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• What Is Ethnography? | Definition, Guide & Examples

What Is Ethnography? | Definition, Guide & Examples

Published on March 13, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on June 22, 2023.

Ethnography is a type of qualitative research that involves immersing yourself in a particular community or organization to observe their behavior and interactions up close. The word “ethnography” also refers to the written report of the research that the ethnographer produces afterwards.

Ethnography is a flexible research method that allows you to gain a deep understanding of a group’s shared culture, conventions, and social dynamics. However, it also involves some practical and ethical challenges.

Table of contents

What is ethnography used for, different approaches to ethnographic research, gaining access to a community, working with informants, observing the group and taking field notes, writing up an ethnography, other interesting articles.

Ethnographic research originated in the field of anthropology, and it often involved an anthropologist living with an isolated tribal community for an extended period of time in order to understand their culture.

This type of research could sometimes last for years. For example, Colin M. Turnbull lived with the Mbuti people for three years in order to write the classic ethnography The Forest People .

Today, ethnography is a common approach in various social science fields, not just anthropology. It is used not only to study distant or unfamiliar cultures, but also to study specific communities within the researcher’s own society.

For example, ethnographic research (sometimes called participant observation ) has been used to investigate  football fans , call center workers , and police officers .

Advantages of ethnography

The main advantage of ethnography is that it gives the researcher direct access to the culture and practices of a group. It is a useful approach for learning first-hand about the behavior and interactions of people within a particular context.

By becoming immersed in a social environment, you may have access to more authentic information and spontaneously observe dynamics that you could not have found out about simply by asking.

Ethnography is also an open and flexible method. Rather than aiming to verify a general theory or test a hypothesis , it aims to offer a rich narrative account of a specific culture, allowing you to explore many different aspects of the group and setting.

Disadvantages of ethnography

Ethnography is a time-consuming method. In order to embed yourself in the setting and gather enough observations to build up a representative picture, you can expect to spend at least a few weeks, but more likely several months. This long-term immersion can be challenging, and requires careful planning.

Ethnographic research can run the risk of observer bias . Writing an ethnography involves subjective interpretation, and it can be difficult to maintain the necessary distance to analyze a group that you are embedded in.

There are often also ethical considerations to take into account: for example, about how your role is disclosed to members of the group, or about observing and reporting sensitive information.

Should you use ethnography in your research?

If you’re a student who wants to use ethnographic research in your thesis or dissertation , it’s worth asking yourself whether it’s the right approach:

• Could the information you need be collected in another way (e.g. a survey , interviews)?
• How difficult will it be to gain access to the community you want to study?
• How exactly will you conduct your research, and over what timespan?
• What ethical issues might arise?

If you do decide to do ethnography, it’s generally best to choose a relatively small and easily accessible group, to ensure that the research is feasible within a limited timeframe.

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There are a few key distinctions in ethnography which help to inform the researcher’s approach: open vs. closed settings, overt vs. covert ethnography, and active vs. passive observation. Each approach has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Open vs. closed settings

The setting of your ethnography—the environment in which you will observe your chosen community in action—may be open or closed.

An open or public setting is one with no formal barriers to entry. For example, you might consider a community of people living in a certain neighborhood, or the fans of a particular baseball team.

• Gaining initial access to open groups is not too difficult…
• …but it may be harder to become immersed in a less clearly defined group.

A closed or private setting is harder to access. This may be for example a business, a school, or a cult.

• A closed group’s boundaries are clearly defined and the ethnographer can become fully immersed in the setting…
• …but gaining access is tougher; the ethnographer may have to negotiate their way in or acquire some role in the organization.

Overt vs. covert ethnography

Most ethnography is overt . In an overt approach, the ethnographer openly states their intentions and acknowledges their role as a researcher to the members of the group being studied.

• Overt ethnography is typically preferred for ethical reasons, as participants can provide informed consent…
• …but people may behave differently with the awareness that they are being studied.

Sometimes ethnography can be covert . This means that the researcher does not tell participants about their research, and comes up with some other pretense for being there.

• Covert ethnography allows access to environments where the group would not welcome a researcher…
• …but hiding the researcher’s role can be considered deceptive and thus unethical.

Active vs. passive observation

Different levels of immersion in the community may be appropriate in different contexts. The ethnographer may be a more active or passive participant depending on the demands of their research and the nature of the setting.

An active role involves trying to fully integrate, carrying out tasks and participating in activities like any other member of the community.

• Active participation may encourage the group to feel more comfortable with the ethnographer’s presence…
• …but runs the risk of disrupting the regular functioning of the community.

A passive role is one in which the ethnographer stands back from the activities of others, behaving as a more distant observer and not involving themselves in the community’s activities.

• Passive observation allows more space for careful observation and note-taking…
• …but group members may behave unnaturally due to feeling they are being observed by an outsider.

While ethnographers usually have a preference, they also have to be flexible about their level of participation. For example, access to the community might depend upon engaging in certain activities, or there might be certain practices in which outsiders cannot participate.

An important consideration for ethnographers is the question of access. The difficulty of gaining access to the setting of a particular ethnography varies greatly:

• To gain access to the fans of a particular sports team, you might start by simply attending the team’s games and speaking with the fans.
• To access the employees of a particular business, you might contact the management and ask for permission to perform a study there.
• Alternatively, you might perform a covert ethnography of a community or organization you are already personally involved in or employed by.

Flexibility is important here too: where it’s impossible to access the desired setting, the ethnographer must consider alternatives that could provide comparable information.

For example, if you had the idea of observing the staff within a particular finance company but could not get permission, you might look into other companies of the same kind as alternatives. Ethnography is a sensitive research method, and it may take multiple attempts to find a feasible approach.

All ethnographies involve the use of informants . These are people involved in the group in question who function as the researcher’s primary points of contact, facilitating access and assisting their understanding of the group.

This might be someone in a high position at an organization allowing you access to their employees, or a member of a community sponsoring your entry into that community and giving advice on how to fit in.

However,  i f you come to rely too much on a single informant, you may be influenced by their perspective on the community, which might be unrepresentative of the group as a whole.

In addition, an informant may not provide the kind of spontaneous information which is most useful to ethnographers, instead trying to show what they believe you want to see. For this reason, it’s good to have a variety of contacts within the group.

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The core of ethnography is observation of the group from the inside. Field notes are taken to record these observations while immersed in the setting; they form the basis of the final written ethnography. They are usually written by hand, but other solutions such as voice recordings can be useful alternatives.

Field notes record any and all important data: phenomena observed, conversations had, preliminary analysis. For example, if you’re researching how service staff interact with customers, you should write down anything you notice about these interactions—body language, phrases used repeatedly, differences and similarities between staff, customer reactions.

Don’t be afraid to also note down things you notice that fall outside the pre-formulated scope of your research; anything may prove relevant, and it’s better to have extra notes you might discard later than to end up with missing data.

Field notes should be as detailed and clear as possible. It’s important to take time to go over your notes, expand on them with further detail, and keep them organized (including information such as dates and locations).

After observations are concluded, there’s still the task of writing them up into an ethnography. This entails going through the field notes and formulating a convincing account of the behaviors and dynamics observed.

The structure of an ethnography

An ethnography can take many different forms: It may be an article, a thesis, or an entire book, for example.

Ethnographies often do not follow the standard structure of a scientific paper, though like most academic texts, they should have an introduction and conclusion. For example, this paper begins by describing the historical background of the research, then focuses on various themes in turn before concluding.

An ethnography may still use a more traditional structure, however, especially when used in combination with other research methods. For example, this paper follows the standard structure for empirical research: introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion.

The content of an ethnography

The goal of a written ethnography is to provide a rich, authoritative account of the social setting in which you were embedded—to convince the reader that your observations and interpretations are representative of reality.

Ethnography tends to take a less impersonal approach than other research methods. Due to the embedded nature of the work, an ethnography often necessarily involves discussion of your personal experiences and feelings during the research.

Ethnography is not limited to making observations; it also attempts to explain the phenomena observed in a structured, narrative way. For this, you may draw on theory, but also on your direct experience and intuitions, which may well contradict the assumptions that you brought into the research.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Normal distribution
• Degrees of freedom
• Null hypothesis
• Discourse analysis
• Control groups
• Mixed methods research
• Non-probability sampling
• Quantitative research
• Ecological validity

Research bias

• Rosenthal effect
• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Selection bias
• Negativity bias
• Status quo bias

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Ethnography: Methods, Types, Importance, Limitations, Examples

Ethnography is a descriptive study of a certain human culture or the process of conducting such a study.  It is a  qualitative data collection approach commonly employed in the social and behavioural sciences. The term “ethnography” comes from the Greek words “ethnos” (which means “people” or “nation) and “grapho” (which means “I write”). A very common example of ethnographic research is an ethnographer coming to an island, living within its community for years, and investigating its people and culture via persistent observation and involvement. A few essential elements of ethnographic research are the significance of context, detailed recording of people and their life and a holistic and qualitative analysis of the data collected. This article will discuss the methods and types of ethnographic research. It will also shed light on the importance of ethnography as a research tool, as well as its advantages and limitations. The article will also illustrate some differences between ethnography and anthropology.

Methods of Ethnography

For example, a naturalist ethnographic study was conducted in South African primary schools, with a focus on the learning habits of a group of Grade 6 children at an urban township school in the Western Cape (Plooy, 2010).

Some researchers acquire access to massive volumes of data by relying on existing information to address a variety of study queries. This method of inquiry is called archival research. Looking at past records helps the researcher to identify patterns or relationships that can further lead to new paths of study. Fire agencies in the United States preserve records of fires, chemical spills, accidents, and so on, all of which represent archived data. From 1953 until 2001, the measurements of models shoot for Playboy magazine’s centrefolds were investigated as an example of archival research (Voracek & Fisher, 2002).

Netnography is a method of performing ethnographic research on the internet. It is a qualitative, interpretative research approach that applies standard ethnographic methodologies to the study of internet platforms. The ethnographic research setting is understood by going to the field where the researcher does fieldwork. Netnography doesn’t always need fieldwork, but what is done is online fieldwork. Even in some research examples, netnographic research can be done completely in front of a smartphone or computer screen. Using a netnographic and case-study method, a study by Johansson and Andreasson examined how loneliness is perceived and comprehended via the use of several blogs as data (2017).  More specifically, the study intended to analyse loneliness and associated topics in the context of online communication.

Types of Ethnographic Research

There are certain procedures included in educational research that study people’s learning and teaching approaches and the influence they have on classroom behaviour. People may learn about student behaviour and attitudes, as well as academic motives, learning dispositions, and much more, through educational ethnography research. People can pay greater attention to the consequences of learning processes, pedagogy, and certain general arrangements in the learning environment with the aid of this study methodology.

Ethnography is a valuable study tool for understanding patients’ and service consumers’ experiences throughout their medical journey. It may tell you what it’s like to have a certain medical condition or diagnosis, as well as the norms and behaviours of individuals with that ailment. The patient’s voice can be heard owing to ethnographic data. Information from ethnographic research of patient populations can be utilised to enhance healthcare and social care services.

There are various advantages of ethnography, which make it important to the field of sociological research. Some benefits of ethnography are:

However, there are some limitations to ethnographic research as well., ethnography vs anthropology.

Ethnography seeks to depict life as it is seen and perceived by a person, somewhere, at some point in time. Anthropology, on the other hand, is a study of the circumstances and possibilities of people living in the world. Although anthropology and ethnography have much to offer each other, their goals and purposes are quite different. Ethnography is a methodology while anthropology is a discipline. Anthropology is the study of human communities in general, while ethnography is a methodical technique to discover a culture, place, or group.

For instance, an anthropologist might be interested in studying the mating rituals of a small town in New Guinea. Now he might employ many methods to achieve his objective. One of those methodological approaches can be the use of ethnographic research. The anthropologist can use participant observation to explore the culture of this tribe in New Guinea. Thus, in this case, the cultural anthropologist has used ethnography to understand a culture.

Lucille, D. P. (M. L. (n.d.). An ethnographic study of the learning practices of grade 6 students in an urban township school in the Western Cape: A sociological perspective (thesis).

Voracek, M. (2002). Shapely centrefolds? temporal change in body measures: Trend Analysis. BMJ , 325 (7378), 1447–1448. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.325.7378.1447

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What is Ethnographic Research? Methods and Examples

Ethnographic research , rooted in the discipline of anthropology, is a systematic and immersive approach for the study of individual cultures. Ethnographic research methods involve the examination of cultural phenomena from the perspective of the subjects under investigation. This method of social research places a particular emphasis on participant observation, where researchers engage with the setting or individuals being studied, documenting intricate patterns of social interaction and analyzing the participants’ own interpretations of their behavior within their local contexts.   

While ethnography originated in social and cultural anthropology in the early twentieth century, its application has extended to various disciplines. Widely adopted as a qualitative data collection strategy, ethnographic research design stands out for its reliance on observing life as it naturally unfolds, dispensing with the controlled environment of a laboratory. Ethnographic observation seeks to understand societies and individuals through direct observation and interviews, providing valuable insights into how they interact with their surroundings in their natural environments.  

Here are some ethnographic research examples :  

• An anthropologist observing the people and culture of an Indigenous tribe by living with them for several months.  
• A child psychologist observing the social dynamics of toddlers in a play school (interactions with teachers and with one another).   
• A potential startup looking to create a product and a market for that product by observing how a group of potential customers interact with and discuss similar products in various stores over a specified length of time.

Table of Contents

What is ethnographic research ?  

Ethnographic research systematically studies cultures and behaviors, relying on participant observation and exploring cultural phenomena from the perspective of the subjects. Its versatility and qualitative nature make it a valuable data collection strategy in the social and behavioral research sciences. It has transcended disciplinary boundaries, making its way into various social science disciplines, notably sociology. Some key points to better understand what is ethnographic research ? and what are the advantages of ethnography research ? are as follows:  

• Ethnographic research is an immersive approach that aims to document detailed patterns of social interaction and behavior.   
• Ethnographic observation provides a rich source of qualitative data.  
• Ethnographic research methods acknowledge the unpredictability of real-world situations, offering a more authentic understanding of societal dynamics and individual behaviors.  
• Ethnographic research puts the point of view of the subject of the research first.  

