Enhance your ability to observe and make reliable judgments about communities

Ethnography involves studying a specific culture or community. By living among the members of a culture and playing the role of participant-observer, ethnographers attempt to define the beliefs, rituals, symbols, problems, and patterns of behavior that distinguish this culture from other dominant cultures. For example, ethnographers have attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and written about the culture of alcoholics. Ethnographers have studied the community of prostitutes and drug dealers on inner-city streets and in housing projects. Researchers have used ethnographic techniques to study classrooms in colleges, high schools, and middle schools.

Understanding People is the Purpose

The purpose of ethnography is not to generalize from a smaller population to a larger one. Instead, ethnographies are conducted to better understand specific groups and how those people are influenced by their environment. While ethnographers typically interview key informants in the culture, their emphasis in writing an ethnography is not to tell discrete life stories. Instead, ethnographers use their observations, conclusions from informal and formal interviews, results of psychological tests, and interpretations of insider-written documents to weave together an account of key people in the community and to explicate the community's values, ceremonies, problems, and prospects.

Ethnography in the Classroom

In a variety of college classes, your instructors may challenge you to play the exciting role of an ethnographer. For example, in a sociology class you may be asked to observe and analyze behavior in a college dormitory. For an education class you may need to analyze how different sociological backgrounds or teaching techniques affect learning. Instructors in business management or communication classes might ask you to study the interpersonal factors that influence how decisions are made or how different people respond to certain leadership and management styles.

• Select a Culture: Identify a culture to study, one that you are relatively unfamiliar with
• Learn About the Culture: Enhance your interpretive skills by learning about the culture before visiting, perhaps by reading other researchers' ethnographic accounts of the culture
• Arrange Access: Secure access to the community without poisoning the waters
• Develop Field Notes: Understand and value the subjective nature of ethnographic interpretation
• Use Research Tools: Broaden your understanding of ethnographic research tools
• Select Key Informants: Wisely choose key informants and triangulate the informants' perspectives
• Analyze Artifacts: Enrich your ethnographic interpretation by accounting for community artifacts
• Observe Rituals: Enhance your ethnographic interpretation by identifying and observing customs and rituals that members of the community routinely perform
• Conclude Your Work: Understand and value the subjective nature of ethnographic interpretation