Ethnography

Principles in Practice

Martyn Hammersley, Paul Atkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351380959
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Customs & Traditions
• Index: Social Sciences

Now in its fourth edition, this leading introduction to ethnography has been thoroughly updated and substantially rewritten. The volume offers a systematic introduction to ethnographic principles and practice, and includes a new chapter on 'Ethnography in the digital world'.

The authors argue that ethnography is best understood as a reflexive process. This requires recognition that social research is part of the world that it studies, and demands that researchers reflect on how they shape both data and analysis. Starting in Chapter 1 with an outline of the principle of reflexivity, against the background of competing research philosophies, the authors go on to discuss the main features of ethnographic work, including:

• the selection and sampling of cases
• the problem of access
• field relations and observation
• interviewing
• the use of documents
• recording and organizing data

• the process of data analysis and writing research reports.
  
  

There is also consideration of the ethical issues involved in ethnographic research. Throughout, the discussion draws on a wide range of illustrative material from classic and more recent studies, within a global context. The new edition of this popular textbook will be an indispensable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, and for all researchers using ethnographic methods in the social sciences and the humanities.

1

What is ethnography?

Ethnography is one of many methodological approaches that can be found within social research today. However, the label is not used in a standard fashion, its meaning can vary. A consequence is that there is considerable overlap in reference with other labels, such as ‘qualitative inquiry’, ‘fieldwork’, ‘interpretive method’, and ‘case study’, these also having fuzzy semantic boundaries. In fact, there is no sharp distinction even between ethnography and the study of individual life histories, as the example of ‘auto/ethnography’ shows; this referring to an individual researcher’s study of her or his own life and its context, with a view to illuminating more general social processes (Reed-Danahay 1997 and 2001; Holman Jones 2005; Short et al. 2013; Bochner and Ellis 2016). There are also the challenging cases of ‘virtual’ or ‘digital’ ethnography, whose data may be restricted to what is ‘online’ or available through digital devices (Hine 2000, 2015; Horst and Miller 2012; Lupton 2014; Pink et al. 2016). While, for the purposes of this opening chapter, we will need to give some indication of what we are taking the term ‘ethnography’ to mean, its variable and sometimes contested character must be remembered; and the account we provide will inevitably be shaped by our own views about what form ethnographic work ought to take. One aspect of this is that we will focus on the use of ethnography in academic research, even though there has been growing use of it, in a variety of forms, in applied and commercial research, for instance in the field of marketing studies (see Venkatesh et al. 2015).

The origins of the term ‘ethnography’ lie in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century anthropology, where an ethnographic account was a description of some aspects of a community or culture, usually located outside the West, and generally regarded as primitive or exotic. At that time, ‘ethnography’ was sometimes contrasted with, and was usually seen as complementary to, ‘ethnology’, where this generally referred to the historical and comparative analysis of non-Western societies and cultures. Ethnology, in this sense, was often treated as the core of anthropological work, and initially drew heavily on accounts produced by travellers and missionaries. Over time, however, the term ‘ethnology’ became less common because anthropologists began to do their own fieldwork, with ‘ethnography’ coming to refer to an integration of first-hand empirical investigation with the comparative or theoretical interpretation of social organization and culture.

Since the early twentieth century, ethnographic fieldwork has been central to anthropology. Indeed, such work, usually in a society very different from one’s own, took on the character of a rite of passage required for entry to the ‘tribe’ of anthropologists. It usually involved living with a group of people for extended periods, often over the course of a year or more, in order to document and interpret their distinctive way of life, and the beliefs and values integral to it.

During the twentieth century, anthropological ethnography came to be one of the models for some strands of research within Western sociology, though it was not followed slavishly. An example is the community study movement, which spanned the two disciplines (Crow 2018). This involved studies of villages and towns in the United States and Western Europe, often concerned with the impact of urbanization and industrialization. A landmark investigation here was the work of the Lynds in documenting life in Muncie, Indiana, which they named ‘Middletown’ (Lynd and Lynd 1929, 1937).¹ In a parallel movement, sociologists working at the University of Chicago between the 1920s and the 1950s developed an approach to studying human social life that was similar to anthropological research in some key respects, though they usually labelled it ‘case study’. The ‘Chicago School of Sociology’ was concerned with documenting the range of different patterns of life to be found in that city, and how these were shaped by in-migration and the developing urban ecology (see Bulmer 1984).

