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Ethnography: Cultures
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Ethnography is a form of research focusing on the sociology of meaning through close field observation of sociocultural phenomena. Typically, the ethnographer focuses on a community (not necessarily geographic, considering ... work, leisure, and other communities), selecting informants who are known to have an overview of the activities of the community. Such informants are asked to identify other informants representative of the community, using chain sampling to obtain a saturation of informants in all empirical areas of investigation. Informants are interviewed multiple times, using information from previous informants to elicit clarification and deeper responses upon re-interview. This process is intended to reveal common cultural understandings related to the phenomena under study. These subjective but collective understandings on a subject (ex., stratification) are often interpreted to be more significant than objective data (ex., income differentials).
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Ethnography [I]s a new international and interdisciplinary journal for the ethnographic study of social and cultural change. Bridging the chasm between sociology and anthropology, it is becoming the leading network for dialogical exchanges between monadic ethnographers and those from all disciplines involved and interested in ethnography and society. It seeks to promote embedded research that fuses close-up observation, rigorous theory and social critique.
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Ethnography assumes the principal research interest is primarily affected by community cultural understandings. The methodology virtually assures that common cultural understandings will be identified for the research interest at hand. Interpretation is apt to place great weight on the causal importance of such cultural understandings. There is a possibility that an ethnographic focus will overestimate the role of cultural perceptions and underestimate the causal role of objective forces.
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Ethnography, in its original research intent, is intended to allow a researcher to make sense of an existing human social situation, human culture. Taking the perspective of the interested naïve outsider the researcher is freed to ask questions of the society under investigation that would otherwise remain invisible to a fully vested member of that culture.
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Ethnography is an extremely broad area with a great variety of practitioners and methods. However, the most common ethnographic approach is participant observation as a part of field research. The ethnographer becomes immersed in the culture as an active participant and records extensive field notes. As in grounded theory, there is no preset limiting of what will be observed and no real ending point in an ethnographic study.
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The HRAF Collection of Ethnography on microfiche consists of 42 installments of source documents. The eHRAF Collection of Ethnography on the Web is made up of installments 43 through current. (Installments 43-49 were ... issued in CD-ROM format, and Bierce Library maintains these for archival purposes.) Researchers interested in using eHRAF to test cross-cultural hypotheses should note that installments 43-48 comprise the 60-culture Probability Sample Files (PSF).
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