Research Methods

Question 1

Ethnograph

Answer 1

• Ethnography — literally, writing about people
• Ethnographic methods — the data collecting techniques we use
• Ethnographer — a researcher conducting an ethnographic study.

Question 1

Ethnographic Fieldwork

Answer 1

• the practice whereby an anthropologist is immersed in the daily life of a culture to collect data.
• primary way of conducting research and collecting data.
• Fieldwork is a research method that requires the researcher to be personally immersed in the daily social activities of some group of people while conducting research
• As a research strategy, anthropological fieldwork is eminently experiential, which means that researchers collect their primary data by immersing themselves in the cultures they are studying (Figure 5.1): living with the people, learning their language, asking them questions, surveying their environments and material possessions, and spending long periods of time observing their everyday behaviours and interactions in their natural setting.

Question 2

Ethnographic methods

Answer 2

• mostly qualitative; can be quantitative
• most descriptive
• increasingly multi-sited
• ideally a form of immersion
• Science-ish (kinda close to botany)
• Research design — its not so tidy

Question 3

Research Design

Answer 3

textbook

1. Selecting research problem in-hand
2. Formulating research design throughout
3. Collecting data iterative
4. Analyzing data literature
5. Writing up/[resenting

Question 4

How do we do fieldwork?

Answer 4

• Observations
• Participation
• Interviews
• Ethnographic research is slow

Question 5

Participant-Observation

Answer 5

• Research that involved living with and observing the people under study.
• Malinowski wrote: “The goal [of the Ethnographer] is, briefly; to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world” P. 25
• “Perhaps through realising human nature in a shape very distant and foreign to us, we shall have some light shed on our own.” P. 25
• You see the twin aims of ethnography?
• Participant
  
  • inside/emic view
  • “It is good for the Ethnographer sometimes to put aside camera, notebook and pencil, and to join in himself in what is going on.” p. 21
• Observation
  
  • outside/etic (analytical) view
  • “An ethnographic diary, carried on systematically throughout the course of one’s work in a district would be the ideal instrument for this sort
• From the first day of fieldwork, gaining entry into the community presents some challenges for the participant-observer.
• The anthropologist typically begins by observing the community before fully participating in all aspects of social life, so as to gradually learn the appropriate behaviour for participating in a local community in a non-obstructive way.
• Cultural anthropologists in the field can hardly expect to be accepted as soon as they walk into a new community.

Question 6

Participating

Answer 6

• Performing daily routines suggests new questions and avenues of inquiry
  
  • Can position you in other’s point of view
• Builds rapport
  
  • Since the anthropologist must have a good working relationship with the people he or she studies, one of the first goals of the researcher is to overcome any apprehension people may have and to gain their trust. In other words, the ethnographer must establish rapport.
  • Often one of the best ways to gain rapport is simply to pitch in and help, whether that means working in the fields, helping to prepare a meal, aiding in building a latrine, or helping deal with other agencies.
• Issues with participating:
  
  • “Going native” (participating without observation)
• always say that you are a researcher collecting information on the people, consistent role.
• Using participant observation has certain methodological advantages for enhancing the quality of the data obtained.
• Another major advantage of participant observation is that it enables the anthropologist to distinguish between normative and real behaviour—that is, between what people say they do and what people actually do.
• On the other hand, participant observation poses certain methodological problems that can jeopardize the quality of the data. For example, the nature of participant observation precludes a large sample size. Because such studies are both in-depth and time-consuming, fewer people are actually studied than would be if questionnaires or surveys were used.

advantages
Generally enhances rapport
Enables fieldworkers to distinguish actual from stated behaviour
Permits observation of nonverbal behaviour
Enables fieldworkers to experience the behaviours being observed

disadvantages
Practical only for small sample size
Difficult to obtain standardized comparable data
Incomplete data resulting from problems recording information
Obtrusive effect on subject matter

Question 7

Interviews (and conversation)

Answer 7

• Interviewing is used for obtaining information on what people think or feel (attitudinal data) as well as on what they do (behavioural data).
• First, in the ethnographic interview, the interviewer and the participant often speak different first languages. Second, the ethnographic interview is often broad in scope because it elicits information about the entire culture. Third, the ethnographic interview cannot be used alone, but must be used in conjunction with other data-gathering techniques.
• Unstructured – conversations
  