Main aim of ethnographic research  

The main aim of ethnographic research is to deep dive into the perspectives and actions of subjects, capturing the variables that characterize their daily experiences. It offers researchers a comprehensive understanding of how subjects perceive the world and navigate their interactions with the surrounding elements.    

Types of ethnographic research  

Ethnographic observation might be applied in fields of business, medicine, education, psychology, and more. There are various types of ethnographic research , broadly based on the study discipline and the activity under study, with each shedding light on human behavior, experiences, and cultural nuances.  

Below are different types of ethnographic research , which will give you a broad idea about how to conduct ethnographic research in various fields:  

1. Psychology ethnography

To explore human experiences and behaviors within a cultural context, researchers immerse themselves in the natural habitat of individuals, applying ethnographic research methods such as in-depth interviews, focus groups, and field notes. 

2. Life history ethnography

Life history ethnography looks at the tapestry of an individual’s life, offering a nuanced understanding of their experiences, challenges, and cultural influences. Researchers conduct in-depth interviews, collect personal documents, and may even observe the subject in their daily life to capture a comprehensive life narrative. By zooming in on a single life, researchers can uncover patterns, transitions, and unique perspectives that might be overlooked in broader ethnographic studies.  

3. Business ethnography

In business and retail, ethnographic research focuses on consumer habits and target markets to discern market demands and attitudes toward products or services. Fieldwork, interviews, and online surveys are used to identify preferences and meet market demands effectively.   

4. Educational ethnography

Researchers employing educational ethnography observe students’ learning attitudes and motivations using non-participant and direct participant observation.  

5. Medical ethnography

In medicine and healthcare, ethnographic research involves qualitative exploration of patient behavior across various healthcare scenarios to understand patient needs, reactions to prescriptions and treatment procedures, suggestions for improvement, etc.  

6. Digital ethnography

Digital ethnography or desk study is conducted remotely. Researchers rely on second- or third-hand information collected by others to compile knowledge about a particular ethnic group without direct observation. This method leverages the wealth of information available online.   

7. Literary ethnography

Novels and books, often overlooked in traditional ethnographic discussions, offer a unique avenue for cultural exploration. Literary ethnography involves analyzing fictional works, autobiographies, and cultural narratives to extract insights into societal norms, values, and historical contexts. This method recognizes the power of storytelling as a medium through which cultural knowledge is transmitted.   

Methods of ethnographic research    

Various methodologies are employed in ethnography, from direct observation, diary studies, video recordings and photography to the analysis of devices used by individuals. The duration of ethnographic studies varies, with observation periods ranging from a few hours to several months, depending on the specific research objectives. Thus, ethnographic research methods employed will depend on the field, the size of the sample, and the research goal.    

So, what are ethnographic methods employed by researchers to answer questions in diverse disciplines? Let’s take a look:  

1. Triangulation  

A researcher used multiple data collection strategies and data sources to obtain a complete picture of the topic in focus and to cross-check information.  

2. Field notes  

A researcher collects, records, and compiles notes on-site during the study. This can be considered a researcher’s primary tool to collect data.  

3. Naturalism  

This is probably the oldest ethnographic research method . In this ethnographic research design , one spends time in the group’s natural environment to observe and record research variables.   

4. Participant observation  

Similar to the above approach, in participant observation, the ethnographer actively interacts with the research subjects. The difference lies in the ethnographer participating in the group. Participant observation gives ethnographers more data. They better understand the research subjects’ experiences and habits from the participant’s perspective.  

5. Interviews  

For authentic and relevant research results, the ethnographer interacts with the research group, asking questions about the research group, while conducting research-related activities.  

6. Surveys  

Ethnography surveys help the researcher obtain and analyze data to arrive at objective conclusions. Multiple choice questions, Likert scale, open-ended, and close-ended ethnography survey questions are commonly used. This approach saves time and costs.   

7. Archival research  

This qualitative ethnographic research method examines existing literature and records of relevant research rather than by the researcher’s physical presence.   

Examples of ethnographic research  

To better understand ethnographic research meaning , methods, and design, let’s take a look at some ethnographic research examples :  

Observing urban street performers: Over the course of several months, a researcher observes urban street performers’ performances and their interactions with passersby, exploring how these individuals collaborate or compete with one another for attention and recognition.  

Studying patterns of coffee shop regulars: Through a combination of direct observation and casual conversations, a researcher might uncover the habits and interactions of regular patrons and the social dynamics that characterize the daily lives of individuals who frequent the establishment.   

Exploring online gaming communities: In the realm of virtual spaces, a researcher might examine online gaming communities to understand the social structures, communication patterns, and shared norms among players. Through active participation and observation within the gaming environment, the researcher might seek insights into how relationships form, conflicts are resolved, and cultural practices evolve within this digital subculture.  

Observing farmers’ market vendors: At a local farmers’ market, a researcher may closely examine the interactions between vendors, customers, and the broader community. This study aims to uncover the cultural nuances of the market environment, exploring aspects such as negotiation tactics, vendor-customer relationships, and the role of the market in creating a sense of community.  

Advantages of ethnography research  

The advantages of ethnography research are manifold. Ethnographic observation allows first-hand observation of subjects’ interactions in their natural environment. This might help uncover subjects’ unconscious or implicit behaviors. Ethnographic research also enables a researcher to gain longitudinal insights as ethnography often involves extended periods of fieldwork, allowing researchers to observe changes and developments over time. Further, this approach often captures the holistic nature of social phenomena by considering various interconnected elements within a cultural context. This holistic approach is beneficial for understanding complex social structures, rituals, and the interplay of different factors influencing behaviors.  

Finally, ethnographic research involves a variety of data collection methods, and this multi-faceted approach yields rich and diverse data, enhancing the depth and validity of the research findings.  

Disadvantages of ethnography research  

Despite its relevance to certain studies, ethnographic research is not without its limitations. One significant challenge lies in the necessity to establish and sustain intimate face-to-face interactions with participants, a task that can prove difficult depending on the study’s nature and the type of participants involved. Prolonged fieldwork might prove costly in terms of time and resources. Second, culture, being an abstract concept, poses difficulties when used as an interpretive lens. Third, ethnographic research lacks reliability and validity since it cannot be easily replicated, and its findings may not extend to other similar situations    

Frequently asked questions  

Q: What are some examples of ethnographic research?

A: Some ethnographic research examples are as follows:  

• Studying yoga retreat participants: An ethnographer may immerse themselves in the experience of a yoga retreat, observing the behaviors, rituals, and social dynamics among participants. This research involves both active participation in yoga sessions and passive observation of communal activities, providing insights into how individuals connect, form bonds, and integrate spiritual practices into their daily lives.  
• Life history ethnography: An in-depth interview of a stroke survivor to obtain an account of their personal struggle for recovery, followed by a narrative analysis based on the transcription, coding, and analysis of transcripts from hours of interviews.  
• Field study on a remote island: A researcher visits a remote island inhabited by an obscure tribe. The researcher then lives and spends a significant amount of time getting to know their daily life customs and practices.  
• Surveying nurses in a trauma hospital: A researcher conducts in-depth surveys to understand the psychological effects of working late-night shifts and dealing with patients with severe trauma.  

Q: What is the main aim of ethnographic research ?

A: The main aim of ethnography is to remain objective and to collect and report what the researcher observes to add to the body of knowledge about the group. It is not to make judgments about the group’s characteristics or methods of interaction or devise approaches to improve or change the group.

Q: Can ethnography be applied to various fields?  

A: Yes, ethnographic research is versatile and can be applied across various disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, marketing, design, education, healthcare, and more. Its adaptability makes it a valuable method for gaining insights into diverse aspects of human behavior and culture.    

Q: Is ethnography only suitable for studying small or isolated communities?  

A: No, while ethnography is often associated with studying small or isolated communities, it can also be applied to larger populations and urban settings. The focus is on understanding the cultural context and social dynamics, regardless of the size or location of the community.  

Q: Can the findings from ethnographic research be generalized to broader populations?  

A: Ethnographic observation is often more concerned with depth than breadth, so generalizability to larger populations may be limited. However, the insights gained can inform broader theories and provide a foundation for further research in similar contexts.  

Q: How should researchers ensure ethical conduct in ethnographic research?  

A: Ethnographers must prioritize ethical considerations by obtaining informed consent from participants, maintaining confidentiality, and being transparent about the research purpose. They also navigate potential conflicts of interest and consider the impact of their presence on the community being studied.  

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Ethnography Explained: Capturing Social Realities in Their Natural Settings

Table of Contents

Have you ever wondered how anthropologists understand entire cultures, or how sociologists can speak so confidently about social dynamics? The secret lies in a research method that reads more like an adventure than a scientific procedure: ethnography . It’s a journey into the heart of communities, observing and interacting with people in their natural environments, and today we’re going to unpack this fascinating approach to research.

What is ethnography?

At its core, ethnography is a qualitative research method focused on exploring cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. It involves researchers immersing themselves in a community for an extended period to observe and participate in the daily lives of the people within it. The goal is to gain a deep, nuanced understanding of the community’s culture, behaviors, rituals, and social interactions.

The immersive world of participant observation

One of the key elements of ethnography is participant observation . This is not just watching from the sidelines; it’s about actively engaging in the community’s activities. Ethnographers might live in the community, work alongside its members, partake in rituals, or join in celebrations—all while making detailed notes on everything they see and experience. It’s a delicate balance of being both an insider and an observer.

Macro vs. Micro Ethnography

When planning an ethnographic study, researchers decide between a macro or micro approach. Macro ethnography examines larger cultural groups over longer periods, often producing broad, sweeping narratives about societal structures. In contrast, micro ethnography zooms into smaller groups or communities, sometimes focusing on a particular phenomenon within a shorter timeframe. Both approaches offer valuable insights but differ in their scope and depth of analysis.

Macro ethnography: The bigger picture

• Societal structures : Focuses on how large groups organize themselves, establish norms, and create collective identities.
• Long-term study : Researchers may spend years in the field, capturing the evolution of cultural practices over time.
• Broader context : Aims to understand how larger social forces, like politics or economics, influence cultural behaviors.

Micro ethnography: A closer look

• Specificity : Targets a particular aspect of culture, such as a ritual, tradition, or social interaction within a community.
• Shorter duration : Studies may last weeks or months, focusing on intense periods of observation.
• Detailed analysis : Provides a granular view of the interactions and meanings that define a community’s way of life.

Understanding community life through ethnography

Why go through all this effort? Ethnography allows us to see the world through someone else’s eyes. It’s a path to understanding not just what people do, but why they do it—their beliefs, their values, and how they make sense of the world. Whether it’s a macro or micro study, ethnography offers a rich, complex picture of human life that other research methods simply can’t match.

The ethnographer’s toolkit

While living among a community is a significant part of ethnographic research, there are other tools at the ethnographer’s disposal:

• Interviews : Conversations with community members provide personal narratives that enrich the researcher’s understanding.
• Surveys : Questionnaires can supplement observations with quantitative data about cultural practices.
• Artifact analysis : Examining objects, art, and tools can reveal much about a culture’s technology, aesthetics, and values.
• Visual methods : Photography and videography can capture moments and details that might otherwise be missed.

Challenges in ethnographic research

Despite its depth, ethnography is not without challenges. Researchers must navigate language barriers, cultural misunderstandings, and the ethical considerations of studying and representing other cultures. They must also be wary of bias —both their own and that of their subjects—which can color the interpretation of their findings.

Navigating the ethical landscape

Being ethical in ethnography is paramount. Researchers are guests in a community, and they must respect the privacy, dignity, and autonomy of the people they study. This often involves obtaining informed consent , ensuring confidentiality , and being transparent about the nature and purpose of the research.

From field notes to narratives

The culmination of an ethnographic study is the creation of a detailed account, or ethnography, that tells the story of the community. This often takes the form of a narrative that weaves together observations, interviews, and analyses into a compelling, readable format that can inform, educate, and sometimes even change the world.

Ethnography is more than just a research method—it’s a profound way of engaging with the world that can yield insights into the human experience that are as rich and complex as life itself. By understanding cultures from the inside out, ethnographers help us see the world anew, challenging our assumptions and broadening our perspectives.

What do you think? Could you see yourself living in another community to study their way of life? How might an ethnographic approach change the way we understand our own culture?

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Research Methodologies & Methods

1 Logic of Inquiry in Social Research

• A Science of Society
• Comte’s Ideas on the Nature of Sociology
• Observation in Social Sciences
• Logical Understanding of Social Reality

2 Empirical Approach

• Empirical Approach
• Rules of Data Collection
• Cultural Relativism
• Problems Encountered in Data Collection
• Difference between Common Sense and Science
• What is Ethical?
• What is Normal?
• Understanding the Data Collected
• Managing Diversities in Social Research
• Problematising the Object of Study
• Conclusion: Return to Good Old Empirical Approach

3 Diverse Logic of Theory Building

• Concern with Theory in Sociology
• Concepts: Basic Elements of Theories
• Why Do We Need Theory?
• Hypothesis Description and Experimentation
• Controlled Experiment
• Designing an Experiment
• How to Test a Hypothesis
• Sensitivity to Alternative Explanations
• Rival Hypothesis Construction
• The Use and Scope of Social Science Theory
• Theory Building and Researcher’s Values

4 Theoretical Analysis

• Premises of Evolutionary and Functional Theories
• Critique of Evolutionary and Functional Theories
• Turning away from Functionalism
• What after Functionalism
• Post-modernism
• Trends other than Post-modernism

5 Issues of Epistemology

• Some Major Concerns of Epistemology
• Rationalism
• Phenomenology: Bracketing Experience

6 Philosophy of Social Science

• Foundations of Science
• Science, Modernity, and Sociology
• Rethinking Science
• Crisis in Foundation

7 Positivism and its Critique

• Heroic Science and Origin of Positivism
• Early Positivism
• Consolidation of Positivism
• Critiques of Positivism

8 Hermeneutics

• Methodological Disputes in the Social Sciences
• Tracing the History of Hermeneutics
• Hermeneutics and Sociology
• Philosophical Hermeneutics
• The Hermeneutics of Suspicion
• Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

9 Comparative Method

• Relationship with Common Sense; Interrogating Ideological Location
• The Historical Context
• Elements of the Comparative Approach

10 Feminist Approach

• Features of the Feminist Method
• Feminist Methods adopt the Reflexive Stance
• Feminist Discourse in India

11 Participatory Method

• Delineation of Key Features

12 Types of Research

• Basic and Applied Research
• Descriptive and Analytical Research
• Empirical and Exploratory Research
• Quantitative and Qualitative Research
• Explanatory (Causal) and Longitudinal Research
• Experimental and Evaluative Research
• Participatory Action Research

13 Methods of Research

• Evolutionary Method
• Comparative Method
• Historical Method
• Personal Documents

14 Elements of Research Design

• Structuring the Research Process

15 Sampling Methods and Estimation of Sample Size

• Classification of Sampling Methods
• Sample Size

16 Measures of Central Tendency

• Relationship between Mean, Mode, and Median
• Choosing a Measure of Central Tendency

17 Measures of Dispersion and Variability

• The Variance
• The Standard Deviation
• Coefficient of Variation

18 Statistical Inference- Tests of Hypothesis

• Statistical Inference
• Tests of Significance

19 Correlation and Regression

• Correlation
• Method of Calculating Correlation of Ungrouped Data
• Method Of Calculating Correlation Of Grouped Data

20 Survey Method

• Rationale of Survey Research Method
• History of Survey Research
• Defining Survey Research
• Sampling and Survey Techniques
• Operationalising Survey Research Tools
• Advantages and Weaknesses of Survey Research

21 Survey Design

• Preliminary Considerations
• Stages / Phases in Survey Research
• Formulation of Research Question
• Survey Research Designs
• Sampling Design

22 Survey Instrumentation

• Techniques/Instruments for Data Collection
• Questionnaire Construction
• Issues in Designing a Survey Instrument

23 Survey Execution and Data Analysis

• Problems and Issues in Executing Survey Research
• Data Analysis
• Ethical Issues in Survey Research

24 Field Research – I

• History of Field Research
• Ethnography
• Theme Selection
• Gaining Entry in the Field
• Key Informants
• Participant Observation

25 Field Research – II

• Interview its Types and Process
• Feminist and Postmodernist Perspectives on Interviewing
• Narrative Analysis
• Interpretation
• Case Study and its Types
• Life Histories
• Oral History
• PRA and RRA Techniques

26 Reliability, Validity and Triangulation

• Concepts of Reliability and Validity
• Three Types of “Reliability”
• Working Towards Reliability
• Procedural Validity
• Field Research as a Validity Check
• Method Appropriate Criteria
• Triangulation
• Ethical Considerations in Qualitative Research

27 Qualitative Data Formatting and Processing

• Qualitative Data Processing and Analysis
• Description
• Classification
• Making Connections
• Theoretical Coding
• Qualitative Content Analysis

28 Writing up Qualitative Data

• Problems of Writing Up
• Grasp and Then Render
• “Writing Down” and “Writing Up”
• Write Early
• Writing Styles
• First Draft

29 Using Internet and Word Processor

• What is Internet and How Does it Work?
• Internet Services
• Searching on the Web: Search Engines
• Accessing and Using Online Information
• Online Journals and Texts
• Statistical Reference Sites
• Data Sources
• Uses of E-mail Services in Research

30 Using SPSS for Data Analysis Contents

• Introduction
• Starting and Exiting SPSS
• Creating a Data File
• Univariate Analysis
• Bivariate Analysis

31 Using SPSS in Report Writing

• Why to Use SPSS
• Working with SPSS Output
• Copying SPSS Output to MS Word Document

32 Tabulation and Graphic Presentation- Case Studies

• Structure for Presentation of Research Findings
• Data Presentation: Editing, Coding, and Transcribing
• Case Studies
• Qualitative Data Analysis and Presentation through Software
• Types of ICT used for Research

33 Guidelines to Research Project Assignment

• Overview of Research Methodologies and Methods (MSO 002)
• Research Project Objectives
• Preparation for Research Project
• Stages of the Research Project
• Supervision During the Research Project
• Submission of Research Project
• Methodology for Evaluating Research Project

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• Knowledge Base
• Methodology
• What Is Ethnography? | Meaning, Guide & Examples

What Is Ethnography? | Meaning, Guide & Examples

Published on 6 May 2022 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on 6 April 2023.

Ethnography is a type of qualitative research that involves immersing yourself in a particular community or organisation to observe their behaviour and interactions up close. The word ‘ethnography’ also refers to the written report of the research that the ethnographer produces afterwards.

Ethnography is a flexible research method that allows you to gain a deep understanding of a group’s shared culture, conventions, and social dynamics. However, it also involves some practical and ethical challenges.

Table of contents

What is ethnography used for, different approaches to ethnographic research, gaining access to a community, working with informants, observing the group and taking field notes, writing up an ethnography.

Ethnographic research originated in the field of anthropology, and it often involved an anthropologist living with an isolated tribal community for an extended period of time in order to understand their culture.

This type of research could sometimes last for years. For example, Colin M. Turnbull lived with the Mbuti people for three years in order to write the classic ethnography The Forest People .

Today, ethnography is a common approach in various social science fields, not just anthropology. It is used not only to study distant or unfamiliar cultures, but also to study specific communities within the researcher’s own society.

For example, ethnographic research (sometimes called participant observation ) has been used to investigate football fans , call centre workers , and police officers .

Advantages of ethnography

The main advantage of ethnography is that it gives the researcher direct access to the culture and practices of a group. It is a useful approach for learning first-hand about the behavior and interactions of people within a particular context.

By becoming immersed in a social environment, you may have access to more authentic information and spontaneously observe dynamics that you could not have found out about simply by asking.

Ethnography is also an open and flexible method. Rather than aiming to verify a general theory or test a hypothesis , it aims to offer a rich narrative account of a specific culture, allowing you to explore many different aspects of the group and setting.

Disadvantages of ethnography

Ethnography is a time-consuming method. In order to embed yourself in the setting and gather enough observations to build up a representative picture, you can expect to spend at least a few weeks, but more likely several months. This long-term immersion can be challenging, and requires careful planning.

Ethnographic research can run the risk of observer bias . Writing an ethnography involves subjective interpretation, and it can be difficult to maintain the necessary distance to analyse a group that you are embedded in.

There are often also ethical considerations to take into account: for example, about how your role is disclosed to members of the group, or about observing and reporting sensitive information.

Should you use ethnography in your research?

If you’re a student who wants to use ethnographic research in your thesis or dissertation , it’s worth asking yourself whether it’s the right approach:

• Could the information you need be collected in another way (e.g., a survey , interviews)?
• How difficult will it be to gain access to the community you want to study?
• How exactly will you conduct your research, and over what timespan?
• What ethical issues might arise?

If you do decide to do ethnography, it’s generally best to choose a relatively small and easily accessible group, to ensure that the research is feasible within a limited time frame.

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There are a few key distinctions in ethnography which help to inform the researcher’s approach: open vs closed settings, overt vs covert ethnography, and active vs passive observation. Each approach has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Open vs closed settings

The setting of your ethnography – the environment in which you will observe your chosen community in action – may be open or closed.

An open or public setting is one with no formal barriers to entry. For example, you might consider a community of people living in a certain neighbourhood, or the fans of a particular football team.

• Gaining initial access to open groups is not too difficult …
• … but it may be harder to become immersed in a less clearly defined group.

A closed or private setting is harder to access. This may be for example a business, a school, or a cult.

• A closed group’s boundaries are clearly defined and the ethnographer can become fully immersed in the setting …
• … but gaining access is tougher; the ethnographer may have to negotiate their way in or acquire some role in the organisation.

Overt vs covert ethnography

Most ethnography is overt . In an overt approach, the ethnographer openly states their intentions and acknowledges their role as a researcher to the members of the group being studied.

• Overt ethnography is typically preferred for ethical reasons, as participants can provide informed consent …
• … but people may behave differently with the awareness that they are being studied.

Sometimes ethnography can be covert . This means that the researcher does not tell participants about their research, and comes up with some other pretence for being there.

• Covert ethnography allows access to environments where the group would not welcome a researcher …
• … but hiding the researcher’s role can be considered deceptive and thus unethical.

Active vs passive observation

Different levels of immersion in the community may be appropriate in different contexts. The ethnographer may be a more active or passive participant depending on the demands of their research and the nature of the setting.

An active role involves trying to fully integrate, carrying out tasks and participating in activities like any other member of the community.

• Active participation may encourage the group to feel more comfortable with the ethnographer’s presence …
• … but runs the risk of disrupting the regular functioning of the community.

A passive role is one in which the ethnographer stands back from the activities of others, behaving as a more distant observer and not involving themselves in the community’s activities.

• Passive observation allows more space for careful observation and note-taking …
• … but group members may behave unnaturally due to feeling they are being observed by an outsider.

While ethnographers usually have a preference, they also have to be flexible about their level of participation. For example, access to the community might depend upon engaging in certain activities, or there might be certain practices in which outsiders cannot participate.

An important consideration for ethnographers is the question of access. The difficulty of gaining access to the setting of a particular ethnography varies greatly:

• To gain access to the fans of a particular sports team, you might start by simply attending the team’s games and speaking with the fans.
• To access the employees of a particular business, you might contact the management and ask for permission to perform a study there.
• Alternatively, you might perform a covert ethnography of a community or organisation you are already personally involved in or employed by.

Flexibility is important here too: where it’s impossible to access the desired setting, the ethnographer must consider alternatives that could provide comparable information.

For example, if you had the idea of observing the staff within a particular finance company but could not get permission, you might look into other companies of the same kind as alternatives. Ethnography is a sensitive research method, and it may take multiple attempts to find a feasible approach.

All ethnographies involve the use of informants . These are people involved in the group in question who function as the researcher’s primary points of contact, facilitating access and assisting their understanding of the group.

This might be someone in a high position at an organisation allowing you access to their employees, or a member of a community sponsoring your entry into that community and giving advice on how to fit in.

However,  i f you come to rely too much on a single informant, you may be influenced by their perspective on the community, which might be unrepresentative of the group as a whole.

In addition, an informant may not provide the kind of spontaneous information which is most useful to ethnographers, instead trying to show what they believe you want to see. For this reason, it’s good to have a variety of contacts within the group.

The core of ethnography is observation of the group from the inside. Field notes are taken to record these observations while immersed in the setting; they form the basis of the final written ethnography. They are usually written by hand, but other solutions such as voice recordings can be useful alternatives.

Field notes record any and all important data: phenomena observed, conversations had, preliminary analysis. For example, if you’re researching how service staff interact with customers, you should write down anything you notice about these interactions – body language, phrases used repeatedly, differences and similarities between staff, customer reactions.

Don’t be afraid to also note down things you notice that fall outside the pre-formulated scope of your research; anything may prove relevant, and it’s better to have extra notes you might discard later than to end up with missing data.

Field notes should be as detailed and clear as possible. It’s important to take time to go over your notes, expand on them with further detail, and keep them organised (including information such as dates and locations).

After observations are concluded, there’s still the task of writing them up into an ethnography. This entails going through the field notes and formulating a convincing account of the behaviours and dynamics observed.

The structure of an ethnography

An ethnography can take many different forms: It may be an article, a thesis, or an entire book, for example.

Ethnographies often do not follow the standard structure of a scientific paper, though like most academic texts, they should have an introduction and conclusion. For example, this paper begins by describing the historical background of the research, then focuses on various themes in turn before concluding.

An ethnography may still use a more traditional structure, however, especially when used in combination with other research methods. For example, this paper follows the standard structure for empirical research: introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion.

The content of an ethnography

The goal of a written ethnography is to provide a rich, authoritative account of the social setting in which you were embedded – to convince the reader that your observations and interpretations are representative of reality.

Ethnography tends to take a less impersonal approach than other research methods. Due to the embedded nature of the work, an ethnography often necessarily involves discussion of your personal experiences and feelings during the research.

Ethnography is not limited to making observations; it also attempts to explain the phenomena observed in a structured, narrative way. For this, you may draw on theory, but also on your direct experience and intuitions, which may well contradict the assumptions that you brought into the research.

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Ethnography in sociology

James Rhodes, School of Social Sciences.

The essence of the method

Ethnography is essentially about embedding ourselves as researchers within specific social settings for a prolonged period of time, in order to develop a richer understanding of the dynamics and complexities of social life, social relations, and the workings of society. Within these settings we observe, we listen, and we try to experience and understand ideas and practices from the perspective of those we are studying.

Ethnography aims to understand social phenomena from the ‘inside’, by observing and participating in social activities, by talking to people in their ‘natural’ settings and in collecting materials (photographs, texts, literature, statistics) that helps us to develop an understanding of the social context in which social meanings and activities are embedded.

The material ethnographers collect is then used to construct a detailed description and analysis of the phenomena under investigation. Through this material, knowledge is produced, theories developed, and research practices are reflected upon that help us to shed light on aspects of society that can only be accessed through intimate and extended forms of investigation.

Experts/users at Manchester

• Dr David Evans , Sociology
• Dr Gillian Evans , Social Anthropology
• Professor Jennifer Mason , Sociology
• Professor Peter Wade , Social Anthropology
• Dr Sophie Woodward , Sociology

Projects using ethnography

• Wacquant, L. (2004) Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This text resulted from ethnographic fieldwork conducted by Wacquant at the Woodlawn Boys Club Boxing Gym in Chicago during the kate-1980s and early-1990s. Wacquant was interested in the boxing gym, both as a lens into the contemporary ‘ghetto’, but also in the embodied craft of boxing itself. 

• McDermott, M. (2006) Working-Class White: The Making and Unmaking of Race Relations, Berkeley, University of California Press.

In the late-1990s, McDermott worked covertly as a cashier in grocery stores in traditionally ‘white working-class’, but increasingly multi-ethnic urban neighbourhoods in Atlanta and Boston. She was interested in developing an ‘insider’ account of the shifting nature of race relations in the US.

Key references

• Atkinson, P., Coffey, A., Delamont, S., Lofland, J. and Lofland, L. (eds.) (2001) Handbook of Ethnography, London: Sage
• Brewer, J.D. (2000) Ethnography, Maidenhead: Open University Press
• Hammersley, M. and Atkinson, P. (2007) Ethnography: Principles in Practice (Third Edition), London and New York: Routledge
• O’Reilly, K. (2005) Ethnographic Methods, London and New York: Routledge

Links to online resources

• Ethnography (ETH) - Sage publications website
• Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (JCE) - Sage publications website
• National Centre for Research Methods
• Economic and Social Data Service  (list of available datasets that employ ethnographic methods)
• Center for Urban Ethnography at Berkeley

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What Is Ethnographic Research: Methods, Examples, and Applications

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• Key Takeaways

Ethnographic research involves researchers deeply immersing themselves in the culture or community being studied, offering rich, contextual insights.

Key methods include participant observation and in-depth interviews, which help gather detailed, qualitative data on human behaviors and social interactions.

Ensuring informed consent and maintaining participant privacy are crucial ethical aspects of conducting ethnographic research.

Researchers must navigate the challenges of balancing objectivity and subjectivity, constantly reflecting on and mitigating their own biases.

Practical issues such as gaining access, requiring significant time, and securing adequate resources are inherent in ethnographic research.

Ethnographic research is used across various fields, from anthropology to marketing, providing valuable insights that other research methods might overlook.

Ethnographic research deeply explores human cultures. It involves researchers in subjects’ daily lives, offering unique insights. This method, useful in fields like anthropology and marketing, uncovers significant details. So, what sets it apart, and how does it change our view of human behavior?

Introduction to Ethnographic Research

• What is Ethnographic Research?

Ethnographic research is a method to study people and cultures from inside. Researchers live with subjects, learning about their behaviors and social interactions.

This method emphasizes “participant observation.” Researchers stay in the community for long periods. This immersive approach yields deep insights into cultural phenomena. It’s crucial for understanding complex social situations.

• Why Use Ethnographic Research?

Gaining Deep Cultural Understanding

Ethnographic research deepens cultural understanding. Researchers visit people in their daily settings to study social interactions, rituals, and habits. This approach uncovers subtle norms and values. Unlike other methods, it yields rich, detailed data. Thus, it offers both in-depth and genuine insights.

Uncovering Unforeseen Insights

Ethnographic research shines at revealing unexpected insights. Its open and flexible approach allows for exploring unanticipated themes. Researchers can follow leads and adapt as needed.

Being in the field, they spot patterns, behaviors, and meanings missed by traditional methods. This skill is key in suggesting new ideas and deepening our grasp of human behavior.

Contextualizing Quantitative Data

Ethnographic research is key for understanding numbers. It complements quantitative methods. These methods provide stats but often lack context. Ethnography, however, offers stories to explain behaviors.

It shows how culture and society influence actions. By using both, researchers can better understand their findings. This leads to more effective interventions and policies.

Conducting Ethnographic Research

• Research Design

Choosing a Research Site and Population

Ethnographic research begins with selecting an appropriate site and population for study. The chosen site should offer rich cultural or social interactions relevant to the research questions. Researchers typically immerse themselves in environments where participants live, work, or socialize.

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Selecting a population involves identifying a group whose behaviors, practices, and interactions will provide valuable insights. The goal is to gain a deep understanding of the cultural context and social dynamics at play.

Ethical Considerations

Ethical considerations are paramount in ethnographic research. Informed consent is essential, ensuring that participants understand the research purpose, procedures, and potential impacts.

Researchers must also guarantee confidentiality, protecting the identity and privacy of participants. Ethical ethnographic research respects the rights and well-being of participants, addressing any ethical dilemmas that may arise during the study.

• Data Collection Methods

1. Participant Observation

Participant observation is vital in ethnographic research. Researchers join participants in their daily routines. This way, they observe behaviors and interactions in natural settings.

It offers direct data on social practices and cultural norms. Also, by engaging in observed activities, researchers gain deeper insights and build community rapport.

2. Interviews (Individual & Group)

Interviews, both individual and group, are critical for collecting detailed personal and collective perspectives. Individual interviews provide in-depth information about personal experiences, beliefs, and motivations.

Group interviews, or focus groups, facilitate discussion among participants, revealing shared and divergent viewpoints within the community. These interviews are often recorded for accuracy and later analysis.

3. Field Notes & Recordings

Field notes and recordings are essential tools for documenting observations and interactions. Researchers take detailed notes during their fieldwork, capturing not only what they observe but also their reflections and interpretations.

Audio or video recordings of interactions and interviews provide an accurate record that can be revisited during analysis. These records form a comprehensive data set for ethnographic research.

4. Document Analysis

Document analysis studies cultural artifacts like texts, images, and objects. It aims to understand their cultural context. These artifacts range from written documents to visual media, adding diverse data. Researchers then explore both symbolic and material aspects of the culture under study.

• Data Analysis Techniques

Coding and Thematic Analysis

Coding and thematic analysis are common techniques for analyzing ethnographic data. Coding involves categorizing data into meaningful segments, often by assigning labels to specific pieces of information.

Thematic analysis identifies patterns and themes across the data, revealing recurring topics and relationships. This method helps researchers organize and interpret complex qualitative data systematically.

Narrative Analysis

Narrative analysis looks at stories and accounts shared by participants. It examines how people build and share their experiences. This method focuses on narrative structure and content. By studying these stories, researchers can find deeper meanings and cultural importance.

Conducting ethnographic research needs careful planning, ethics, and varied data methods. It offers a deep look into cultural and social dynamics, shedding light on human behavior.

Examples of Ethnographic Research

• Anthropology: Studying a Remote Tribe’s Social Structure

In anthropology, ethnographic research often means living with a remote tribe. The goal? To understand its social setup. Researchers join tribe activities and watch interactions. This approach uncovers insights.

They document customs, rituals, and social norms shaping the tribe’s culture. By mapping the social hierarchy, kinship systems, and communal roles, researchers grasp how the tribe manages its society and the environment.

• Sociology: Examining Interactions in a Workplace Setting

Sociologists use ethnographic research to study workplace interactions. They spend a long time in an organization, watching and joining in daily activities. This way, they learn about relationships between employees, management, and the culture.

The method reveals behavior patterns, communication styles, and social networks that affect productivity and satisfaction. By focusing on real interactions and the social setting, ethnographic research sheds light on workplace relationships and behavior.

• Design: Understanding User Experience with a New Product

Ethnographic research is key in design, especially for new product user experience. Designers watch users use the product in their own settings. They observe how users navigate, solve problems, and adjust the product.

This process uncovers usability problems, unmet needs, and gathers feedback for improvements. Ultimately, it ensures the design process focuses on users. This leads to products that better suit their needs and preferences.

• Marketing: Analyzing Consumer Behavior in Different Cultures

In marketing, ethnographic research studies consumer behavior in various cultures. Marketers live with consumers to see their shopping habits and how culture impacts choices.

This approach uncovers the values, beliefs, and social norms influencing consumer actions across cultures. By understanding how people from different cultures view and use products, marketers can create better, culturally fitting strategies.

Applications of Ethnographic Research

• 1. Application in Social Sciences

Insights into Cultural Practices

Ethnographic research delves into cultural practices. It involves researchers in subjects’ daily lives. This method reveals rituals, traditions, and social interactions.

These elements shape cultures. By observing and joining activities, researchers can study the meanings and significance of behaviors. They aim to offer a full view of diverse cultural patterns.

Contributions to Sociology and Anthropology

Sociology and anthropology rely on ethnographic research to understand human behavior and social structures. It enables detailed descriptions. These descriptions help compare societies.

Moreover, the method deepens our grasp of social norms, kinship, and power dynamics. This knowledge supports academic studies and applications in social policy and community development.

• 2. Application in Market Research

Understanding Consumer Behavior

Ethnographic research in market research means observing consumers in their environments. This offers real insights into their actions, likes, and buys. It helps businesses see how their products fit into daily life.

By studying these interactions, companies can spot unmet needs and issues. This leads to better marketing and products that match their audience’s real experiences.

Enhancing Product Development

Adding ethnographic research to product development helps companies make designs that users love. By talking with and watching users, researchers get feedback. This feedback guides the design.

In the end, products meet user needs and expectations. This leads to higher satisfaction and better sales. Thus, this research bridges the gap between what users say they want and what they actually use. It results in more innovative, successful products.

• 3. Application in Healthcare

Patient-Centered Research

Ethnographic research in healthcare examines the patient experience fully. Researchers observe patients and providers to understand care complexity. They consider emotional, social, and cultural factors. This approach helps find barriers to care. It also tailors interventions to meet patient needs. As a result, the quality of care improves.

Improving Health Services Delivery

Ethnographic research in healthcare spots inefficiencies and areas for growth. It observes how staff and patients interact, as well as medical facility workflows. This approach pinpoints issues in service delivery.

Then, it suggests improvements in processes and communication. In short, it enhances service quality. Moreover, this research offers a complete view of the healthcare environment. It crafts solutions that boost patient experiences and health outcomes.

• Ethical and Methodological Challenges

Ethical Issues: Informed Consent and Privacy

Ethnographic research requires deep involvement in a community or culture, so ethics are crucial. Getting informed consent is key. It ensures that participants understand the study and join willingly.

Researchers must explain the research’s purpose, data use, and any risks clearly. Protecting participants’ identities and information is vital. This involves securing data and making sensitive information anonymous to prevent harm.

Methodological Issues: Objectivity and Subjectivity

Ethnographic research faces a key challenge: staying objective when deeply involved in the study. Researchers often get close to participants, making their observations biased.

So, they need to regularly check for their biases’ impact on findings. Using many data sources and cross-referencing findings can reduce these biases. It leads to a more balanced and accurate view of the community.

Practical Issues: Access, Time, and Resources

Conducting ethnographic research demands significant time and resources, often posing practical challenges. Gaining access to the community or setting being studied can be difficult, requiring researchers to build trust and rapport with participants. This process can be time-consuming and requires patience and persistence.

Additionally, ethnographic research often involves prolonged periods of fieldwork, which can be resource-intensive. Researchers need adequate funding, support, and flexibility to navigate these practical challenges, ensuring that the study can be conducted effectively and ethically.

Ethnographic research offers deep insights into cultures and communities. Researchers immerse themselves in the lives of participants. They use methods like observation and interviews to collect detailed, qualitative data. Despite challenges in ethics, methods, and practicality, it’s still a major tool for understanding complex social issues. It benefits various fields by providing unique perspectives.

• What is an ethnographic research PDF?

An ethnographic research PDF is a document that provides detailed information about ethnographic studies, including methodologies, case studies, and theoretical frameworks. These PDFs are often used as educational resources or references for researchers and students in social sciences and related fields. They serve as comprehensive guides for conducting and understanding ethnographic research.

• Can you provide some examples of ethnographic research?

Examples of ethnographic research include studying the daily lives of indigenous communities, examining consumer behaviors in retail environments, and investigating classroom dynamics in educational settings. These studies typically involve immersive fieldwork where researchers observe and interact with participants in their natural settings to gather in-depth insights.

• What are the main methods used in ethnographic research?

The main methods used in ethnographic research include participant observation, where researchers immerse themselves in the community they are studying, and conducting interviews, both structured and unstructured, to gather detailed personal insights. Additionally, researchers often take comprehensive field notes and may use audio-visual recordings to document their findings.

• What are the different types of ethnographic research?

Different types of ethnographic research include realist ethnography, which aims to provide an objective account of the culture being studied, and critical ethnography, which focuses on power dynamics and social injustices within the community. There are also autoethnographies, where the researcher reflects on their own experiences within the cultural context, and focused ethnographies, which concentrate on specific aspects of the culture.

• What is ethnography in qualitative research?

Ethnography in qualitative research is a method used to study cultures and communities through direct observation, participation, and interaction. It involves collecting detailed descriptions of people’s behaviors, beliefs, and social interactions to understand their cultural practices and societal structures. This approach provides deep, contextual insights that are often unattainable through other research methods.

• How is ethnography used in research design?

Ethnography in research design involves creating a study framework that emphasizes immersive fieldwork, participant observation, and qualitative data collection. Researchers design their studies to integrate into the community, often living among the participants for extended periods. This design allows for a holistic understanding of the cultural context and nuanced insights into human behaviors and social patterns.

• What is ethnography in sociology?

In sociology, ethnography is a research method used to study the social interactions, behaviors, and perceptions of people within their communities. Sociologists use ethnographic methods to explore how individuals and groups navigate their social worlds, providing rich, detailed accounts of societal norms, practices, and power relations. This method helps to uncover the underlying meanings and dynamics of social life.

• What are the aims of ethnographic research?

The aims of ethnographic research are to provide a comprehensive understanding of the cultural practices, beliefs, and social interactions of a community. Researchers seek to uncover the meanings behind these practices and how they shape individuals’ lives within their social contexts. Ethnographic research aims to offer in-depth insights that can inform policy, education, and further academic study.

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15 Great Ethnography Examples

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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Ethnography is a research method that involves embedding yourself in the environment of a group or community and recording what you observe. It often involves the researcher living in the community being studied. This leads to a much richer understanding of the people being examined than doing quantitative research.

The thing I love about ethnography is that it paints a thorough picture of people’s lives. It is, in its own way, the most raw, honest, and detailed form of academic research.

In my previous blog posts, I have discussed my admiration for thick description as a way to pierce beyond stereotypes and view the world through the lens of our subjects.

And there’s no doubt that ethnographic research has helped us learn so much more about how people navigate their cultural circumstances.

Below are some examples of ethnography – both abstract (with the hope that it helps students think about some ways they can do ethnography) and real-life (with the hope that you will read some inspiring ethnographic studies).

Ethnography Examples

To start, here are some ways you could potentially do ethnography:

• Ethnography of Indigenous People: There are many examples of ethnographic studies that look at indigenous cultures and how they’re similar or different to Western culture. Beware of the trap of colonialism during this work.
• Mundane Ethnography: Remember, ethnography doesn’t have to happen in a far off land. You can do autoethnography where you study yourself , or a study of somewhere very banal, like your workplace or home.
• Educational Ethnography: There is a rich history of teachers and researchers using ethnographic methods in classrooms to explore how learning happens.
• Ethnography in a Shop: Be the ethnographer within a supermarket by interacting with the people there on a daily basis (maybe as the cashier) and observe how people interact and collide within the space.
• Working-Class and Immigrant Ethnography: Many sociologists use ethnographic methods to take an inside look at how people on the margins of society grapple with global concepts like capitalism, globalization, and race.
• Digital Ethnography: Since the rise of the internet, there have been many researchers interested in the digital lives of people. Some of my favorite studies have revealed how we create our identities online.

My Favorite Ethnographic Research Books

1. learning to labour.

Author: Paul Willis

One of my favorite ethnographic works, Learning to Labour follows working-class ‘lads’ in the British Midlands as they participate in counter-cultural and ‘anti-social’ behaviors.

The most fascinating aspect of this book is the rich elucidation of how these working-class boys reject narratives of upward mobility and revel in rejecting mental work at school. But at the same time, they create their own value hierarchies.

In fact, the boys don’t even leave school when they are legally allowed, despite giving a veneer of being anti-school. Instead, they remain there, because there is their own social and even educational value they can get out of it. They prize the manual labor they do in class and, after leaving school, continue to prize physical labor in the workplace while deriding and dismissing mental labor.

2. Being Maori in the City

Author: Natacha Gagné

When indigenous people live in urban environments, their authenticity as indigenous peoples is often brought into question.

Thus, Gagné’s examination of Maori identity in Auckland presents a valuable insight into how people continue to live out their indigenous identities in a changing, urbanized, and colonized landscape.

Gagné spent two years living with Maori people in Auckland and highlights in the book how their identity continues to be central to how they interact both with one another and with broader society.

3. Ethnography of a Neoliberal School

Author: Garth Stahl

While a wide range of academic research has looked at how neoliberalism can affect education, an ethnographic approach allows Stahl to demonstrate how it turns up as lived experience.

Neoliberalism is an approach to governance that focuses on the corporatization of society. In education, this means that schools should be run like companies.

There is no better example, of course, than charter schools .

In my favorite chapter, Stahl demonstrates within one anonymized charter school how teachers are increasingly subjected to performance quotas, KPIs, and governance that narrow down the purpose of education and give them very little freedom to exercise their expertise and provide individualized support to their students.

4. Coming of Age in Samoa

Author: Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead’s groundbreaking ethnography, Coming of Age in Samoa , had implications for two important reasons:

• It highlighted the importance of feminist perspectives in ethnographic research.
• It challenged a universalizing stage-based conceptualization of human development.

Mead’s work was conducted at a time when the Western world was in a moral panic about adolescents’ stress and emotional behaviors. The prevailing idea – promoted mainly by male psychologists – was that most of those behaviors were a natural part of the developmental cycle.

Mead, however, saw that female Samoan adolescents had much different experiences of adolescence and would not have fitted into the western mold of how a female adolescent would behave or be treated.

The Samoan society’s liberal ideas around intimacy and the lower levels of academic stress placed on the girls meant they lived very different realities with far less stress and social pressure than their Western counterparts.

5. Ghetto at the Center of the World

Author: Gordon Mathews

Mathews’s Ghetto at the Center of the World explores a multiethnic high-density housing complex in Hong Kong.

While seen by many locals as a ghetto (despite its relative safety!), Mathews shows how the motley group of residents, migrants, and tourists in the building live rich lives at what appears to be ground zero of globalization.

For the people in the building, globalization has offered opportunities but hasn’t solved all their problems. Each person that Mathews follows has their own story of how they navigate a globalized world while maintaining hope for a better future.

Additional Influential Ethnographic Studies

• Argonauts of the Western Pacific – This study was notable because it presented a turn toward participant observation in ethnography rather than attempts at fly-on-the-wall objectivity.
• The Remembered Village – A study of caste systems in India, this study is most notable for its methodological influence. Srinivas, the author, lost his field notes, but he continued on with presenting his findings, causing widespread controversy about its methodological merits.
• Space and Society in Central Brazil – This study explores the experiences of the Panará indigenous people of Brazil as they attempt to secure protected space from the colonialization occurring around them. It’s notable for its insights into how the Panará people organize themselves both culturally and spatially.
• White Bound – This book follows two groups, a white anti-racist group and a white nationalist group, and explores how each deals with whiteness. While the groups have fundamentally different goals, even the anti-racist group continue to contribute to white privilege .
• City, Street and Citizen – Suzanne Hall’s study of the mundane city street explores how multiethnicity is played out in globalized cities. It is a fascinating look at how lives take place within shared spaces where social contact occurs.

Ethnography is, in my humble (and of course subjective) opinion, the most exciting form of primary research you can do. It can challenge assumptions, unpick social norms, and make us all more empathetic people.

• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 10 Reasons you’re Perpetually Single
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 20 Montessori Toddler Bedrooms (Design Inspiration)
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 21 Montessori Homeschool Setups
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 101 Hidden Talents Examples

3 thoughts on “15 Great Ethnography Examples”

Thanks very much for that. I am an early childhood teacher, already published on the topic of bilingual and multilingual children in our sector. One of my lecturers has suggested an ethnographic study of some of our immigrant children. Not sure where to start with that, but this has put me in the right frame of mind. Thanks again

Dear Chris,

Any suggested topic on ethnographic research i can start with here in the hospital where i am working. I am a nurse for cardiovascular patients undergoing open heart surgeries.

As you’re in a high risk setting, you might be best asking your managers at the workplace about this one. You could also consider an autoethnography where you do a study on yourself within the settings.

Best of luck with the study.

Regards, Chris

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Digital Ethnography for Sociology: Craft, Rigor, and Creativity

• Published: 16 July 2022
• Volume 45 , pages 319–326, ( 2022 )

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• Jeffrey Lane 1 &
• Jessa Lingel 2  

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This special issue gathers empirical papers that develop and employ digital ethnographic methods to answer core sociological questions related to community, culture, urban life, violence, activism, professional identity, health, and sociality. Each paper, in its own right, offers key sociological insights, and as a collection, this special issue demonstrates the need to bring ethnographic methods to digital communities, interactions, practices, and tools. Both as a topic and a methodological approach, “the digital” points us to the need to update, rethink, and grow qualitative sociology. The exemplary papers comprising this special issue exhibit this curiosity and expansiveness, with lessons and implications for an interdisciplinary set of fields and research problems.

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What does it mean to bring digital tools and practices to established methods of ethnography? How can digital technologies help us rethink core claims about ethnography and other established modes of doing qualitative sociology? How can sociology’s debates and norms speak to related fields of communication, media studies, information science, and internet studies? Do we have the kinds of ethnography we need to answer the most interesting and most important research questions about social and digital life? These are the kinds of questions at the heart of this special issue.

The empirical papers in this collection develop and employ digital ethnographic methods to answer sociological questions about community, culture, urban life, violence, activism, professional identity, health, and sociality. They show how digital ethnography can be used to test and animate classic sociological concepts and theories in the digital age and to rework our theoretical and methodological landscape for the complexities of today’s communication environments. Both as a topic and a methodological approach, “the digital” provides incredible leverage to update and grow qualitative sociology. Digital technologies, practices, and communities point us toward new, exciting, and overlooked phenomena. The exemplary papers comprising this special issue exhibit this curiosity and expansiveness, with lessons and implications for an interdisciplinary set of fields and research problems.

As editors of this special issue, we came to this collection with aligned but distinct relationships to ethnography, digital culture, and sociology. With a PhD in sociology and interest in urban ethnography, Jeff came to digital ethnography through adapting neighborhood fieldwork to the digital networks that were shaping the social life he studied in Harlem (Lane 2019 ). With a PhD in library science and firm ties to internet studies, Jessa’s expertise in digital ethnography comes from an investment in unearthing the technological distributions of power (Lingel 2017a , b ). We both share a commitment to seeing the digital as a core component of how the communities we study make sense of themselves and the world around them. While Jeff’s ethnographic praxis typically starts in the streets and ventures towards the digital to study neighborhood and digital life together, Jessa’s work often traverses the reverse course, beginning with online communities and asking how those practices reshape in-person networks and relationships. The papers in this collection demonstrate this spectrum of where to locate the digital within ethnographic work.

One way of characterizing the range of approaches to digital ethnography in this special issue (and more broadly) is to situate some papers as proactively focused on the digital, while others are more reactive. Within this collection, Ross Arguedas’ work on orthorexia is focused on a phenomenon that arguably requires online interaction to take shape. Similarly, Ferrari’s paper on the role of social media within mutual aid work of activist groups begins with the online communications of activists while pulling in the ways that local geography and politics still retain a crucial impact on digital practices. In contrast, Baldor’s work on queer men’s dating lives began in bars and clubs, but could only succeed as a full accounting of queer urban nightlife by recognizing the role of online dating platforms within the community. Evans’ work on the creative work of urban youth began in a production studio and expanded to include young people’s online networks. Whether researchers opt to focus on the digital from the outset or to incorporate online practices as part of what makes a particular community or practice function, we would argue that the idea that the digital could be a completely unexpected encounter in fieldwork will be increasingly uncommon. Moreover, a refusal to engage with the digital will increasingly risk key conceptual oversights and potentially a disservice to one’s project and participants. To be sure, we do not mean to imply that every ethnography must be primarily virtual in focus – this special issue is meant as an invitation, not a mandate. More specifically, we see these papers as offering guidance on what digital ethnography looks like and how it produces new insights into questions that have long been central to sociology.

The methods at the core of this special issue have also been called cyber ethnography (Ward 1999 ), netnography (Kozinets 2002 ), and virtual ethnography (Hine 2008 ). We see digital ethnography as the most expansive term and position this collection as a complement to the growing literature on how to conduct ethnographic and qualitative work that attends to digital technologies (cf. Boellstorff et al. 2012 ; Hine 2020; Lane 2020 ; Lingel 2017a , b ). Rather than gathering a set of papers focused solely on methodology, we wanted an empirical collection, where authors could show how they used digital ethnography to gather evidence, make claims, and advance theory. These contributions all demonstrate sociological value in their capacity to offer insight into phenomena like understanding changing norms of health and diagnosis (Ross Arguedas), disparities around class and privilege (Rosa), and the social dimensions of rituals around food and eating together (Bascuñan-Wiley et al.). But in addition to developing key sociological insights, these papers create opportunities for future ethnographers to learn and plan future projects, with the benefit of reading papers that lay out the turning points, the struggles, and the advantages of digital ethnography. We hope that readers will take away a sense of how to make a plan for assessing the role of technology in the communities, sites, and practices that they are following. As a way of considering the collective contributions to these empirical pieces, we invited Dr. Mario Small, whose expertise in ethnography has guided and inspired countless researchers in sociology as well as many other fields, to respond in an afterword. His contribution underscores both the importance of digital technology as a focus for sociology, and the different but equally valid approaches that one can take to bringing online life and practices within the sphere of sociological study.

Across the ethnographic approaches gathered in this special issue, the digital is centrally relevant (Markham 2016 , 2020 ), but not monolithic. Thus, there is no one single way to do digital ethnography: as the projects in this collection demonstrate, there are different ethnographic designs, with varying physical and digital proximities, varying modes of entry into the field, and varying goals and timelines of the project. In some cases these variances also stem from contingencies of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Projects and the Pandemic

The pandemic has taught us many things, one of which is that virtual communication is essential to our basic, social functioning. Indeed, one finding that cuts across these papers is the entanglement of the digital in our everyday lives. As a result, the conservative view of ethnographers with stalwart resistance to the digital is no longer possible or welcome to an increasing number of researchers, both inside and outside sociology. In this sense, the pandemic has helped to legitimize the necessity and possibilities of paying attention to the digital within ethnographic work.

Digital ethnography is highly adaptive to the social demands of the moment and the “versatility of sociality” (Bascuñan-Wiley et al.). Several studies in this special issue are shaped by pandemic restrictions on fieldwork in person and serve as empirical studies of digital transformations brought on or made more salient by the pandemic (e.g., Bascuñan-Wiley et al.; Evans; Ferrari). This special issue also features projects completed entirely or in part before the pandemic that reveal fundamental changes to social order and everyday interaction in the digital age. For instance, Lane and Stuart show in their fieldwork how various neighborhood actors use the “communication visibility” that social media affords to divert and de-escalate urban violence, forcing sociologists to think differently, more broadly, and further “upstream” about the third-party actors, relationships, and processes surrounding neighborhood gun and gang violence. Baldor’s Philadelphia Gayborhood study, meanwhile, captures a new relationship type and interactional problem in digitally mediated neighborhoods where meetings between strangers in persons are routinely yet no less awkwardly reshaped by prior acquaintanceship on social media.

Returning to our earlier categorization of proactive and reactive ethnographies, we should add that the pandemic created its own influences on whether, when, and how to incorporate digital methods. For many ethnographers, crises like the pandemic felt primarily disruptive of in-person fieldwork. For others, digital technologies became a valuable lifeline that allowed for continued dialogue with and observations of interlocutors. Recognizing that bringing the digital to ethnographic work is sometimes a pull from the communities we study and sometimes a push from exigent circumstances, we hope this collection can provide guidance to both the proactive and reactive forms of bringing online tools and communities within the sphere of ethnography.

Craft and Rigor of Digital Ethnography

It’s a mistake to think of digital ethnography as simply a matter of adding the digital to conventional ethnography. At its best, digital ethnography is an orientation to a set of relationships between people and technologies. We would also discourage thinking of digital ethnography solely as a matter of convenience, allowing us to observe or interview people in locations or under circumstances that aren’t amenable to in-person meetings. Indeed, we embrace digital ethnographies that retain the inconveniences of ethnography: of meeting people where they’re at, doing the things that participants are doing on their time and not on our own, and recognizing the complexity of overlapping platforms, devices, and communities. Digital ethnography should also retain the awkwardness inherent to ethnography. After all, it is fundamentally awkward to insert yourself into a situation for the purposes of research, even if you are a part of the community you are studying (Colic-Peisker 2004 ). The inconveniences and awkwardness of ethnography are key to fieldwork, to understanding a community, and one’s place in that community as a researcher. Rather than imagining that digital technologies are valuable for ethnography primarily because they can ease communication flows or smooth out awkward encounters, we would insist that the difficulties, inconveniences, and awkward encounters of fieldwork should carry over to digital ethnography.

In looking across the pieces that comprise this special issue, we see some patterns in how these ethnographies were conducted to inform future ethnographers as they formulate their plans and embrace the inevitable challenges of fieldwork. Most of the ethnographers in this special issue created or adapted their own social media accounts to link to the people and processes they wanted to study. Creating an account is an important mode of understanding the people we study, helping us to get a sense of the social hierarchies and values within a community, and build rapport with participants. Building profiles also open us up to the specificities of a platform’s politics and norms. For example, although they study vastly different communities, both Ferrari and Ross Arguedas argue that Instagram’s specific design norms and policies shape how particular communities form and interact. As a whole, creating online profiles can provide points of access to and ways of constructing, moving about, and making decisions about the field site (Burrell 2009 ).

Digital ethnographies engage deeply and thoughtfully with technology, requiring new forms of adaptability and expertise for ethnographers. For the pieces in this collection, online sightlines and ties were also combined with remote or in-person interviews and, in four of the seven papers, observations and fieldwork in person. All of the papers treat the digital as slices of social life entangled online and offline (Hine 2015 ) rather than the whole or totality of a community. For studies on and of social media, digital ethnographers inevitably encounter algorithms that structure the visibility of digital field sites by making certain user accounts and contents more noticeable and available than others (Christin 2020a , b ; Seaver 2017 ). Ross Arguedas and Ferrari each leverage algorithmic recommendations (Christin 2020b ; Leaver et al. 2020) to find and recruit participants. Other ethnographers in this issue, such as Baldor, Evans, and Lane and Stuart, rely primarily on neighborhood-based relationships to determine which participants to study online. Lane and Stuart discuss what it means to digitize urban ethnography in ways that allow the ethnographer to compare, contrast, and track outcomes between online interaction and neighborhood events, and vice versa. In all cases, ethnographers on social media must wrestle and engage with the logics and politics of these platforms (van Dijck 2013 ), even if they remain “black boxes” (Christin 2020b ), and how best to incorporate various platforms and platforms features (e.g., Instagram stories) into recruitment, study designs, and the everyday flow of fieldwork. Through his study of the career-building, social media practices of young, aspiring Hip Hop artists and mentors at Dreamer Studio, Evans learned to conduct fieldwork and ask meaningful questions within and across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Clubhouse, in addition to the physical space of the recording studio. Meanwhile, Rosa shifts the focus of digital ethnography onto the code, internet nodes, and decision-making points and actors that undergird the internet, social media, and various communication technologies in ways that shape and sustain global inequality.

While we are drawn to digital ethnography for the opportunities that it affords, it also presents important challenges, not least around ethics (Markham and Tiidenberg 2018 ). Screenshots and other materials that digital ethnographers typically collect include traceable, searchable data that identifies participants and third parties, which raises questions about if, when, and how to intervene in the collection and presentation of that data. Initiating the ethnography and choosing to write about people may open social scenes and networks that cannot be closed off again without taking extreme measures of de-Googlization (Shklovski and Vertesi 2013 ). While non-digital ethnography is certainly not free from harms of representation (see Moreton-Robinson 2021 ), digital methods carry added challenges around managing visibility that may require digital ethnographers to adapt specialized strategies, such as the feminist ethics of care that Ross Arguedas uses in her paper (see also Clark-Parsons and Lingel 2020 ).

For those with lingering concerns about the need for or value of digital ethnography, we hope that reading these papers will demonstrate the depth of observation and insight that this method yields. Even for more reactive projects, where attention to the digital may have seemed primarily like a form of convenience or necessity, we see that digital work produces vibrant, complex accounts of people and practices. While digital outreach can initially feel like primarily a matter of saving time or research funds, these projects reveal just how much heavy lifting had to go into ultimately getting to know the field, getting to know the people, recruiting the people, building trust, and collecting meaningful personal narratives and perspectives.

Creativity and Inclusivity

Digital ethnography is here to stay. It is our goal with this special issue to encourage and help foster the kinds of creativity and interdisciplinarity we need in ethnography to be able to not only update qualitative sociology, but to make sense of social life that is increasingly coextensive with digital technologies. Digital ethnography, as these empirical papers demonstrate, is an exciting and malleable craft that can be done rigorously and that gives great leverage to help construct and understand a field site. This style of research also pushes sociologists to be more inclusive about the strategies employed to collect ethnographic data and the concepts and theories used to frame and analyze this data. It is not a new empirical approach, although only recently, with “big data,” algorithms, and predictive analytics, have many sociologists, particularly in the U.S., become more widely interested in digital research (Markham 2020 ; on digital methods in sociology, cf. Hampton 2017 ; Lupton 2014 ; Selwyn 2019 ). Digital ethnography has an established history across disciplines, including communication, media studies, information science, internet studies, cultural anthropology, and marketing (see Murthy 2008 , on bridging digital ethnography with sociology). Digital ethnography also has a rich and vibrant history outside the Global North (e.g., Chan 2014 ; Takhteyev 2012 ; Treré 2015 ), which provides important sociological insights in their own right while also representing the need to decenter mainstream narratives of technological origins and values (see also Rosa, this issue). Digital ethnography is an opportunity for qualitative sociologists to bridge literatures, import concepts, theories, and methodological strategies, and practice greater interdisciplinarity and inclusion. This integrative spirit has shaped the selection of the authors and projects convened for this special issue, and is reflected in the article framings and references. This volume, we hope, helps to legitimize further and inspire even more creative, cross-disciplinary, and rigorous forms of digital ethnography.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editors of Qualitative Sociology , Claudio Benzecry and Andrew Deener, for the invitation and opportunity to convene a special issue on digital ethnography and their support during all phases of the project. We’d also like to acknowledge the editorial assistance of Jessica Yorks, who helped manage all aspects of this project, and Mariela Morales, who provided administrative support. We thank Mark Compendio at Springer for managing production. We appreciate the thoughtful writing and conversations with the authors included in this special issue and thank the peer reviewers for feedback that helped to strengthen these papers. Finally, we’d like to acknowledge Mario Small for his important contribution of an afterword.

No funding to declare.

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The authors Jeffrey Lane and Jessa Lingel contributed equally.

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Department of Communication, Rutgers University, 4 Huntington Street, 08901, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

Jeffrey Lane

University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School for Communication, 3620 Walnut Street, 19104, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Jessa Lingel

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Correspondence to Jeffrey Lane or Jessa Lingel .

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Lane, J., Lingel, J. Digital Ethnography for Sociology: Craft, Rigor, and Creativity. Qual Sociol 45 , 319–326 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-022-09509-3

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12 Ethnography

Anthony Kwame Harrison, Department of Sociology, Virginia Tech

• Published: 04 August 2014
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Embracing the trope of ethnography as narrative, this chapter uses the mythic story of Bronislaw Malinowski’s early career and fieldwork as a vehicle through which to explore key aspects of ethnography’s history and development into a distinct form of qualitative research. The reputed “founding father” of the ethnographic approach, Malinowski was a brilliant social scientist, dynamic writer, conceited colonialist, and, above all else, pathetically human. Through a series of intervallic steps—in and out of Malinowski’s path from Poland to the “Cambridge School” and eventually to the western Pacific—I trace the legacy of ethnography to its current position as a critical, historically informed, and unfailingly evolving research endeavor. As a research methodology that has continually reflected on and revised its practices and modes of presentation, ethnography is boundless. Yet minus its political, ethical, and historical moorings, I argue, the complexities of twenty-first-century society render its future uncertain.

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ethnography

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• International Design Foundation - Ethnography
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ethnography , descriptive study of a particular human society or the process of making such a study. Contemporary ethnography is based almost entirely on fieldwork and requires the complete immersion of the anthropologist in the culture and everyday life of the people who are the subject of his study.

There has been some confusion regarding the terms ethnography and ethnology . The latter, a term more widely used in Europe, encompasses the analytical and comparative study of cultures in general, which in American usage is the academic field known as cultural anthropology (in British usage, social anthropology). Increasingly, however, the distinction between the two is coming to be seen as existing more in theory than in fact. Ethnography, by virtue of its intersubjective nature, is necessarily comparative. Given that the anthropologist in the field necessarily retains certain cultural biases, his observations and descriptions must, to a certain degree, be comparative. Thus the formulating of generalizations about culture and the drawing of comparisons inevitably become components of ethnography.

The description of other ways of life is an activity with roots in ancient times. Herodotus , the Greek traveler and historian of the 5th century bc , wrote of some 50 different peoples he encountered or heard of, remarking on their laws, social customs, religion, and appearance. Beginning with the age of exploration and continuing into the early 20th century, detailed accounts of non-European peoples were rendered by European traders, missionaries, and, later, colonial administrators. The reliability of such accounts varies considerably, as the Europeans often misunderstood what they saw or had a vested interest in portraying their subjects less than objectively.

Modern anthropologists usually identify the establishment of ethnography as a professional field with the pioneering work of both the Polish-born British anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia ( c. 1915) and the American anthropologist Margaret Mead , whose first fieldwork was in Samoa (1925). Ethnographic fieldwork has since become a sort of rite of passage into the profession of cultural anthropology. Many ethnographers reside in the field for a year or more, learning the local language or dialect and, to the greatest extent possible, participating in everyday life while at the same time maintaining an observer’s objective detachment. This method, called participant-observation, while necessary and useful for gaining a thorough understanding of a foreign culture, is in practice quite difficult. Just as the anthropologist brings to the situation certain inherent , if unconscious, cultural biases, so also is he influenced by the subject of his study. While there are cases of ethnographers who felt alienated or even repelled by the culture they entered, many—perhaps most—have come to identify closely with “their people,” a factor that affects their objectivity. In addition to the technique of participant-observation, the contemporary ethnographer usually selects and cultivates close relationships with individuals, known as informants, who can provide specific information on ritual, kinship , or other significant aspects of cultural life. In this process also the anthropologist risks the danger of biased viewpoints, as those who most willingly act as informants frequently are individuals who are marginal to the group and who, for ulterior motives ( e.g., alienation from the group or a desire to be singled out as special by the foreigner), may provide other than objective explanations of cultural and social phenomena. A final hazard inherent in ethnographic fieldwork is the ever-present possibility of cultural change produced by or resulting from the ethnographer’s presence in the group.

Contemporary ethnographies usually adhere to a community , rather than individual, focus and concentrate on the description of current circumstances rather than historical events. Traditionally, commonalities among members of the group have been emphasized, though recent ethnography has begun to reflect an interest in the importance of variation within cultural systems. Ethnographic studies are no longer restricted to small primitive societies but may also focus on such social units as urban ghettos. The tools of the ethnographer have changed radically since Malinowski’s time. While detailed notes are still a mainstay of fieldwork, ethnographers have taken full advantage of technological developments such as motion pictures and tape recorders to augment their written accounts.

What Is Ethnography?

What It Is and How To Do It

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Ethnography is defined as both a social science research method and its final written product. As a method, ethnographic observation involves embedding oneself deeply and over the long-term in a field site of study in order to systemically document the everyday lives, behaviors, and interactions of a community of people. As a written product, an ethnography is a richly descriptive account of the social life and culture of the group studied.

Key Takeaways: Ethnography

• Ethnography refers to the practice of conducting a long-term, detailed study of a community.
• A written report based on this type of detailed observation of a community is also referred to as an ethnography.
• Conducting an ethnography allows researchers to obtain a great detail of information about the group they are studying; however, this research method is also time- and labor-intensive.

Ethnography was developed by anthropologists, most famously, by Bronislaw Malinowki in the early 20th century. But simultaneously, early sociologists in the U.S. (many affiliated with the Chicago School) adopted the method as well, as they pioneered the field of urban sociology. Since then, ethnography has been a staple of sociological research methods , and many sociologists have contributed to developing the method and formalizing it in books that offer methodological instruction.

The goal of an ethnographer is to develop a rich understanding of how and why people think, behave, and interact as they do in a given community or organization (the field of study), and most importantly, to understand these things from the standpoint of those studied (known as an "emic perspective" or "insider standpoint"). Thus, the goal of ethnography is not just to develop an understanding of practices and interactions, but also what those things mean to the population studied. Importantly, the ethnographer also works to situate what they find in historical and local context, and to identify the connections between their findings and the larger social forces and structures of society.

How Sociologists Conduct Ethnographic Research

Any field site can serve as a setting for ethnographic research. For example, sociologists have conducted this kind of research in schools, churches, rural and urban communities, around particular street corners, within corporations, and even at bars, drag clubs, and strip clubs.

To conduct ethnographic research and produce an ethnography, researchers typically embed themselves in their chosen field site over a long period of time. They do this so that they can develop a robust dataset composed of systematic observations, interviews , and historical and investigative research, which requires repeated, careful observations of the same people and settings. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz referred to this process as generating "thick description," which means a description that digs below the surface by asking questions that begin with the following: who, what, where, when, and how.

From a methodological standpoint, one of the important goals of an ethnographer is to have as little impact on the field site and people studied as possible, so as to collect data that is as unbiased as possible. Developing trust is an important part of this process, as those observed must feel comfortable having the ethnographer present in order to behave and interact as they normally would.

Pros of Conducting Ethnographic Research

One advantage of ethnographic research is that it provides insight into aspects of social life, including perception and values, which other research methods are unable to capture. Ethnography can illuminate that which is  taken for granted and which goes unspoken  within a community. It also allows the researcher to develop a rich and valuable understanding of the cultural meaning of practices and interactions. Additionally, the detailed observations conducted in ethnographic research can also disprove negative biases or stereotypes about the population in question.

Cons of Conducting Ethnographic Research

One disadvantage of ethnographic research is that it can sometimes be difficult to gain access to and establish trust within a desired field site. It can also be difficult for researchers to dedicate the time required to conduct a rigorous ethnography, given limits on research funding and their other professional commitments (e.g. teaching).

Ethnographic research also has the potential for bias on the part of the researcher, which could skew the data and insights gained from it. Additionally, due to the intimate nature of the research, there is the potential for ethical and interpersonal issues and conflicts to arise. Finally, the storytelling nature of an ethnography can seem to bias the interpretation of the data.

Notable Ethnographers and Works

• Street Corner Society , William F. Whyte
• Black Metropolis ,  St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Jr.
• Slim's Table , Mitchell Duneier
• Home Bound , Yen Le Espiritu
• Punished , Victor Rios
• Academic Profiling , Gilda Ochoa
• Learning to Labour , Paul Willis
• Women Without Class , Julie Bettie
• Code of the Street , Elijah Anderson

You can learn more about ethnography by reading books on the method, such as  Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes  by Emerson et al., and  Analyzing Social Settings by Lofland and Lofland, as well as by reading the latest articles in the  Journal of Contemporary Ethnography .

