Ethnography in Social Science Practice

Julie Scott-Jones, Sal Watt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415543477
• eBook ISBN: 9781135998639
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

Ethnography in Social Science Practice explores ethnography's increasing use across the social sciences, beyond its traditional bases in social anthropology and sociology. It explores the disciplinary roots of ethnographic research within social anthropology, and contextualizes it within both field and disciplinary settings.

The book is of two parts: Part one places ethnography as a methodology in its historical, ethical and disciplinary context, and also discusses the increasing popularity of ethnography across the social sciences. Part two explores the stages of ethnographic research via a selection of multidisciplinary case studies. A number of key questions are explored:

• What exactly is ethnographic research and what makes it different from other qualitative approaches?
• Why did ethnography emerge within one social science discipline and not others?
• Why did its adoption across the social sciences prove problematic?
• What are the methodological advantages and disadvantages of doing ethnographic research?
• Why are ethnographers so concerned by issues of ethics, politics, representation and power?
• What does ethnography look like within different social science disciplines?

The book is aimed at social science students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level and each chapter has pedagogic features, including reflective activities and suggested further readings for students.

Part I
THINKING THROUGH ETHNOGRAPHY

1
INTRODUCTIONS

Julie Scott Jones

Looking back

My introduction to ethnography came as a first-year social anthropology undergraduate. My first week of lectures was on Bronislaw Malinowski’s fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands (see Young 1979), given by a deeply charismatic lecturer who had spent years doing ethnographic field research in the Amazon. By the end of that week, I had learnt two basic ‘truths’: first, that ethnographic field research was what social anthropologists ‘did’ and, second, that Malinowski was the ‘founding father’ of all things ethnographic. Furthermore, ethnography entailed long-term participant observation in far-flung, ‘exotic’ places, where the researcher might even ‘go native’ (that is over-identify with the research participants and thus lose all sense of objectivity), and that was not necessarily a bad thing. To my class of first-year social anthropologists it all seemed exciting, glamorous and far superior to anything the sociology or psychology students were doing with their questionnaire-based surveys or lab experiments. At that stage, we did not see that these established ‘truths’ were more akin to ‘myths’ and highly problematic in relation to representation, power, ethics, and many other related methodological (and political) issues. We had not yet read Malinowski’s diary (1967) or engaged with the debates that ensued within the discipline (see for example Okely 1975 and Geertz 1984). Also, we had not yet come across ethnography in other social science disciplines: we thought ethnography was purely the domain of the social anthropologist.

By the end of my undergraduate studies ethnography was a far more problematized methodological approach and far less romanticized. This book seeks to explore many of these problematics around power, representation, politics, ethics and so forth; the issues that ethnographers today see as essential aspects of ‘doing’ an ethnography, which were absent from the classical ethnographies to which my first-year class was introduced. Chapter 2 of this book explores social anthropology’s relationship with ethnography, and how and why these issues became important, so there is no need to review them here. It also explores the ‘myth’ of Malinowski that my undergraduate class was taught and believed.

Nevertheless, ethnography remained something that social anthropologists ‘did’; indeed it often seemed like social anthropology’s raison d’être. During my doctoral studies, I began to appreciate that social anthropologists were not the only ones to use ethnographic field research. I conducted my field research in the USA and found anthropology ‘at home’ problematic in relation to social anthropology’s traditional focus on non-western cultures. It was then that I began to explore ethnography in sociology and found that some sociologists had pursued ethnographic research, often influenced by the classical ethnographers that I had studied as an undergraduate. The Chicago School remains the best and most influential example of this work, but they were not mainstream within sociology until the latter half of the twentieth century. It is interesting to reflect on how disciplinary boundaries can blind us to alternative and often innovative uses of the same methodology – something that is discussed in Chapter 4 in particular reference to psychology.

Today, as a lecturer in sociology, I teach qualitative research methods, including ethnography, but remain frustrated by how ethnography, typically, is presented to students in the mainstream research methods textbooks. That representation presents ethnography as a form of participant observation (which it is) that entails a bit of reflexivity. Obviously, texts that are more specialized provide greater detail than generic methods books can, but there is a danger that students believe themselves to be doing ethnographic research when they are not. Students often have a stereotype of ethnography that it is any form of participant observation, or any form of qualitative research, that involves being a ‘bit touchy feely’, as one of my students put it. My co-editor, Sal Watt, as an ethnographer herself and a lecturer in research methods to psychology students, felt similar frustrations. Additionally, as we both migrated across disciplinary boundaries, from social anthropology to sociology and sociology to psychology respectively, we became aware that ethnography was often represented and viewed in different ways, depending on the disciplinary context.

