Ethnographic Practice
Unit 1. Observation
1.1 Initial and General
1.2 Determination of Elements
1.3 Empathy and Rapport Process
1.4 “Fly on the wall” technique
Conducting an investigation requires an adequate mental and psychological attitude. Research is an inquiry, a search for new knowledge and new understanding. Therefore, you have to be curious, you have to want to know something new, you have to have some spirit of adventure. This implies a recognition that the knowledge that is possessed is imperfect and incomplete.
First of all, you have to pay attention to self-observability. It is necessary, as much as possible, to merge with the stage and disturb the action as little as possible with our presence. The apparition itself and the place we occupy should lack any notoriety.
Establishing rapport with informants is the goal of every field researcher. When you begin to achieve rapport with those you are studying, you experience feelings of accomplishment and encouragement.
The researcher is, theoretically, oblivious to these processes, and adopts the “fly on the wall” technique to observe things as they happen, naturally, with as little interference as possible from their presence.
Unit 2. Interview
2.1 Casual Unstructured
2.2 First Sounding
2.3 Categorization and Second Survey
2.4 Direct Questioning
The place where the interview takes place, how it is graded, the relationships that exist between the people involved and the whole form that it takes, are so many decisive problems.
As interviewers try to develop an open and honest relationship with informants, they must be alert to possible exaggeration and distortion in the stories.
Questionnaires are not popular with ethnographers. In truth, there are those who totally exclude its use with the excuse that it belongs to a research style whose basic assumptions are daily opposed to ethnography.
Unit 3. Application in the field
3.1 Institutional Dimensions
3.2 Specific Subjects
3.3 analysis records p
3.4 Reportes Iniciales
Entry is a common problem in ethnography, and consequently the respective literature presents voluminous and valuable advice to researchers trying to enter an institution, on how to dress, how to behave, what to say. Deep down, he tries to sell himself as a credible person carrying out a worthwhile project..
A detailed description of the setting and the position of the people within it provides important insights into the nature of the participants' activities, their patterns of interaction, their perspectives, and ways of presenting themselves to others.
Observers must record their own conduct in the field. People's words and actions can only be understood if they are examined in the context in which they were spoken or performed. The observers are part of the context. In addition, recording and analyzing one's own actions helps review field tactics or develop other tactics.
Initial and ad hoc reflection is more typically speculative and less well formed. The clarification and extension of the data through a key report, which points to a basic comparison, to deeper considerations behind the actions observed and other related data..
Unit 4. Construction of categories
4.1 Rudimentary empirics
4.2 Parallel Readings
4.3 Diagnostic test
4.4 Initial Visions of Solution
The first step is to identify the most important categories, which, in turn, can be divided into groups
Another aspect of the ethnographic analysis that can be derived from the type of elemental analysis, operate independently of it, is that of the formulation of concepts
The main emphasis has been placed on the discovery before in the verification of theories, but this does not include, that the analysis is guided by data collection as an East said collection. The categories and their properties are noted and saturated. The concepts arise from the field, further data are controlled and recontrolled, compared to another material, reinforces them or perhaps formulated again in another way.
In ethnography, the analysis is simultaneously given with data collection. When it is observed, interviews, field notes are taken and the research journal is made, the work of the ethnographer is not limited to register