From the 1960s onwards, forms of sociological work influenced by these developments spread across many sub-fields of sociology, and into other disciplines and areas of inquiry as well; and they also migrated from the United States to Europe and to other parts of the world. Furthermore, for a variety of reasons, an increasing number of anthropologists began to do research within Western societies, at first in rural areas but later in urban locales too.² Another relevant development in the latter half of the twentieth century was the rise of cultural studies as an area of investigation distinct from, but overlapping with, anthropology and sociology. Work in this field moved from broadly historical and textual approaches to include the use of ethnographic method, notably in studying youth cultures and media audiences, along with the whole issue of cultural consumption. Furthermore, in the later decades of the twentieth century, ethnography spread even further, for example into psychology and human geography, in the company of other qualitative methods. As a result, there has sometimes been a tendency for it to be swallowed up into a general, multi-disciplinary, movement promoting qualitative approaches.³ However, the term ‘ethnography’ still retains some distinctive connotations.

1 Muncie has been re-studied several times. For a revisionist account, see Lassiter et al. 2004.

2 For an account of the development and reconfiguration of ethnographic work within British anthropology, see Macdonald 2001. See also Peirano 1998.

3 Diverse strands and trends of the qualitative research movement are exemplified in the various editions of the Handbook of Qualitative Research: Denzin and Lincoln 1994, 2000, 2005, 2011, and 2018.

Its complex history is one of the reasons why ‘ethnography’ does not have a standard, well-defined meaning. Over the course of time, and in each of the various disciplinary contexts mentioned, its sense has been re-interpreted in various ways, in order to adapt to new circumstances. Part of this re-moulding has arisen from the fact that, at different times, ethnography has been treated as opposed to different methodological approaches. Early on, the contrast was with ‘statistical method’ – in the form of experimental and, especially, survey research – and this continues today. Later, it was sometimes set against the sort of macro-analysis characteristic of much sociology and political economy. More recently, it has frequently been contrasted with conversation and discourse analysis, on one side, and with interview studies of various sorts, on the other. Furthermore, over the years, ethnography has been influenced by a range of theoretical ideas: anthropological and sociological functionalism, philosophical pragmatism and symbolic interactionism, Marxism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, feminism, constructionism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, and (most recently) the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology and ‘new materialisms’ (Henare et al. 2007; Alberti et al. 2011; Coole and Frost 2010; Fox and Alldred 2015a, 2015b; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017).

In short, the term ‘ethnography’ has a variable and shifting role in the dynamic tapestry that makes up the social sciences in the twenty-first century. However, it is by no means unusual in lacking a single, clearly defined meaning; the same is true of many other methodological labels. Nor does the uncertainty of sense undermine its value: we can outline a core definition, while recognizing that this does not capture all of its meaning on all occasions. In doing this, we will focus at a practical level: on what ethnographers actually do, on the sorts of data that they usually collect, and what kind of analysis they deploy to handle those data. Later, we will broaden the discussion to cover some of the diverse ideas that have informed, and continue to shape, ethnographic practice.

What ethnographers do

In terms of data collection, ethnography usually involves the researcher participating, overtly or covertly, in people’s daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, and/or asking questions through informal and formal interviews, collecting documents and artefacts – in fact, gathering whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the emerging focus of inquiry. As this indicates, generally speaking, ethnographers draw on a range of sources of data, though they may sometimes rely primarily on one – very often participant observation. In the case of virtual ethnography, of course, the participation and observation take place online, and so too may any accessing of documents and elicitation of accounts from participants, although sometimes offline sources are used as well.

In more detailed terms, ethnographic work usually has most of the following features:

1. People’s actions and accounts are studied in everyday contexts, rather than solely under conditions created by the researcher, as is the case with experiments or highly structured interviews.

2. Data are gathered from a range of sources, including documentary evidence of various kinds, but participant observation and/or informal conversations are usually the main ones.