This book emerged from our desire as ethnographers (and teachers) to explore a number of related issues:

• What exactly is ethnographic research and what makes it different from other qualitative approaches?

• Why did ethnography emerge within one social science discipline and not others?

• Why did its adoption across the social sciences prove problematic?

• What are the methodological advantages and disadvantages of doing ethnographic research?

• Why are ethnographers so concerned by issues of ethics, politics, representation and power?

• What does ethnography look like within different social science disciplines?

These issues are explored throughout this book, which seeks to place ethnography within broad historical and disciplinary contexts. As ethnography is becoming increasingly popular across the social sciences, we wanted to explore what ethnography means to researchers outside its traditional havens of social anthropology and sociology. Indeed, does ethnography look the same to a psychologist or sports scientist as it might to a social anthropologist? Does it matter if it does not?

The importance of context

We did not want to write a ‘how to do’ ethnography textbook; there are already some very good books that do this, for example, Hammersley and Atkinson (2007) and Brewer (2000). What we wanted was to write a book that allowed students to see ethnography in action in a variety of field settings and within different social science disciplines. ‘Social science’ is a label that has become increasingly unfashionable in the past thirty years due to the many ‘turns’ (for example, feminism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, etc.) in theory that have influenced, shaped and altered how so-called ‘social scientists’ see their disciplines. As objectivity, validity and empiricism make way for subjectivity, politics and deconstruction, social scientists find the word ‘scientist’ highly problematic. In addition, ‘social scientists’ increasingly ‘deconstruct’ and dissect their own subject areas, motives, preconceptions and so forth; unifying ideals that may operate across disciplinary boundaries can seem opaque. Increasingly we have retreated into our disciplinary boxes to a greater degree. However, the editors and contributors of this book would make a case for utilizing the label ‘social science’ as the more we peer over disciplinary boundaries and attempt interdisciplinary work the more we appreciate common goals and motives. At a basic level, we could identify a desire to engage with and understand the social world and individuals’ lives within it. An appreciation and awareness of historical and cultural contextualization, as well as social constructionism, are also shared across the ‘social sciences’. Social scientists might also acknowledge shared usage of key concepts and terminology, a point Sal Watt makes in Chapter 13 of this book. Therefore, we use the term ‘social science’ deliberately and consider there to be sufficient commonalities across the social science disciplines for the material in this book – even though each chapter is written within a particular disciplinary perspective – to be of use and ‘speak’ to students in a range of social science subjects. It will become clear as the chapters progress that what unites us is not our categorization as ‘social scientists’ but as ‘ethnographers’.

Each chapter of this book will place the reader in a different field setting and within a different social science discipline, including social anthropology, sociology, criminology, psychology, geography, education, sport and health. This list is not exclusive; as the bibliography demonstrates, ethnography has also been used in, among others, economics, business studies, nursing, hospitality studies and within IT development. I hope that the reader will also grasp that ethnography is no longer ‘just’ colourful description but can be applied in academic, policy and commercial settings (as Chapters 3, 5, 6 and 7 vividly demonstrate). In other words, ethnographic work can have an influence beyond academia and, more importantly, can change lives; Helen Jones, in Chapter 3, sees the ability of ethnography to change research subjects’ lives as the central goal of any piece of ethnographic research. This point is echoed by many of the other contributors.

The overall intention of the book is to demonstrate the potential range of field settings available to would-be ethnographers, as well as to illustrate how ethnography may be conducted within different disciplinary boundaries. It is worth noting, as Sal Watt does in Chapter 4, that ethnography has such a low profile in some disciplines that researchers may not even categorize their work as ethnographic or may not wish to due to disciplinary norms. One of our contributors, Duncan Light (see Chapter 12), ‘came out’ so to speak as an ethnographer while writing his chapter as he realized the commonalities his work shared with that of the other contributors. Within his discipline of geography, ethnography is still an emerging methodology. This book demonstrates that although ethnography may look ‘different’ when conducted within specific disciplinary contexts; this ‘difference’ is superficial and beneath the surface lie shared values: what we might call ‘core values’ common to all ethnographers, irrespective of social science discipline. We might also categorize ethnographers as having a shared worldview, or what Dave Randall and Mark Rouncefield, in Chapter 5, call a ‘sensibility’.

