Originating in the field of anthropology, ethnographic writing provides detailed accounts of the lives and practices of people in various cultures. Researchers who aspire to create ethnographies of a particular culture conduct long-term studies and immerse themselves in the experiences of that culture as “participant observers.”
Seth Kahn, a composition instructor who frequently teaches ethnographic writing, notes that ethnographers “observe, participate, interact, analyze, reflect, write, rethink, and describe cultures, their members, and [their] own involvements with them.”
Methods of Ethnography
- Fieldwork
- The ethnographer spends an extended period of time with the chosen group, learning its routines and customs. Researchers observe and participate as members of the culture interact and go about their daily lives. This allows the researcher to understand cultural practices through experience as well as through observations and interviews.
- Informal, Semi-Structured, & Structured Interviews
- There are three general approaches to conducting interviews in ethnography:
- The Informal “Interview”: a casual conversation with a participant or group about their culture.
- The Semi-Structured Interview: “used to gather focused, qualitative textual data. This method offers a balance between the flexibility of an open-ended interview and the focus of a structured ethnographic survey.”
- Structured Interview: an interview with predetermined questions and intentions.
- Secondary Data Analysis
- Secondary sources include existing data about a culture that has already been observed and analyzed. These can be used to generate ideas and questions to explore in further research and can include scholarly publications, statistical data, and records.
Students may be asked to employ ethnographic research methods to conduct short-term observations of a group and write an ethnography based on their observations.
Ethnographic Writing Resources
Seth Kahn, “Putting Ethnographic Writing in Context.” This is a great introduction to using ethnographies in a writing classroom for a student audience. The author explains the different kinds of writing involved in an ethnography and the process the writer will go through, from field notes to the final product.
Sources Used
http://writingspaces.org/sites/default/files/kahn--putting-ethnographic-writing.pdf