Updated  by Nicki Lisa Cole, Ph.D.

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Qualitative Research: Ethnography

• Data Analysis
• Ethnography
• Interviewing & Focus Groups
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Journals on Ethnography

• Common Ground: Archeology and Ethnography in the Public Interest
• Cultural Anthropology
• Ethnography and Education
• The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography
• Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
• Journal of Museum Ethnography
• Journal of Organizational Ethnography

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Home > Sociology and Anthropology > Selected Anthropology 380 Photo Essays

Outstanding Ethnographic Research Projects

Submissions from 2022 2022.

People, Not Symptoms: A Visual Ethnography of Ayurvedic Doctor Ashlesha Raut , Elizabeth Baranski

Submissions from 2019 2019

Laurie Bergner: A Bloomington-Normal Community Educator Shaped by Her Values , Jessica Bugayong

Community Lawyering and the Immigration Project: An Ethnographic Study of Charlotte Alvarez , Kathryn Jefferson

It’s about more than reproduction: a visual ethnography about Jennifer Sedbrook , Sommer Martin

Nine Months in One Day: A Visual Ethnography with Caroline and Elizabeth Fox-Anvick , Kayla Ranta

Submissions from 2018 2018

Colleen Connelly: Taking the First Step towards Improving Food Accessibility , Michelle Rekowski '19

Submissions from 2016 2016

“Don’t Cross Momma!” A Visual Representation of LGBTQI Woman Leader Jan Lancaster , Lucy Bullock '17

Sacred Partnership: A Visual Ethnographic Study of Rabbi Rebecca L. Dubowe , Anna Kerr-Carpenter '17

Women Leaders as Change Agents: Mary Campbell’s Story of Academic and Community Leadership , Raelynn Parmely '17

Submissions from 2013 2013

American by Citizenship or American at Heart? An analysis of becoming an “American” as seen through the eyes of an Indian-American immigrant , Helen Brandt '14

Pierogies to Hamburgers: An immigration story , Madeline Cross '13

The Long Road to Becoming American: One Kenyan’s Immigration Journey Filled with Perseverance, Discrimination, and Student Visa Restrictions , Katelyn Eichinger '14

Bicultural Living: Maria Luisa Mainou’s Experience with Immigration and Cultural Change , Alicia Gummess '13

Russian-Jewish Immigration and the Life Experiences of Dr. Marina Balina: A Photo Essay , Lauren Henry '14

Snapped into Focus: Addressing the Challenges Faced by Undocumented Mexican Immigrants in the United States , Nora Peterson '14

An American who Emigrated from Poland: The Significance of Education and Family Support in the Acculturation Process , Stephanie Pierson '13

Submissions from 2012 2012

Smile and Style: An Ethnographic Analysis of ISU's Gamma Phi Circus , Sarah Carlson '13

Building Christ-based Relationships, Disciples, and Sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ at Illinois State University , Cassandra Jordan '12

When Words Fail, Music Speaks , Hannah Williams '12

Submissions from 2011 2011

Exploring Acupuncture in the American Midwest , Shuting Zhong '11

Submissions from 2010 2010

Luck Be A Lady: An Exploration of the Bloomington Bingo Community Through Visual Ethnographic Methods , Monica Simonin 11

Getting High: An Inside Look into College Students' Lives with Type 1 Diabetes , Amber Spiewak 11

Twin City Chess Club: a Visual Ethnographic Examination of Chess , Morgan Tarbutton 11

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Ethnography In Qualitative Research

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

What is Ethnography?

Ethnography is a qualitative research method that emphasizes studying what people do and say in particular contexts. Ethnographers typically spend considerable time observing and interacting with a social group to understand how the group develops cultural constructions and relations.

Ethnography is used anthropology and other social sciences to systematically study people and cultures.

The goal of ethnography is to explore cultural phenomena from the perspective of the subjects being studied.

They aim to uncover the reasons for particular behaviors and practices within a specific cultural context. For example, an ethnographic study might examine why certain communities use specific child-rearing techniques or how cultural values influence emotional expression.

This often involves immersing oneself in a community or organization to observe their behaviors and interactions up close.

Ethnographic research is often open-ended and exploratory. Researchers may enter the field with a research question in mind, but they remain open to unexpected findings and allow the social order of the community to guide their observations.

This openness to discovery helps researchers develop a deeper understanding of the cultural phenomena they study.

How does an ethnographic perspective view psychological knowledge?

Ethnography considers the social context of psychological phenomena to be critical to the field of psychology.

An ethnographic perspective argues that psychological knowledge is not complete unless it examines how communal practices, economic and political structures, shared values, histories, aspirations, and other life dimensions shape human experiences.

The interaction of identity and self-definition is dynamic and shaped by an individual’s social contexts.

Ethnography is primarily used in the following situations:

• Cultural anthropology : Ethnography is the primary research method used by cultural anthropologists to study and understand different societies and cultures around the world. Margaret Mead conducted ethnographic research among the Arapesh, Mundugumor, and Tchambuli people of New Guinea, which resulted in her book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). In this work, she explored the ways in which gender roles and personality traits varied across cultures.
• Sociology : Ethnographic methods are used in sociology to study subcultures, communities, and social groups within a larger society, such as urban neighborhoods, religious communities, or professional groups. Paul Willis conducted an ethnographic study of working-class youth culture, presented in his work Learning to Labo r. Willis sought to understand why working-class youth often ended up in working-class jobs. His research involved a series of interviews and observations, focusing on a school setting to gain insight into the connection between working-class backgrounds and career trajectories. Willis concluded that working-class children often develop a counter-school culture, characterized by opposition to academics and authority figures.
• Education : Ethnography is used in educational research to study classroom dynamics, student-teacher interactions, and the impact of cultural factors on learning.
• Healthcare : Ethnography is used in healthcare research to study patient experiences, healthcare provider practices, and the cultural factors that influence health behaviors and outcomes.
• Social work : Ethnographic research helps social workers understand the lived experiences of marginalized or vulnerable populations, informing the development of more effective interventions and support services.
• Policy and development : Ethnography is used in policy research and international development to assess the impact of policies and programs on local communities and to ensure that development initiatives are culturally appropriate and sustainable.

What distinguishes ethnography from other qualitative methods?

While ethnography shares commonalities with other qualitative methods, these distinctions highlight its unique capacity to provide rich, nuanced insights into the complexities of human behavior and culture.

• Immersive Fieldwork: Unlike other qualitative methods that might rely solely on interviews or surveys, ethnography necessitates the researcher to be directly involved in the community or group they are studying, often for extended periods. This immersive approach allows for a depth of understanding unattainable through less participatory methods.
• Unstructured Data Collection: Ethnographers typically begin their research with a more exploratory approach rather than testing predetermined hypotheses. They embrace unstructured data collection, allowing patterns and theories to emerge from their observations and interactions rather than imposing pre-existing frameworks.
• Emphasis on Observation Over Interviews: Although interviews are a common tool in ethnographic research, the core of the method lies in observing what people do rather than solely relying on what they say . This focus on action allows ethnographers to identify discrepancies between stated beliefs and actual practices, providing a richer understanding of the complexities within a social group.
• Interpretative and Reflexive Analysis: Ethnographers acknowledge the inherent subjectivity involved in interpreting social phenomena. They embrace reflexivity, acknowledging that their own backgrounds and perspectives shape how they observe and interpret data.
• Focus on Process, Meaning, and Place: Ethnography seeks to uncover the dynamic processes, shared meanings, and influence of place that shape social life. It investigates how individuals make sense of their world and how these understandings influence their actions and interactions within specific geographical and social contexts.
• Thick description : Thick description, a concept by Geertz, is an ethnographer’s in-depth and nuanced representation of social life that goes beyond simple observation, exploring the meanings and motivations behind behaviors. This nuanced understanding illustrates how ethnographers use thick description to reveal what is “at stake” in people’s lives.

Gaining Access to a Community for Ethnographic Research

Negotiating access to a community for research can be a delicate process, requiring sensitivity and understanding of local social practices.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach; instead, researchers must adapt their approach to the specific community and setting they wish to study.

• Initial Contact: Start by identifying potential participants and settings relevant to the research question. Initial contact can be made remotely through emails, calls, or social connections. Reaching out to researchers who have previously worked in the field can be beneficial. Physical visits to the field can also be helpful in the initial stages.
• Building Trust and Understanding Local Norms: Establishing trust is paramount in ethnographic research. Researchers should prioritize initiating contact in a manner that aligns with the community’s social practices. For example, directly emailing community centers in a culture that values personal introductions might be ineffective. Introducing the researcher through a trusted community member, like a friend or neighbor, can foster trust and facilitate acceptance. Researchers should remain mindful of their position in relation to the community’s cultural norms and how their presence might be perceived.
• Addressing Challenges and Maintaining Access: Unexpected challenges and setbacks are common in ethnographic research. Embracing methodological agility allows researchers to adapt their methods to the contingencies of the field site and view setbacks as opportunities for refining research design. Flexibility is key, and researchers should be open to exploring alternative settings or communities if access to the initial choice proves difficult.
• Ethical Considerations and Reciprocity: Ethnographic research involves a responsibility to the community being studied. Ethnographers must be aware of the power dynamics inherent in research and strive to minimize harm by respecting participants’ privacy and cultural norms. Researchers should consider how their work can benefit the community, for instance, by offering insights, providing resources, or advocating for positive change.

Working with Informants in Ethnography

Informants are crucial to ethnographic research, acting as primary points of contact and facilitating the researcher’s understanding of the group being studied.

Identifying the right informants is vital, and a “friend-of-a-friend” approach, leveraging existing social networks, can be advantageous.

This method can grant access to otherwise inaccessible aspects of social life and provide a unique, embedded perspective on the community’s language use and attitudes.

However, over-reliance on a single informant can skew the researcher’s perspective, potentially leading to biased or unrepresentative findings.

An informant may consciously or unconsciously shape their interactions with the researcher to align with what they believe is expected, hindering the collection of spontaneous and authentic data.

Therefore, it’s essential to cultivate relationships with a diverse range of informants within the community. This approach helps ensure a more comprehensive understanding of the group’s dynamics and mitigates the risk of individual bias influencing the research findings.

While the sources don’t provide detailed steps on managing relationships with multiple informants, they emphasize the importance of ethical considerations, open communication, and building trust throughout the research process.

Data Sources in Ethnographic Research

Ethnographers often employ a  multi-method approach , combining data from these various sources to create a rich and comprehensive understanding of the group being studied.

They may also utilize audio and video recordings to capture interactions and analyze nonverbal communication.

The choice of specific data collection methods depends on factors like the research question, available resources, and ethical considerations

• Participant observation involves the researcher immersing themselves in the daily life of a community to gain an understanding of the actions, activities, rituals, routines, and daily practices. The ethnographer might participate in activities to learn through experience or observe from the sidelines. There are varying levels of participation in this method. Some researchers fully adopt the social role they are studying, like a factory worker or police officer, to better understand the group’s worldview. Others maintain a more detached relationship, observing from the sidelines, while acknowledging that some interaction is inevitable.
• Field notes  are a primary data source, meticulously recording observations, conversations, and preliminary analyses made during immersion in the research setting3.
• Interviews  play a significant role, providing insights into individuals’ perspectives and experiences within the group. Interviews provide a source of witness accounts about settings and events in the social world that the ethnographer may or may not have been able to observe.
• Documents , both official and personal, can offer valuable contextual information and supplement observational data

When conducting ethnographic research, researchers should be mindful of their ontological and epistemological stances, their research questions, and the context of their research.

Ethnographers must also consider ethical implications, the type of data they are collecting, and how their findings will be used.

What are the limitations of solely relying on interviews in ethnographic research?

While interviews are a common element of ethnographic research, relying on them solely as a source of data has some significant limitations.

• Discrepancies Between Words and Actions : Interviews primarily capture what people say about their lives, beliefs, and practices. However, what people say and what they actually do can differ. Observing participants in their natural environment can reveal these discrepancies and provide a more complete understanding of their lived experiences.
• Influence of Interviewer and Context : The interview itself is a constructed situation that can influence participants’ responses. Participants may modify their language or opinions to align with perceived expectations or power dynamics, particularly when discussing sensitive topics.
• Limited Insight into Meaning-Making : While interviews can provide information about perspectives and beliefs, they may not fully capture the subtle ways cultural meanings are embedded in everyday practices and interactions. Ethnographic observation allows researchers to witness these meaning-making processes firsthand.
• Difficulty in Capturing Complexity : Interviews, especially structured ones, often rely on pre-determined questions and response categories. This approach can oversimplify complex cultural phenomena and miss nuances that emerge through observation of natural interactions.

Supplementing Interviews with Observation

To mitigate these limitations, sources emphasize the importance of combining interviews with other ethnographic methods, primarily participant observation .

• Observing participants in their natural environment provides a more holistic and nuanced understanding of their practices, interactions, and the cultural meanings embedded within them.
• This immersive approach allows researchers to go beyond self-reported accounts and gain insights that might not be revealed through interviews alone.

Skills Required for Ethnographic Studies

• High Degree of Interpretative Agility: Understanding the intricacies of ethnographic studies necessitates a high degree of interpretative agility to make sense of the diverse range of issues and facts gathered.
• Cultural Sensitivity: Sensitivity towards the culture, values, and norms of the social setting is paramount for conducting ethical and meaningful research. This is essential for building trust and rapport with research participants and understanding their perspectives.
• Reflexivity : Ethnographers must be self-aware and reflective about their own positionality, biases, and impact on the research process, and be transparent about these factors in their writing.

The Role of Reflexivity in Ethnography

Reflexivity in ethnographic writing involves thoughtfully examining how the researcher’s background, beliefs, and position influence their observations, interpretations, and the final ethnographic account.

It’s a crucial aspect of producing responsible and insightful ethnographic work.

