- in depth interviewing and ongoing participant observation of a situation.
- Gets into the nuance and subtleties.
- Hard to determine causal effects
Topics that Lend Themselves Well to Ethnographic Research
- Topics that defy simple quantification.
- Often culture and character fit here!
- Topics that can be best understood in a natural setting.
- Ex: How does a school’s culture shape interactions among students and staff?
- Topics that involve the study of individual or group activities over time.
- Topics that involve the study of the roles that educators play, and the behaviors associated with those roles.
- Topics that involve the study of the activities and behavior of groups as a unit.
- Topics that involve the study of formal organizations in their totality.
sampling
- enough subjects
-
Gain a complete understanding better keep it small
- don’t start with a hypothesis
- Can’t predict in advance
- Field notes
- Field jottings
- Field diary
- Field log
- Need to be organized
- Triangulating data
- Patterns
- Key events
- Visual representations
- Statistics
- Crystallization