  • A data-gathering technique in which interviewees are asked to respond to broad, open-ended questions.
  • Unstructured interviews are used most often in the early stages of fieldwork and involve a minimum of control.
  • Unstructured interviews have the advantage of allowing respondents to decide what is important to include in their responses, and they also give the anthropologist the flexibility to pursue issues raised by the respondent.
  • It is from the unstructured interview that the anthropologist may narrow in on a line of questioning in a semi-structured interview to obtain more detailed nuanced information from the participant on a specific subject.
• Semi-structured
  
  • A data-gathering technique relying on an interview guide covering the topics or themes needing to be addressed.
  • In semi-structured interviews, the anthropologist relies on an interview guide covering the topics or themes he or she needs to address in a particular order during an interview.
  • Semi-structured interviews are flexible to the extent that new ideas can be explored depending on what the interviewee says, and questions can be tailored to suit the context of the interview and to the particular interviewee.
  • Grand tour and mini-tour questions
  • No leading questions, please
• Structured interviews
  
  • An ethnographic data-gathering technique in which large numbers of respondents are asked a set of specific questions.
  • At the other extreme are structured interviews, or surveys, in which the interviewer asks all respondents the same set of questions, in the same sequence, and, except for open-ended questions, with the same choice of possible answers.
  • Structured interviews have the advantage of producing large quantities of data that are comparable and thus lend themselves well to rapid statistical analyses.
  • Because structured interviews ask questions based on specific cultural information, they are used most commonly late in the fieldwork, if at all, and only after the anthropologist knows enough about the culture to ask highly specific questions.
  • Questionnaires and surveys
    
    • Good for getting a handle on lots of stuff, but not usually able to get at why things are the way they are

Question 8

Issues with interviews

Answer 8

• Interviewers might not know the best questions to ask
  
  • ­https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA8xTGP_M8g
  • ­“the sheds don’t matter”
• Verbal descriptions are always incomplete – may not capture norms/etiquette; issues with explication, translation, knowledge/secrecy

Question 9

Key consultants

Answer 9

• Individuals who are particularly well informed about (expert in) a subject of inquiry
• Anthropologists aren’t the only people who have ideas about culture and society
• Community members have variable abilities and capacities to recall information
  
  • Not to mention, they might intentionally mislead you for the sake of humour, out of anger, or because of social convention (Margaret Mead in Samoa?)

Question 10

We are the instruments

Answer 10

• What subjects do we ask about?
• Who can we talk to/observe?
• What will they reveal to us?

Question 11

Other methods

Answer 11

• Ethnographic mapping
  
  • A data-gathering tool that locates where the people being studied live, where they keep their livestock, where public buildings are located, and so on to determine how that culture interacts with its environment.
  • We can learn a good deal about a culture by examining how people interact with their physical environment.
• census taking
  
  • Because census taking involves the collection of basic demographic data, such as age, occupation, marital status, and household composition, it is generally not threatening to the local people.
• film and photography
  
  • To illustrate, ethnographic documentaries can be extremely helpful in proxemic analysis (i.e., the study of how people in different cultures distance themselves from one another in normal interactions) and event analysis (i.e., documentation of who participates in events such as circumcision ceremonies, marriages, and funerals).
• genealogies
  
  • genealogical method: A technique of collecting data in which the anthropologist writes down all the kin of a research collaborator.
  • The data are often expressed in a kinship diagram, or genealogy, and from this information the anthropologist can deduce how family members relate to one another, what the gender roles in the community are, who marries whom, and what behavioural expectations exist among different categories of kin. Sometimes the information can also be used to reconstruct past historical events.
• document analysis/archival research
  
  • Examination of data such as personal diaries, newspapers, colonial records, and so on.
  • Advantages to using historical documents or reviewing popular culture are that it is neither expensive nor time-consuming, and it is totally unobtrusive in providing the anthropologist with a cultural context for their research.
• ethnohistory
  
  • The use of historical documents, oral traditions, as well as other archaeological and ethnographic methods to understand the history of ethnic groups, both past and present.
• narrative/life history
  
