develop in the context of the Western world as a form of knowledge investigating distant non-Western cultures, impenetrable to any form of analysis consisting of fleeting contact or brief conversations. Despite good intentions of gaining a deeper understanding, ethnography is still a colonial method that must be, in a sense, de-colonialized. And you, students in every part of the world, can make a crucial contribution to that end. But first you need to understand what ethnography is, can be, and most importantly is not.

In recent years, ethnography is gaining increasing currency in social and applied research, and it may become a mass phenomenon in years to come. Why? Because we now live in what one might call the ‘observation society’ (see Chapter 17).

The goal of this first introductory chapter is to help to understand the concept of ethnography, to clarify its main advantages and drawbacks, and to identify and outline the more urgent tasks of ethnography in contemporary societies.

1.2 An overview of ethnography

Read the following passages from two classical ethnographic works carefully.

SECONDARY ADJUSTMENTS

The first thing to note is the prevalence of make-do’s. In every social establishment participants use available artefacts in a manner and for an end not officially intended thereby modifying the conditions of life programmed for these individuals. A physical reworking of the artefact may be involved, or merely an illegitimate context of use [...] In Central Hospital many simple make-do’s were tacitly tolerated. For example, inmates widely used freestanding radiators to dry personal clothing that they had washed, on their own, in the bathroom sink, thus performing a private laundry cycle that was officially only the institution’s concern. On hard-bench wards, patients sometimes carried around rolled up newspapers to place between their necks and the wooden benches when lying down. Rolled-up coats and towels were used in the same way ... Older patients who were disinclined or unable to move around sometimes employed strategies to avoid the task of going to the toilet: on the ward, the hot steam radiator could be urinated on without leaving too many long-lasting signs; during twice-weekly shaving visits to the basement barber shop, the bin reserved for used towels was used as a urinal when the attendants were not looking ... In Central Hospital, toilet paper was sometimes ‘organized’; neatly torn, folded, and carried on one’s person, it was apologetically used as Kleenex by some fastidious patients. (Goffman, 1961: 207–9)

SOCIAL DEATH

When, in the course of a patient’s illness his condition is considered such that he is dying or terminally ill, his name is posted on the critical patients list ... Posting also serves as an internally relevant message, notifying certain key hospital personnel that a death may be forthcoming and that appropriate preparations for that possibility are tentatively warranted. In the hospital morgue, scheduling is an important requirement. Rough first drafts of the week’s expected work load are made, with the number of possible autopsies being a matter which, if possible, is to be anticipated and planned for. In making such estimates the morgue attendant consults posted lists from which he makes a guess as to the work load of the coming week. The posted list is also consulted by various medical personnel who have some special interest in various anatomical regions. County’s morgue attendant made it a practice to alert the ward physician that Doctor S. wanted to get all the eyes he could (Doctor S. was a research ophthalmologist). To provide Doctor S. with the needed eyes, the morgue attendant habitually checked the posted list and tried, in informal talk with the nurses about the patient’s family, to assess his chances of getting the family’s permission to relinquish the eyes of the patient for research. Apparently, when he felt he had located a likely candidate, a patient whose family could be expected to give permission at the time of death, he thus informed the pathologist, who made an effort, via the resident physician, to have special attention given to the request for an eye donation. (At several places in the hospital: on the admission nurse’s desk, in the morgue, in doctors’ lounges, and elsewhere, there were periodically placed signs that read ‘Doctor S. needs eyes’, ‘Doctor Y. needs kidneys’, etc.). (Sudnow, 1967: 72–3)

For some of you this may have been your first encounter with an ‘ethnographic account’, a distinctive literary genre which in certain respects resembles a novel.

Exercise 1.1

Before moving forward, please discuss with your instructor or classmates:

• Your reactions to the two passages.
• Your emotional reactions to them.
• Have you ever thought such things could be happening in a hospital?

1.3 Defining ethnography

The two above passages were written on the basis of what social scientists call systematic observations. The authors, Erving Goffman and David Sudnow, were physically present at the time that this happened and saw it with their own eyes. The most striking features of these accounts are the precision of the observations, the number of details presented and the vividness of the text. The two authors documented the daily routines of an organization with great acumen and insight, discovering emerging social routines and rituals.

