Ethnographic Research Guide:

Key Terms:

Ethnography: a description of a culture or everyday cultural practices based on interviews and participant observation.

Participant observation: A research method of joining in the daily life of the studied community as much as possible, to acquire a sense of how things are done, or said and how the various aspects of life fit together.

Interview: a conversation between two or more people that is guided by a set of questions that are asked by the interviewer to gather information (about views, opinions, experiences, facts) related to a specific topic.

Instructions:

Step 1: Get in contact with your group members to arrange a time to meet and discuss what you will study for the assignment. Each group will have a specific theme to follow. The theme will be whatever we are covering in class on the week that the group is due to present. The specific topic that the group chooses to study must follow that theme.

Step 2: During your first meeting, work together to brainstorm ideas for a research topic. For example, if the theme of the week is about kinship, marriage, and families, possible topics include: "What are beliefs about marriage among college students?", "What is the traditional family arrangement among Vietnamese immigrants in Boston?", "How have parent-child relationships been affected by social media", "What are traditional Nigerian weddings like in Boston?", "Are roommates part of contemporary American definitions of kinship?"

The question can be about a community that the group is familiar with or one that the group is unfamiliar with. As you brainstorm ideas, be sure to specify what social/cultural group you will focus on. As you decide on the topic, remember to choose something that will be feasible for you to study in two weeks!

Step 3: Once you have identified the research topic, your group must assign roles. The two main roles are: 1) interviewer; 2) participant observer. Choose two people who will be participant observers. The rest of the group will interview two people each. The participant observers will be in charge of participating in, observing, and writing notes about an event, activity, or practice that is related to the chosen research topic. Each of the interviewers will be in charge of interviewing two people. Therefore, if there are 4 interviewers in your group, the group will do a total of 8 interviews.

Step 4: Decide as a group what questions you will ask in your interview. I suggest between 3-5 questions. Think about what questions you need to ask to properly address your research topic.

Participant observers will follow the "Ethnographic Observation Guide" attached in the email (and posted in BV).

Step 5: DO THE RESEARCH - CONDUCT INTERVIEWS AND OBSERVATIONS. Interviewers should take detailed notes during their interviews. Participant observers should also take detailed notes, making sure to follow the observation guide.

Step 6: Come back together as a group and discuss your findings. Review and summarize notes from interviews and observations.

a) compare all the answers to the questions

b) try sorting answers into types or key themes, picking out frequently used phrases and words

c) try summarizing the consensus to each question

d) connect the themes from the interviews with the findings from the observations

e) record the team's comments, interpretations, and conclusions

Step 7: Write up the 2-3 page summary. The summary should describe what research topic the group decided on, how they went about doing the research, what they found/learned, and what the group's conclusions are.

Step 8: Prepare a 10-minute presentation of the summary.