Ethnographic Research
Ethnographic research requires that you conduct fieldwork to become involved with the individuals or group in a personal manner, using participant observation as a technique for gathering data for telling the group’s or individual’s story via rich narrative description. You will typically gather the data via interviews during the participant observation, videography, photography, and document analysis. These techniques of data gathering will yield thick and rich descriptions necessary for your ethnographic dissertation in the form of quotations (low inference descriptors), descriptions of the group and the contexts, and parts of documents. You will, as in participant observation, investigate the behaviors of the people, their language, their actions, and their artifacts. You will look for norms, mores, and customs. Prior to going in to conduct such research, you must be clear about your own biases, about colonization, about who the “other” is, about your impact on the group to be studied, and about basic respect. To conduct fieldwork for the ethnography, you will need to gain the trust of the individuals in charge; these are the gatekeepers.