But, one might ask, couldn’t the same information have been collected in a different way, for instance by interviewing some of the patients? Perhaps, but this would have required the interviewees to be extremely aware of their actions and possess a great capacity to call to mind every single detail of their lives. Neuroscientists and social researchers would agree that very few people, if any, have these abilities. Couldn’t the details have been gathered by administering a questionnaire to the personnel then? Well, most certainly not. No questionnaire, regardless how well made it is, could gather all these details at once. And besides, such a goal is not the purpose of the survey method, which was developed to handle a different type of information.

So what does ethnography consist of and why is it different from interviews and surveys? In order to answer these questions, we must start by defining what ethnography is (and is not).

1.4 A definition of ethnography

As humans, to acquire knowledge of the outside world we use different senses: sound, sight, touch, smell, taste, etc. And yet these senses do not gather and deliver information to our brain to be processed separately, but rather are constantly interacting with each other. During this interactive process it is normal that one sense acts as the principal source of information for our brain to process, rather like the Center in a basketball team. Indeed, we can imagine these senses as basketball players who alternate in the role of Center but always need the cooperation of all the others to score a point.

For ethnography the central cognitive device, the research strategy that defines it, is ‘observation’. Of course, it is also crucial to listen to the conversations, read the documents produced by the organization under study, ask people questions, and so on. And yet what most distinguishes ethnography from all other research methods is the essential role of observation. Having this in mind, we can now move on to other issues.

Ethnographic methodology is comprised of two main approaches to observation: ‘non-participant observation’ and ‘participant observation’. The former involves the researcher observing the subjects ‘from a distance’, in other words avoiding any interaction with them. Researchers who favor this strategy are seemingly more interested in adopting an objective stance and willing to overlook the importance of the symbolic sphere, while making sure they do not interfere with the social actors’ courses of action so as not to influence their behavior.

On the other hand, participant observation considers the interaction between the researcher and the social actors as crucial to understanding their behavior. An adequate definition of participant observation is a strategy where the researcher:

1. establishes a direct relationship with the social actors by
2. staying in their natural environment
3. with the purpose of observing and describing their behavior, and by
4. interacting with them and participating in their everyday ceremonials and rituals
5. learning their code (or at least parts of it) in order to understand the meaning of their actions, and
6. collecting ethnographic notes in a rigorous and systematic way.

There are several intermediate situations between the two extremes of participant and non-participant observation. Regardless of the strategy, however, ethnographic methodology gives priority to the observation of actions performed in concrete settings as its primary source of information and only on a secondary or ancillary level are other sources of information used by the ethnographer. Informal conversations, individual or group interviews, and documentary materials such as diaries, letters, class essays, organizational documents, newspapers, photographs and audio-visuals are just some such examples.

As sociologist John Heritage suggests, if one is interested in action, the statements made by social actors during interviews cannot be treated ‘as an appropriate substitute for the observation of actual behavior’ (1984: 236). In fact, there is a well-documented gap between attitudes, beliefs and behaviors (La Piere, 1934); as well as between what people say and what they actually do (Gilbert and Mulkay, 1983).

1.5 The gap between attitudes, beliefs and behavior

Before Heritage, the American sociologist Edward C. Lindeman (1885–1953) had argued against surveys in his famous book Social Discovery:

if, say the behaviorists, you wish to know what a person is doing, by all means refrain from asking him. His answer is sure to be wrong, not merely because he does not know what he is doing but precisely because he is answering a question and he will make the reply in terms of you and not in terms of the objective thing he is doing. (1924, quoted by Converse, 1987: 54)

Several studies have shown the extent of the gap between attitude and behavior, between what people think, feel or believe and what they do; between feelings and actions. Some classic studies have been collected by Deutscher (1973). A pioneering study by La Piere (1934), focused on the presumed consistency between people’s attitudes and their behavior (a topic subsequently much debated in the 1940s and 1950s). In his study, La Piere concluded that there was no relation between attitude and behavior since social actors are often inconsistent, unconscious and irrational. In the experiment, he spent two years traveling in the United States by car with a Chinese couple. During that time, they visited 251 hotels and restaurants and were turned away only once. Six months after the conclusion of their travels, La Piere mailed a survey to all the businesses they had visited with the question, ‘Will you accept members of the Chinese race in your establishment?’ The available responses were ‘Yes’, ‘No’ and ‘Depends upon the circumstances’. Of the 128 that r...