Applied Ethnography
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Applied Ethnography

Guidelines for Field Research

Pertti J Pelto

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eBook - ePub

Applied Ethnography

Guidelines for Field Research

Pertti J Pelto

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About This Book

This comprehensive, engaging guide to applied research distills the expertise of the distinguished ethnographer and methodologist Pertti Pelto over his acclaimed 50-year career. Having written the first major text promoting mixed qualitative and quantitative methods in applied ethnography in the 1970s, Pelto now synthesizes decades of innovation, including examples from around the world that illustrate how specific methods yield immediate results for addressing social problems. Ideal for researchers, students, training programs, and technical assistance projects, this thorough text covers the key topics and skills required: gaining entry, recording and organizing field data, a host of specialized techniques, integrating qualitative and quantitative methods, building and training research teams, rapid assessment and focused ethnographic studies, short- and long-term ethnography, writing up results, non-Western perspectives on research, and more.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781315434674
Subtopic
Antropologia
Edition
1
1
Introduction to Ethnographic Research
This book presents concrete examples of practical ethnographic research and provides guidelines for using this type of research in intervention programs relating to health, community development, education, agriculture, and other applied topics. The data-gathering methods I describe should be useful to researchers from various disciplines, including anthropology, education, epidemiology, geography, nursing, psychology, public health, sociology, marketing and others. It is also intended that the explanations of ethnographic data-gathering methods should be useful for non-academic applied research organizations in developing countries. Although the focus on methods in this book is primarily “nonacademic,” all of the basic techniques presented here are also widely used in academic studies, including that centrally important genre—master’s and doctoral dissertation research.
ETHNOGRAPHY: WHAT IS IT?
The common definition of ethnography in earlier times was simply: Ethnography is the branch of anthropology that deals with the systematic description of specific human cultures. That definition reflected a bygone era in the social sciences. There was, indeed, a time when the word ethnography was found mainly in anthropology, and most cultural anthropologists would say that they did ethnographic research. However, research of exactly the same type was also well established among many sociologists, notably the Chicago School, beginning in the 1920s, although they didn’t use the label ethnography very much for their research paradigm. In European countries there were many researchers who referred to themselves as folklorists, folk culture researchers, and various other labels, but much of their research could easily be considered ethnography.
On the other hand, the term ethnography has been in use in European academic circles at least since the middle of the 19th century. One of the very earliest ethnographers in Finland, Mathias A. Castren, gave the following definition:
[Ethnography] is a new name for an old thing. It means the scientific study of the religion, society, customs, way of life, habitations, of different peoples, in a word, everything that belongs to their inner and outer life. Ethnography could be regarded as a part of cultural history, but not all nations possess a history in the textual sense; instead, their history consists of ethnography. (Castren 1857: 8; quoted in Niiranen 1992: 23)
I am quoting Castren here, because the case can be made that he was the first “real ethnographic field researcher.” The scope of Castren’s ethnographic field work in Siberia is given in the following excerpt from a bulletin of the Russian Academy of Sciences at the time of his field research:
The Academy’s wish is that Mr. Castren has as his main object the study of languages and major dialects of all the peoples roaming over the above mentioned territories [southern part of Yenisei Province].… Mr. Castren will pay attention to the oral traditions and legends of those peoples…. His long contacts with the aboriginal peoples will make it perfectly easy for him to study their physical constitution, daily life, clothes, rites, rituals and customs, standard of education and their opinions about faith as well as everything that makes it possible to describe these peoples and all their specific features. (Russian Academy of Sciences, quoted in Sokolova 1992: 11)
Castren carried out four years of field work in Siberia (1845 to 1849), in accordance with the instructions from the Russian Academy, and collected a wide range of linguistic data from a number of different tribal groups, as well as folk songs, ethnic and geographical names, and other ethnographic data.
There were other “heroes of ethnographic research” in the 19th century, in many lands, but I will leave those histories for someone else. For example, H.R. Bernard (2011) commented that the 19th century sociologist, Beatrice Webb, was doing qualitative ethnography, including participant observation and informant interviewing, in the 1880s.
W. P. Handwerker provided a useful definition of ethnography in Quick Ethnography: “Ethnography, as I use the word, consists of the processes and products of research that document what people know, feel, and do in a way that situates the phenomena at specific points in time in the history of individual lives, including pertinent global events and processes” (Handwerker 2001: 7).
That definition gives us the following features:
Ethnography is not confined to people’s idea systems (knowledge, mores, values, emotions) but also includes documentation of behaviors, events, and actions.
In Handwerker’s theoretical orientation, “culture” (knowledge, systems of ideas and beliefs, etc.) is first of all a system of properties “in the history of individual lives.” To me, that means that he considers individual, unique mental patterns to be culture—personal culture.
“Ethnography” refers to the process of doing research, but the word is also used to refer to the products of research, as in “an ethnography of the Andaman Islanders.” The word is often used as a subtitle, as in Ogbu (1974) The Next Generation: An Ethnography of Education in an Urban Neighborhood.
Ethnography does not “belong” solely to anthropologists, but is found in a wide range of disciplines.
Concerning “ethnography as product,” LeCompte and Preissle noted that “Ethnographies re-create for the reader the shared beliefs, practices, artifacts, folk knowledge, and behaviors of some group of people” (LeCompte and Preissle 1993: 2–3).
In recent decades, the word ethnography has spread throughout many areas of sociology—studies focused on schooling and education, various sectors in health care and nursing, marketing research, and urban geography—as well as to a number of other disciplines.
ETHNOGRAPHY IN EDUCATION RESEARCH
The word and methodology of ethnography found a comfortable home in the field of education many decades ago. In 1982, G. Spindler put together a collection of papers entitled “Doing the Ethnography of Schooling,” in which his first sentence refers to the “meteoric rise in the past decade…” [of ethnographic research in education]. Margaret LeCompte and Judith Preissle produced a widely used textbook, Ethnography and Qualitative Design in Educational Research, in 1984 (second edition in 1993). Also, together with W. I. Millroy, they produced The Handbook of Qualitative Research in Education (1992). These works show that ethnography has deep and impressive roots in education. They pointed out that in 1913 M. Montessori wrote a book called Pedagogical Anthropology, which discussed the importance of anthropological (ethnographic) methods and theory for understanding educational processes, including the training of teachers (LeCompte and Preissle 1993: 10).
A large number of publications feature ethnographic research in the field of education. Here is the statement of the journal Ethnography and Education, as found on its website:
Ethnography and Education is an international, peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles illuminating educational practices through empirical methodologies, which prioritize the experiences and perspectives of those involved. The journal is open to a wide range of ethnographic research that emanates from the perspectives of sociology, linguistics, history, psychology and general educational studies as well as anthropology. The journal’s priority is to support ethnographic research that involves long-term engagement with those studied in order to understand their cultures; uses multiple methods of generating data, and recognizes the centrality of the researcher in the research process. (Ethnography and Education 2012)
ETHNOGRAPHY IN COMMUNITY HEALTH, NURSING, AND OTHER HEALTH FIELDS
Anthropologists were undoubtedly among the first to carry out ethnographic research in aspects of health and illness, beginning with descriptive studies of traditional beliefs and practices of healing and healers in various traditional societies. Around the middle of the 20th century, a number of anthropologists were doing research in health and nutrition issues, including applied projects. One of the first collections of these studies, put together by Benjamin Paul in 1955, is Health, Culture and Community. Included are descriptions of people’s reactions and behaviors in a cholera epidemic in China, diphtheria immunization in a Thai population, a nutrition research program in Guatemala, and several other informative applied studies. This collection is interesting because, among the 16 papers, only two or three present any quantitative data. This reflects the strongly qualitative approach of ethnographic research methods in the first half of the 20th century. Within a few years after that book appeared, medical anthropology became a rapidly growing sub-discipline. Today, research articles in medical anthropology are found in many research journals, and include large numbers of studies based on mixed qualitative and quantitative data gathering, often including complex statistical analysis.
In the mid-20th century, anthropologists were turning their attention to “peasant societies” in India, Mexico, South America, the Caribbean and other areas. Many of the “new style” studies involved research on “pluralistic health care,” which examined people’s patterns of resort to combinations of traditional treatments and “modern” allopathic medicines and practitioners.
During the 1950s, Alan Beals made three field trips to south India, where he carried out ethnographic research that included in-depth study of villagers’ lists of illnesses, their explanations concerning treatments, available health practitioners, and treatment-seeking behaviors. He found that there was a wide range of different traditional beliefs and practices concerning treatment of illness, and that very few people believed it was useful to seek “modern medicines,” partly because of the costs, including transportation costs (Beals [1976] 1998).
James Young conducted a particularly interesting study of treatment decision-making among Mexican families in the 1970s, in a small town (Pichataro) in the west-central state of Michoacan (Young 1981). During the year of field work, he and his wife collected 323 illness episodes, in which he identified the range of different treatment possibilities as recognized by the individual families, and collected information concerning people’s criteria and motives for their choices of health care providers. The study showed that the available sources of treatment were:
self-treatment (home remedies and “modern medicines”);
traditional curers (curanderas), who were almost all older women using mainly herbal remedies;
unqualified practitioners of “modern” medicine, referred to as practicantes; and
a small number of trained medical doctors, available at the city of Patzcuaro, located about one hour’s bus ride from Pichataro.
Young used a number of structured qualitative research tools, including paired comparisons, hypothetical scenarios, and rank ordering, in order to examine the people’s choices of providers and treatment-seeking patterns.
As a “typical anthropological study,” Young’s work took a full year and resulted in the publication of a widely cited book. It should be noted, however, that the main data-gathering tools of the study could be trimmed down considerably for applied purposes. Thus, a useful assessment of treatment-seeking, decision-making processes could be achieved in a much shorter time period, if needed for planning an intervention program.
Ethnography in Nursing Research
In contrast to the long-time commitment to qualitative ethnographic study of health care in anthropology, the nursing profession in the mid 20th century experienced considerable conflict and confusion about basic orientations to research methods. Leininger and McFarland commented that researchers in nursing “…prior to 1965 were relying heavily on quantitative research methods as the only means for ‘scientific’ knowledge and methods acceptable to science, medicine and nursing as a discipline” (Leininger and McFarland 2002: 75 emphasis in original). The nursing profession was developing rapidly in that time, but it was not primarily oriented to research. Nursing was seen as a pragmatic profession: training people to do effective health care in hospitals, clinics, and community health programs.
In the 1960s, United States government policymakers increasingly realized the importance of research in the field of nursing practices and related health areas. They recognized the need to support nurses to take doctoral degrees in research disciplines outside of nursing. The program of Nurse Scientist Training Grants (1962) and the Nurse Training Act (1964) offered fellowships for nursing students to gain advanced degrees for research purposes. While many of the students in nursing programs chose to go into supposedly more scientific studies in biology, physiology, and other “hard sciences,” some of them opted for social sciences—sociology and anthropology. That choice led to the creation of an active group of nursing researchers who developed ethnographic research approaches for addressing issues in health care.
Among those early pioneers, M. Leininger carried out research in a remote area in New Guinea in the 1960s, in which she developed her theoretical approaches for “transcultural nursing,” which focused on qualitative methods of data gathering. Other key phrases in her theoretical writings include “ethnonursing,” “culturally congruent care,” and “culture care theory.” Leininger’s Qualitative Research Methods in Nursing (1985) was among the first major publications devoted to describing ethnographic approaches for nursing research. During that seminal period, a number of other individuals, partly influenced by their studies in anthropology, also contributed to the growth of what has become a multi-faceted field of ethnographic research by nursing professionals. Some of these nurse-researchers, including Leininger, have argued that qualitative field research should not be mixed with quantitative methods. “Still today some nurse researchers and others are mixing and using both qualitative and quantitative methods.… Such practices seriously violate the integrity and philosophical purpose of each paradigm” (Leininger and McFarland 2002: 87).
J. Morse has written that “We owe a tremendous debt to this cadre of nurses who fought for the introduction of qualitative research into nursing. Madeleine Leininger, Margareta Kay, Eleanor Bowen, Pam Brink, Noel Chrisman, and Melanie Dreher prepared course outlines, and taught the first courses. They monitored journal editors, insisting on fair reviews by qualified reviewers” (Morse 2013).
The struggles for increased acceptance of qualitative ethnographic research in nursing led to the founding of new publication channels, particularly journals more friendly to ethnographic research papers. In 1979, the Western Journal of Nursing Research began publication, with Pamela Brink as editor, a role she continued for more than two decades. This publication accepts research from diverse methodological orientations—phenomenology, historiography, grounded theory, quasi-experimental design, controlled experiments, and others. In 1991, another important ethnography-oriented journal, Qualitative Health Research, was initiated; it is currently edited by J. Morse. Of course, there are now many journals in the field of nursing research, publishing a wide array of quantitative and qualitative studies.
Many of the ethnography-oriented researchers in nursing have carried out studies in non-Western societies, thus broadening the scope and theoretical understanding of health issues and treatment styles in widely different cultural settings. Brink studied health care issues among the Northern Paiute Native Americans and carried out ethnographic field research in the Annang ethnic group in the Cross River area of Nigeria. Her paper entitled “Value Orientations as an Assessment Tool in Cultural Diversity” (Brink 1984) presents interesting data about cultural ideas among the Annang people, as assessed with ...

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