3. Data collection is, for the most part, relatively ‘unstructured’, in two senses. First, it does not involve implementing a fixed and detailed research design specified at the start. Second, the categories that are used for interpreting what people say or do are not built into the data collection process, for example through the use of observation schedules or questionnaires. Instead, they are generated out of the process of data analysis.

4. The focus is usually on a few cases, generally small-scale, perhaps a single setting or group of people. This is to facilitate in-depth investigation.

5. The analysis of data involves interpretation of the meanings, sources, functions, and consequences of human actions and institutional practices, and how these are implicated in local, and perhaps also wider, contexts. What are produced, for the most part, are verbal descriptions, explanations, and theories; quantification and statistical analysis play a subordinate role at most.

So, as regards what is referred to in methodological texts as ‘research design’, ethnographers typically employ a relatively open-ended approach, as do qualitative researchers generally (see Maxwell 2013). They begin with an interest in some particular area of social life, type of situation, group of people, or topic. And, while they will usually have in mind what the anthropologist Malinowski – often regarded as the inventor of modern anthropological fieldwork – called ‘foreshadowed problems’, their orientation is an exploratory one. The task is to investigate some aspects of the lives of people, what they do, how they view the situations they face, how they regard one another, and also how they see themselves. It is expected that the initial interests and questions that motivated the research will be refined, and perhaps even transformed, over the course of inquiry, and that this may take a considerable amount of time. Eventually, through this process, the investigation will become progressively more clearly focused on a specific set of research questions, and this may then allow further, strategic, collection of data to pursue answers to those questions, and to test these against evidence.

Collecting data in ‘natural’ settings – in other words, in those that have not been specifically set up for research purposes – also gives a distinctive character to ethnographic work. Where participant observation is involved, the researcher must find some role in the field being studied, and this will usually have to be done through negotiation with people in that field, explicitly or implicitly. This is often true even in relatively public settings, though it may sometimes be possible to ‘lurk’, offline or online. And in many settings initial access will have to be secured through gatekeepers (see Chapters 3 and 4). This is true even where ethnographers are studying settings in which they are already participants, unless they carry out the research covertly. In the case of interviews, similarly, access to informants is not available automatically: here, too, it may be necessary to go through gatekeepers to make contact with the relevant people, and relations with informants will have to be established and developed if productive interviews are to take place (see Chapter 5). Furthermore, this and other aspects of ethnography generate distinctive ethical issues (see Chapter 11).

The initially exploratory character of ethnographic research means that it will often not be clear where observation should begin, which actors or activities should be focused on, and so on. Sampling strategies will have to be worked out, and may be changed, as the research progresses. Much the same is true with the use of interviews. Here, decisions about whom to interview will have to be developed over time, and the interviewing will normally take a relatively unstructured form, questions being formulated during the course of interviews in response to what informants say; though more structured or directive questioning may be used towards the end of the fieldwork. The data will take the form of fieldnotes written in concretely descriptive terms but also frequently audio- or video-recordings, along with transcriptions of these, as well as the collection or elicitation of documentary material, paper-based or electronic. Given the unstructured nature of these data, a great deal of effort, and time, will need to go into processing and analysing them. In all these respects, ethnography is a demanding activity, and it requires diverse skills – including the ability to make decisions in conditions of considerable uncertainty.

This is true despite the fact that the methods used by ethnographers are not far removed from the means that we all use in everyday life to get information and to make sense of our surroundings, especially of other people’s actions, and perhaps even of what we do ourselves. What is distinctive is that ethnography involves a more deliberate and systematic approach than is common for most of us most of the time, one in which data are sought specifically to illuminate research questions, and are carefully recorded, and where the process of analysis draws on previous studies and involves intense reflection, including the critical assessment of competing interpretations. What is involved here, then, is a significant development of the ordinary modes of finding out about and making sense of the social world that we all use in our mundane lives, in a manner that is attuned to the specific purposes of producing research knowledge.

In the remainder of this chapter, we will explore and assess a number of methodological ideas that have shaped ethnography over the course of its history. We will begin by looking at the conflict between quantitative and qualitative methods as competing models of social research, which raged across many fields in the past and still continues today to some degree. This was often regarded as a clash between competing philosophical positions. Following considerable precedent, we will call these ‘positivism’ ...