An ethnographic sensibility?

The conventional academic style would be for an introductory chapter to offer a discussion of definitions of ‘ethnography’, before presenting the editors’ particular shared definition. This introduction (and book) deliberately omits such a discussion. Debates on definitions are always interesting (and often entertaining) but can also be nothing more than semantic diversions. Numerous texts explore the issue of definitions (see for example Brewer 2000; Hammersley and Atkinson 2007). In bringing together a range of ethnographic examples from across the social sciences, we have found diversity in approaches to field settings and how fieldwork was conducted. I am the only one of all the contributors who actually lived long term with their field subjects; to my undergraduate social anthropologist sensibilities this would make my work the only ‘proper’ ethnography. However, as many of the chapters demonstrate, one can move in and out of the field setting and yet still immerse oneself in a particular social world. The relationships created and maintained with field subjects can be just as meaningful (and close) as powerfully demonstrated in Chapters 3, 6 and 9. As noted in Chapters 5 and 12; some research might only last a week or two and yet, as these chapters show, a wealth of ‘thick’ data that is certainly ethnographic can be obtained. Many of the field settings could not be lived in by the researcher for practical reasons; most obviously in Wendy Laverick’s prison work discussed in Chapter 6. Some settings, by their nature, require the ethnographer to live apart from the field. Yet all the chapters show a high level of participation within the field setting and a strong commitment to field subjects that overwhelmingly identify the work as ‘ethnographic’ in style and orientation. We could argue, then, for a shared sensibility common to all ethnographers, built on a set of common, core values, that shapes the way they see and orientate themselves towards their discipline, their field setting and ultimately their research: a sensibility that identifies them as ethnographers rather than ‘just’ qualitative researchers or indeed ‘social scientists’. What exactly might these core values be?

Our core values?

The chapters in this book demonstrate that, no matter where ethnographic research is conducted or within whatever social science discipline, there remains a set of shared, what we might call, core values. These values include the following:

• Participation: conventionally ethnography is represented as utilizing participant observation as its central method. However, not every field setting can allow the researcher to participate fully, for example, Wendy Laverick, in Chapter 6, could not live the life of a prisoner. She had to rely on focus groups and interviews to collect her data. Yet her work is ethnographic because she participates in their lives, not in a literal physical sense but, as she clearly discusses, in an emotional and mental sense. Her participation is a commitment to enter the prisoners’ social worlds emotionally and mentally. Participation need not be the model of the fully immersed participant observer; field settings mean that levels of participation vary and may alter over time. Ethnographers make a commitment and demonstrate a willingness to participate in the social worlds of their research subjects on different levels: physical, social, mental and emotional. This commitment means that ethnography is highly subjective and physically and emotionally draining; a point fully explored in Chapter 13 on ‘Leaving the field’. Using ethnography and participant observation as synonymous terms ignores the fact that the latter may be a very superficial level of physical or social participation, without the emotional or mental participation ethnographers usually engage in.

• Immersion: ethnographers strive to immerse themselves within a cultural setting; they want to ‘learn the language’ literally and metaphorically. This is not the same as ‘going native’, but rather a commitment to doing as much as you can to become akin to what we might term a ‘knowledgeable tourist’ or a ‘trusted outsider’. Immersion means that ethnographers (to paraphrase the Chicago School sociologist, Robert E. Park) get the seat of our ‘pants dirty’ literally and metaphorically. Or to use another analogy, we seek to get ‘up close and personal’.

• Reflection, reflexivity and representation: we might call these the ‘Three Rs’ of ethnography. Ethnographers reflect constantly on their work, their writing, their motives, etc. This reflective practice works to inform their research at every stage. Thus, ethnography is not a mechanical methodology where one ‘goes out’ and collects data, analyses it and then writes it up. Ethnography is highly reflective. Ethnographers are also committed to reflexivity, as Sal Watt discusses in Chapter 13. Reflexivity is more than mere reflection but rather a theoretical, ethical and political stance whereby ethnographers consider their position...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Part I THINKING THROUGH ETHNOGRAPHY
• Part II ETHNOGRAPHY IN CONTEXT
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX