Topics Covered in this Session

• Inition and Characteristics of Ethnographic Research
• Appropriateness/Limitations

Ethnographic Research

Ethnography is from the Greek "ethnos" for people, tribes, or nations and "graphy" for writing. Ethnographic research is the writing about people in their natural setting. It comes from the social sciences and was made popular by the likes of Margaret Mead, the noted anthropologist. It is a form of descriptive research and is also referred to as "observational research" and "naturalistic inquiry." Ethnography is well-suited for educational research because so much of what we do in education is based on human interaction in social settings.

Good ethnographic research requires training and discipline. Training to be observant and discipline in suppressing subjectivity and recording observations objectively. The latter is most difficult because most of us do not fully understand our own biases and prejudices in observing others.

The major benefit of ethnographic research is that it provides rich descriptions of human behavior in natural settings not in artificially constructed, experimental settings. In addition to the question of subjectivity, the major drawback of ethnography is that the researcher cannot infer from a small sample to larger populations. Any inferences made in an ethnographic study are left to the readers to accept or reject.

Data Sources

• Persons associated with the subject of study.
• Observations.

Research Tools

• Structured Interviews.
• Careful recording of events.

Procedural Considerations

• Hypotheses generally are not used.
• Research questions/Sub-questions stated.
• Statistical Analysis is minimal and generally restricted to descriptive statistics.
• Findings usually limited to the population studied.

Report Presentation

• Reports tend to be qualitative rather than quantitative presentations.
• Reports tend to provide rich narrative descriptions.