  • reflexive or narrative ethnography: An ethnography in which the ethnographer discusses the influence of his or her personal and cultural context on the ethnography, and which are co-produced and focus on the interaction between themselves and their collaborators.
  • life history or life story The story of a collaborator’s life experiences in a culture that provides insight into their culture
  • the primary method is the in-depth interview in which the ethnographer asks collaborators to describe in their own words the story of their lives and to describe what it is like to experience their culture.
• internet/social media

Question 12

Triangulation

Answer 12

• Sometimes what people say differs from what they do
  
  • Malinowski and the Trobriand boy who killed himself because of the public pronouncement of his affair with his mother’s sister’s daughter (a prohibited relationship that was common)
• And sometimes things look different from another perspective…

Question 13

Being thoughtful about ethics

Answer 13

• Consider relations of power
• What does it mean to be informed?
• What are our obligations to research participants?
• What are our responsibilities?
• Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics

Question 14

Comparative methods

Answer 14

• Cross-cultural comparison
  
  • Can we isolate larger cross-cultural patterns or similarities?
• Controlled historical comparison
  
  • How do 2 more societies compare over time?
• Analogic reasoning
  
  • What else is this phenomenon like?

Question 15

Cross-cultural comparison

Answer 15

• We look for associations or correlations between etic concepts
• George Peter Murdock and the Human Resource Area Files (HRAF) – pre-coded data
• Beatrice Whiting’s work on the association between sorcery and specialised legal apparatus

Question 16

Hypothesis Testing

Answer 16

1. Researcher states idea as a hypothesis
   
   1. Stated in a way that it can be falsified
2. Researcher chooses a sample of societies and studies the ethnographies that describe their way of life
3. Researcher takes data from the ethnographies and classifies/groups them in a way that confirms or falsifies hypothesis

Question 17

Controlled historical comparison

Answer 17

• In cross-cultural comparison we take a synchronic view – we freeze cultures in time
• In controlled historical comparison we try to take a diachronic view – look at cultures over time
• The relative adaptiveness of matrilineal vs. patrilineal social organisation over a specific time period (135 years from 1775 to 1910)
  
  • Michael Allen observed that matrilineal societies in the Pacific Islands were more resilient to post-contact changes than patrilineal societies. He wondered: is matrilineality in some way advantageous or protective?
• In terms of contact with Europeans, do (did) matrilineal societies fare better than patrilineal societies?
• Hypothesis: Given the same disruptive external pressures, matrilineal societies maintain their population levels better than patrilineal societies.

Question 18

Problems with these comparions

Answer 18

• Comparisons are taken out of cultural context and assigned binary values
  
  • Important/unimportant, present/absent, is/isn’t
• Cross cultural comparison freezes cultures in time
  
  • The limitation of a synchronic approach
• Controlled historical comparison assumes “all else being equal”
  
  • Only type of descent was an important variable in distinguishing these societies over time

Question 19

Analogical Reasoning

Answer 19

• More often the comparison is “one thing is like something else”
• Usually, these comparisons challenge our knowledge about both phenomena
• Case of apprenticeship
• Ritual and sport
• A way of further refining theories and categorizations

Question 20

Description cf. explanation

Answer 20

Ethnographic works accomplishes 2 things

1. A description of culture
   
   1. What people think (or say), do and have
2. An explanation or account for findings
   
   1. This can be emic
   2. This can be etic
   3. This can be etic
   4. It can be analogic
   5. It can generate general claims about societies or social organization

Question 21

Comparing all the comparisons

Answer 21

• The popularity of cross-cultural comparison ebbs and flows
  
  • Early anthropologists such as Tylor, Morgan and Frazer built evolutionary schema based on broad comparison (if poor evidence)
  • Comparison was heralded in mid-20th century American anthropology by George Murdock (Yale - HRAF) and Fred Eggan (U of Chicago)
• Implicit comparison is almost always present
• “There’s only one method in social anthropology, the comparative method – and that’s impossible.” (aphorism attributed to E.E. Evans-Pritchard)

Question 22

Conclusion on Research Methods

Answer 22

• Cultural anthropology is interested in describing culture(s) (uses ethnographic methods)
• Cultural anthropology is interested in comparing cultures – to build theories about culture and society
• We want to understand the particular and we would like to be able to go beyond particular descriptions and make claims about humanity in general