Ethnography. A very quick
introduction
Davide Nicolini
What are we going to talk about?
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What is ethnography?
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Aspects of an ethnographic project
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The writing up bit
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What is ethnography? Methodological
definitions
“…a particular method or set of methods. In
its most characteristic form it involves the
ethnographer participating, overtly or
covertly, in people’s daily lives for an
extended period of time, watching what
happens, listening to what is said, asking
questions.”
Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995, p. 1
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Distinctive features
People's behaviour is studied in everyday contexts rather
than under unnatural or experimental circumstances created
by the researcher;
 Data are collected by various techniques but primarily by
means of observation;
 Data collection is flexible and unstructured to avoid pre-fixed
arrangements that impose categories on what people say and
do;
 The focus is normally on a single setting or group and is smallscale; the analysis of the data involves attribution of the
meanings of the human actions described and explained

(Atkinson and Hammersley 1998: 110-11).
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Ethnographic Methods family
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Participant observation
 Covert
 Overt
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Informal interviews
Life histories
Diaries
Field notes/research diary
Video ethnography
Auto ethnography
…
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The Origins of Ethnography
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Anthropological Ethnography
 Malinowski
 Geertz
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The Chicago School of Sociology
 Urban sociology – Whyte; Anderson
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The British Ethnographic tradition
 Charles and Beatrice Webb
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Community Studies
 Meg Stacey study of Banbury
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Bronislaw Malinowski (1922) Argonauts
of the Western Pacific

In this volume I give an account of one phase of savage
life … This account has been culled… from Ethnographic
material, covering the whole extent of the tribal culture
of one district…
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I have lived in that one archipelago for about two years,
in the course of three expeditions to New Guinea, during
which time I naturally acquired a thorough knowledge of
the language. I did my work entirely alone, living for the
greater part of the time right in the villages. I therefore
had constantly the daily life of the natives before my
eyes, while accidental, dramatic occurrences, deaths,
quarrels, village brawls, public and ceremonial events,
could not escape my notice.
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The goal of ethnographic fieldwork
Describe the organization in factual term
 Capture the imponderabilia of actual life
through minute, detailed observations
 Create a corpus of ethnographic statements,
characteristic narratives, typical utterances,
items of folklore and magical formulae
 Aim: to grasp the native’s point of view, his
relation to life, to realise his vision of his world

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W.F. Whyte: Street Corner Society (1943)
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Street Corner Society

The first part of the book contains detailed accounts of
how local gangs were formed and organized. The opening
reads like a novel with a first person narrative as Whyte
begins his description of the Nortons, a gang he is
'studying‘.

Whyte differentiated between "corner boys" and "college
boys": The lives of the former men revolved around
particular street corners and the nearby shops. The college
boys, on the other hand, were more interested in good
education and moving up the social ladder.
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Karen Ho: Liquidated: An Ethnography of
Wall Street (2009)
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Ethnography beyond academia
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Ethnography in industry: Design
ethnography
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Ethnography and emancipation
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Ethnography
Ethnos
+ graphos
Today’s focus
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Doing ethnography
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Participant Observation
 If meaning is what we are after we cannot escape the
social world in order to study it:
“it is not a matter of methodological commitment, it is an existential
fact.”
(Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983: 15)
 “An observer is under the bed. A participant observer
is in it.”
(John Whiting, age 80-something, to an undergraduate
class when he was a guest lecturer at UC Irvine)
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Ethnographic projects are often
recursive, evolving, shifting and messy

If a man sets out on an expedition, determined
to prove certain hypotheses, if he is incapable of
changing his views constantly and casting them
off ungrudgingly under the pressure of
evidence, needless to say his work will be
worthless.
Malinowski (1922)
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Spradley’s funnel model
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How long should an ethnography be?

Consider situated cycles and temporal horizons
 Can you understand a beach town if you only spend the
summer there?
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Traditional ethnography measured in years
I think you should spend at least one year in the field. Otherwise you don’t
get the random sample, you don’t get the deep familiarity. It’s deep
familiarity that is the rationale –that, plus getting material on a tissue of
events – that gives justification and warrant to such apparent “loose” thing
as fieldwork (Goffman, 1989)

Organizational ethnographers rarely take they
toothbrush with them these days (Bate, 1997: 1150)
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Obtaining access and
entering the field
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Doing ethnography
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0Oan6gGnVI
7.20 -18.34;
21.26-24.40
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On entry
All attempts at entry are data
 Listen to rejections!
 Be ready to negotiate entry multiple times!

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Managing entry
Develop a rationale for the study
 Capitalise on your being a learner (treat me as a
trainee)
 Help informants envision your role
 What does an ethnographer do?

 Expect me to take notes
 I will watch and interview
 I am willing to help (am I?)
 What will I do with my data (show past examples)
 What I will not do with my data (confidentiality)
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Staying in the field:
managing immersion
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Staying in the field: taking a position
Ethnographers rely on the ‘kindness of
strangers’ (Du Boise)
 What is the nature of the field and what
opportunities does it offer?