• Acknowledging Subjectivity: Ethnographers who practice reflexivity understand that their accounts are not objective truths, but rather interpretations shaped by their own experiences and perspectives. They acknowledge that other researchers, with different backgrounds and positions, might interpret the same data differently.
• Positioning the Researcher: Reflexivity encourages ethnographers to explicitly consider and articulate how their personal and cultural background, as well as their social position relative to the community being studied, might influence their understanding of the observed phenomena. This includes acknowledging any preconceived notions or biases they bring to the research.
• Examining Power Dynamics: Ethnographic research often involves power imbalances between the researcher and the researched, especially when studying marginalized groups. Reflexivity encourages researchers to critically examine these power dynamics and to consider how their work might perpetuate or challenge existing inequalities. This involves being transparent about the research process and engaging in ethical practices that protect participants.
• Enhancing the Validity of Findings : Ultimately, reflexivity aims to strengthen the ethnographic account by making the researcher’s interpretive process more transparent and by providing a more nuanced and accountable representation of the community being studied. This can involve explicitly discussing the researcher’s positionality and reflecting on how their presence might have influenced the data collected.

It is important to note that while reflexivity is widely recognized as crucial in ethnography, there are different understandings of its application and implications.

Some argue for a more radical approach that emphasizes the subjective nature of ethnographic knowledge and the limitations of representation.

Others advocate for a more moderate stance that acknowledges the importance of reflexivity while still striving for rigorous and insightful accounts of social reality.

Importance of Local Context in Ethnography

Understanding the local context is crucial for ethnographic research because it allows researchers to accurately interpret the meanings behind people’s actions and perspectives within their specific social and cultural environment.

Ethnography examines the intricate relationships between human agency and the structures of society within the everyday experiences of a particular place. This method aims to understand the processes and meanings that underpin social life, recognizing that these processes and meanings vary across locations.

Here’s why local context is so important for ethnographic research:

• Connecting Macro and Micro Levels of Analysis: Ethnography aims to reveal the link between large-scale societal structures and the everyday experiences of individuals. The local context provides the specific setting where these connections are made visible and understandable. For instance, studying violence statistically cannot capture the contextual factors that lead to it, but ethnographic research can uncover the specific social dynamics and meanings within particular places that contribute to such behavior.
• Uncovering Meaning Systems: The meanings people assign to events and actions are often deeply embedded within their local culture and not always explicitly stated. Ethnographers, by immersing themselves in the local context, can gradually understand these meaning systems through prolonged observation, interaction, and analysis of daily practices.
• Context-Sensitivity of Behavior: People’s actions and accounts of their actions are highly context-dependent, meaning they can vary significantly across different settings. Ethnographic research acknowledges this by emphasizing firsthand observation and understanding of the local context to ensure accurate interpretation of behavior and perspectives.
• Avoiding Misinterpretation: Without a deep understanding of the local context, researchers risk misinterpreting observations or imposing their own cultural biases on the data. Immersing oneself in the local context allows ethnographers to develop cultural competence and sensitivity, which helps them arrive at more accurate and insightful interpretations of the group’s actions and beliefs.

In essence, understanding the local context is not just about knowing where something occurs, but about comprehending the intricate web of cultural meanings, social dynamics, and historical factors that shape people’s lives and experiences in that specific location.

This understanding is fundamental to the ethnographic approach and its ability to generate meaningful insights into human behavior and social life.

Challenges in Conducting Ethnographic Research

Ethnography, a qualitative research method focusing on the study of people and cultures, presents a unique set of challenges for researchers:

• Time Commitment : Ethnography is a time-consuming endeavor. Researchers need to spend significant time immersed in the community or organization they are studying to build relationships, observe interactions, and gain a deep understanding of the culture. This long-term immersion requires careful planning and can be personally demanding. For instance, some research may necessitate a “focused” or “mini” ethnography lasting a few weeks or months, while others require a year or more.
• Observer Bias : Ethnographers are at risk of introducing their own biases into the research. Writing an ethnography involves subjective interpretation, and it can be difficult to remain objective when analyzing a group in which the researcher is deeply involved. The researcher’s background, beliefs, and experiences can influence their observations and interpretations.
• Representing Culture : Writing about other people is inherently complicated, and ethnographers must consider how to describe people in a manner that is informative, honest, sensitive, and ethical.
• Ethical Issues : Recognize that ethnographers often hold a position of power relative to the communities they study, particularly when working with marginalized groups. Ensure participants are volunteers who understand the study’s purpose and their right to withdraw.
• Gaining Access : Getting access to a community or organization for research can be a delicate process. Researchers need to establish trust with gatekeepers and negotiate their role within the community. This can be particularly difficult in settings that are closed or suspicious of outsiders. For instance, researchers may face resistance from organizations concerned about negative publicity stemming from the study’s findings.
• Data Analysis and Interpretation : Ethnographic research often generates large amounts of data in various forms, such as field notes, interviews, and documents. Analyzing this data and developing meaningful interpretations can be challenging and time-consuming. Researchers must develop systematic ways to manage, analyze, and interpret their data while staying true to the experiences and perspectives of the participants.
• Generalizability : The findings of ethnographic research, which typically focuses on a specific case or setting, can be challenging to generalize to other populations or contexts. The in-depth, context-specific nature of ethnographic research, while a strength in understanding a particular group, poses challenges for drawing broader conclusions about human behavior and social phenomena.
• External Pressures : Ethnographers may face pressure from funding agencies or institutions to conduct research that aligns with specific agendas or produces immediate, tangible outcomes. This pressure can create ethical dilemmas and compromise the integrity of the research. For example, ethnography may be perceived as an inefficient research method due to its reliance on long-term engagement.

Strategies for Ethical Representation

Any ethnographic account of another cultural group risks engaging in what Edward Said (1978) called the “politics of othering,” potentially distorting the lives of those being studied in support of “scientific racism and projects of colonial domination and exploitation”.

The ethnographer should chronicle the community’s experiences, including their struggles, aspirations, losses, and stagnation, with compassion

Thick Description

Provide a nuanced perspective on social life, connecting observed behaviors to underlying meanings, emotions, and decision-making strategies, while avoiding simplistic or reductive accounts of complex experiences.

For example, instead of simply stating that Alzheimer’s carries a social stigma, an ethnographer might connect this observation to the community’s beliefs about family and social change.

Respect and Dignity

Represent individuals with respect and dignity, appreciating their values within the context of their lives.

The ethnographer should chronicle the community’s experiences, including their struggles, aspirations, losses, and stagnation, with compassion.

Reflexivity and Collaboration

Acknowledge the historical legacy of ethnography, including its role in colonialism and the potential for exploitative research practices.

Ethnographers should strive for a more equitable and collaborative approach by:

• Recognizing participants as “epistemic agents and interlocutors” who contribute theoretical interpretations, not merely data points2.
• Involving community members in shaping research questions, data analysis, and the dissemination of findings.
• Considering co-authorship with community members

Strengths of Ethnography

• Ethnography offers a nuanced understanding of cultural phenomena by directly observing behaviors and interactions within a specific community or organization. This immersive approach allows researchers to gain firsthand knowledge of shared culture, conventions, and social dynamics. Ethnography is particularly useful for studying complex social phenomena like football fans, call center workers, and police officers.
• Flexibility, allowing researchers to adapt their research strategy and direction based on their observations and developing understanding. Rather than aiming to confirm a hypothesis or test a general theory, ethnographic research prioritizes providing a comprehensive and detailed narrative of a specific culture. This open-ended approach enables the exploration of various aspects of the group and setting being studied.
• Ethnographers can uncover authentic information and observe spontaneous dynamics that might not surface through direct questioning. By becoming immersed in the social environment, researchers gain access to a deeper understanding of the lived experiences of the group under study. For example, ethnographers can examine discrepancies between what people say and their actual actions, providing insights that other methodologies might miss.
• Ethnography enables researchers to understand the meanings behind social actions by revealing the knowledge and meaning structures that guide them. Through prolonged engagement and observation, ethnographers gain insight into the cultural systems of meaning that shape individuals’ perceptions and actions. Unlike surveys or interviews with pre-determined questions, ethnography allows for an emergent understanding of the cultural competencies within a social setting.
• Ethnographic research relies on a comprehensive approach to data collection, incorporating observations, conversations, and preliminary analysis through detailed field notes. This rigorous documentation helps ensure the accuracy and representativeness of the findings. Moreover, ethnography goes beyond simply describing behaviors; it strives to provide a structured explanation of the observed phenomena, drawing on the researcher’s direct experiences, intuitions, and relevant theoretical frameworks.

However, it’s important to note that ethnography, while valuable, has limitations. It is a time-consuming method requiring significant planning and careful consideration of ethical issues.

Additionally, maintaining objectivity and minimizing observer bias can be a challenge due to the researcher’s immersive role.

Further Information

• Brewer, J. (2000).  Ethnography . McGraw-Hill Education (UK).
• Hammersley, M. (2006). Ethnography: problems and prospects .  Ethnography and education ,  1 (1), 3-14.
• Herbert, S. (2000). For ethnography .  Progress in human geography ,  24 (4), 550-568.
• Lew-Levy, S., Reckin, R., Lavi, N., Cristóbal-Azkarate, J., & Ellis-Davies, K. (2017). How do hunter-gatherer children learn subsistence skills? A meta-ethnographic review. Human Nature,  28 (4), 367–394.  https://doi.org/10.1007/S12110-017-9302-2
• Mead, M. (1963). Sex and temperament in three primitive societies (Vol. 370). New York: Morrow.
• Said, E. W. (2013). Orientalism reconsidered. In  Literature Politics & Theory  (pp. 230-249). Routledge.
• Willis, P. (1977). Learning to Labor: How Working-class Kids Get Working-class Jobs . New York: Colombia University Press

Open Education Sociology Dictionary

ethnography

Table of Contents

Definition of Ethnography

( noun ) A qualitative research method in which a  researcher   observes a social setting to provide descriptions of a group , society , or organization .

Examples of Ethnography

• Codrington, Robert Henry – The Melanesians: Studies in their Anthropology and Folk-lore (1891)
• Clifford Geertz – The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)
• Helene Lawson – Ladies on the Lot: Women, Car Sales, and the Pursuit of the American Dream (2000)
• Margaret Mead – Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)
• Judith Stacey – Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth-century America (1990)
• Neil Websdale – Rural Woman Battering and the Justice System: An Ethnography (1998)

Ethnography Pronunciation

Pronunciation Usage Guide

Syllabification : eth·nog·ra·phy

Audio Pronunciation

Phonetic Spelling

• American English – /eth-nAH-gruh-fee/
• British English – /eth-nO-gruh-fee/

International Phonetic Alphabet

• American English – /ɛθˈnɑɡrəfi/
• British English – /ɛθˈnɒɡrəfi/

Usage Notes

• Plural:  ethnographies
• A type of qualitative research .
• Also called descriptive anthropology .
• An ( noun ) ethnographer uses the research methodology of ethnography to produce ( adjective ) ethnographic or ( adjective ) ethnographical work ( adverb ) ethnographically .

Related Quotation

• “Ethnographers seek out the insider’s viewpoint. Because  culture is the knowledge people use to generate behavior and interpret experience, the ethnographer seeks to understand group members’   behavior from the inside, or cultural , perspective. Instead of looking for a subject to observe , ethnographers look for an informant to teach them the culture ” (Spradley and McCurdy 2008:4).

Related Video

Additional Information

• Qualitative Research Resources – Books, Journals, and Helpful Links
• Word origin of “ethnography” – Online Etymology Dictionary: etymonline.com
• Atkinson, Paul. 1990.  The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual Constructions of Reality . London: Routledge.
• Atkinson, Paul, Amanda Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland, and Lyn Lofland, eds. 2001. Handbook of Ethnography . London: SAGE.
• Behar, Ruth. 1996.  The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart . Boston: Beacon Press.
• Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. 2011.  Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes . 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Ferrell, Jeff, and Mark S. Hamm, eds. 1998. Ethnography at the Edge: Crime, Deviance, and Field Research . Boston: Northeastern University Press.
• Hine, Christine. 2000. Virtual Ethnography . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Madden, Raymond. 2010. Being Ethnographic: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Ethnography . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Murdock, George. 1950. World Ethnographic Sample . Bobbs-Merrill reprint series in the social sciences. A-166.
• Neyland, Daniel. 2008. Organizational Ethnography . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Rossman, Gretchen B., and Sharon F. Rallis. 2012. Learning in the Field: An Introduction to Qualitative Research . 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Sunstein, Bonnie S., and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater. 2012. Fieldworking: Reading and Writing Research . 4th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins Press.
• Taylor, Stephanie, ed. 2002. Ethnographic Research: A Reader . London: SAGE.
• Troman, Geoff, Bob Jeffrey, and Geoffrey Walford, eds. 2005. Methodological Issues and Practices in Ethnography . Boston: Elsevier JAI.
• Van Maanen, John. 2011.  Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography . 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Wolcott, Harry F. 2009.  Writing Up Qualitative Research . 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Conducting Field Research: writing.colostate.edu
• Institute for Field Research: ifrglobal.org
• Ethnography
• Field Methods
• Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

Related Terms

• anthropology
• field experiment
• field notes
• field research
• observation
• participant observation
• qualitative research

Spradley, James P., and David W. McCurdy, eds. 2008.  Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology . 13th ed. Boston: Pearson Education.

Works Consulted

Bilton, Tony, Kevin Bonnett, Pip Jones, David Skinner, Michelle Stanworth, and Andrew Webster. 1996. Introductory Sociology . 3rd ed. London: Macmillan.

Bruce, Steve, and Steven Yearley. 2006. The SAGE Dictionary of Sociology . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

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Cite the Definition of Ethnography

ASA – American Sociological Association (5th edition)

Bell, Kenton, ed. 2013. “ethnography.” In Open Education Sociology Dictionary . Retrieved September 12, 2024 ( https://sociologydictionary.org/ethnography/ ).

APA – American Psychological Association (6th edition)

ethnography. (2013). In K. Bell (Ed.), Open education sociology dictionary . Retrieved from https://sociologydictionary.org/ethnography/

Chicago/Turabian: Author-Date – Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition)

Bell, Kenton, ed. 2013. “ethnography.” In Open Education Sociology Dictionary . Accessed September 12, 2024. https://sociologydictionary.org/ethnography/ .

MLA – Modern Language Association (7th edition)

“ethnography.” Open Education Sociology Dictionary . Ed. Kenton Bell. 2013. Web. 12 Sep. 2024. < https://sociologydictionary.org/ethnography/ >.