 Single site/stable group: get yourself a job!
 Multiple sites/ stable group: “here comes the
shadow”
 Multiple sites /multiple groups: negotiating entry a
full time job
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How they will see me? What will they
let me see?
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Appearance
Dress for success
Biographic clues
Involvement
Status
Who introduced you/gave you access?
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Staying on the fence (neither in or
out)

You should not get too friendly, but you have to open up
yourself in ways you are not in ordinary life. You have to
open yourself up to being snubbed. You have to stop
making points to show how smart assed you are
(Goffman, 1999)

Go easy on that "who," "what, " "why," "when," "where"
stuff, Bill. You ask those questions, and people will clam
up on you. If people accept you, you can just hang
around, and you'll learn the answers in the long run
without even having to ask the questions.
(Doc, main informant in Street Corner Society, talking to W F Whyte).
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Managing troublesome situations
Factions
 Map factions early
 Never carry tales
 If necessary: articulate your role as neutral when you
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witness mistakes and troubles
Be sympathetic
Refrain from taking note and be sure this is apparent
Ask to destroy notes?
Stay safe and keep in mind your safety and the dafety
of your informants
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Observing and taking notes
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Taking field notes
When to take field notes
 On the spot
 Right after from memory
 At night
 At the end of the week
 Every two days
 …
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Jotting
Jorge = at table
doesn’t
you can call his doctor at UCLA
introduce me to anyone
and he can verify all this
now only speaks in Spanish
I just don’t call people on the
chit chat - who's playing
telephone
-
courts
don't
"they're not very good" - operate that way – it has to be
on paper or (in person)
apology
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Openly vs. concealed note taking

When I took my station on a house-top, sketchbooks and colors in hand, I was surprised to see
frowns and hear explosive , angry
expostulations in every direction. As the day
wore on this indignation increased, until at last
an old, bush-headed hag approached me, and
scowling into my face made a grab at my book
and pantomimically tore it to pieces... (Cushin,
1882)
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What to use
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“The field book It's a symbol of
our occupation. A material
symbol”
XXI century
Visual diaries
Ipads
Phones
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Finding the remarkable in the mundane
and the mundane in the remarkable
Diane Arbus ‘A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y.,’ 1968
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What to observe
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Keeping notes in order
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The three notebooks: research log, Research diary
/reflections, research field notes
Observational Notes
Theoretical Notes (represent self-conscious,
controlled attempts to derive meaning from any
one or several observation notes)
Methodological Notes (an instruction to oneself, a
reminder, a critique of one's own tactics. It notes
timing, sequencing, stationing, stage setting, or
manoeuvring
(Schatzman and Strauss 1973)
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Working on the notes while in the
field
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Ethnographers are those who write things down at
the end of the day (Jackson, 1990)
Spend one week analysing material to every three
spent in observation (Malinowski, 1922)
The greatest source of all the inadequacies and
gaps in my own field-work has resulted from the
dire methodological fallacy: get as many "facts" as
you can while in the field, and let the construction
and organisation of your evidence wait till you write
up your material… (M Mead, 1952)
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Preparing analytic memos in the
field: interrogate your notes
 What are people doing? What are they trying to
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accomplish?
How, exactly, do they do this? What specific means
and/or strategies do they use?
How do members talk about, characterize, and
understand what is going on?
What assumptions are they making?
What do I see going on here? What did I learn from
these notes?
Why did I include them?
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Ethnography
Ethnos
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graphos
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Exercise: reconstructing “reality” in the
text
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Consider the three extracts from Van Maanen How
would you call the three genres/ styles?
What do they focus upon?
What is the narrative unit? (activity, scene of action,
sequence, etc.)
Where is the researcher? What is her/his position?
What strategy are used to make the text persuasive?
How is naturalness obtained?
Other notable differences?
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Speaking to the reader: genres and
stances
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Van Maanen (1988/2010)
REALIST
CONFESSIONAL
IMPRESSIONIST
Focus on mundane things and Focus is personal experience, Focus is on dramatic
surprise and bewilderment in moments. Relive the
routine reported “as is”.
encountering ‘the other’
experience of the field
worker
Details, details and more
details presented in flat selfevident mode
Anecdotes
Researcher absent
Third person ‘The police
turned and ’
Researcher explicitly present Researcher present as a
‘‘I saw the policeman turning ‘position’
‘At his point the policeman
and’
turned while the …”
Told from the perspective of Places audience in the
researcher
middle of the scene
Two or more interpretations Accounts open to multiple
interpretations but
always present
objectivity in the story
Native point of view
reproduced
Interpretive omnipotence (I
describe them) field data as
facts
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Scenes and stories (main plot
and sub plots) Often
detective story like
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Writing: ethnography as an outcome
Ethnography is a text
 Different genres
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 What is reported
 Which/whose perspective
 Whose interpretation (who has the last word)
 (Ethnography is a text even when it is a video)
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