Ethnographic Research

(from College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction)

In this assignment, you will be conducting an ethnography of a discourse community. Ethnography is essentially a study of a group of people and is a methodology and genre used typically in anthropology. In doing ethnographic research, you observe a group, take notes, and report on your findings. For this ethnography, you will be observing and analyzing a discourse community that you belong to or one that is new to you. In other words, you will be focusing primarily on the writing practices within a specific social group. The focus of this research should not be solely on social dynamics or oral discourse, but rather on how written texts work within the group.

Assignment Requirements

The essay (8-10 pages) will present your findings as a research report or researched argument. Here are some guidelines for a successful essay:

• You should organize your essay thematically, not chronologically. Do not give a report of what you did while researching-instead, group your data and focus on reoccurring themes of interest in your data that give answers to your research questions.

• You should also utilize some of the data you have collected directly in the essay-direct quotes or observations make great examples!

• Regardless of format or organization, each essay should have a primary focus on the writing practices, written texts and language of the group in question.

• Your research should include appropriate primary or secondary sources to support or amplify your field research. You may use sources from popular magazines, newspapers, non-scholarly Internet sites, or other sources, but you need to include at least three scholarly sources, as this is an academic essay.

• Use American Psychological Association (APA) citation guidelines for in-text citations and the works cited list at the end of your essay. (APA is generally the citation style used in the social sciences.)
 
What types of discourse communities can you observe? The possibilities are endless, but here is a short list to get you thinking:

• Any sort of club or organization that produces written texts: for example: a non-profit organization that produces a weekly newsletter; a club that has weekly meetings and produces information on their website; or an online group that produces fan fiction

• A group that regularly attends a particular type of event, such as a convention or concert or theatre performance.

• A group associated with a particular job or profession that produces some sort of written product: groups such as teachers,

contractors, journalists, public relations people, an advertising agency, or the executive board at a local bank.

• A group related to your field of study-graduate students in a lab, professors, people working in the industry, etc.
Getting Started

• Be sure to collect written texts and other "artifacts" from the group for further analysis.

• If you are not a member of the group, contact a group representative to arrange your visit. Explain your purpose-this research assignment. Reassure the group that anything which is confidential you will either write about using pseudonyms or not reveal. You may want to put your agreement in writing to the appropriate member(s) of the group.

• If it is not possible to observe or have a face-to-face meeting with the group, arrange for several interviews with group members by phone or email.

• Be careful to separate your actual observations from information you assume or your opinions and reactions to what you observe. To help you facilitate this type of "objectivity," use a double-entry notebook. We will be discussing the double-entry notebook more in class.

• Some observers interact more with the group they are observing than others. If you plan on having some interaction, be sure you still have time to write and take notes.

• Give people some time to get accustomed to you before starting your note taking. Individuals who know they are being watched will behave differently than those who are in their natural environment without observers. But they tend to forget their observers after a while.

• Revisit your notes and organize as soon after as possible. Or, if you did an interview in which you were not able to take notes, write up the conversation as soon as possible afterwards.

• Be sure to pay special attention to the speech and literacy practices and language use of the group members that you observed.

• Look for patterns in language, behavior, writing practices. Also, consider people who don't fit the pattern or the norm.

What to Observe?

When you are observing, it is impossible to focus on everything. For the purposes of this assignment, you should focus your observations on the discourse community's writing practices. You may also note what gets communicated through other channels-oral? visual?

• For what purpose(s) are texts produced?

• How important is writing to the group as a whole?

• What genres are used in the discourse community?

• How are texts produced within the discourse community?

• Who produces texts? Do all community members produce or just a select few?

• What guidelines does the community have for what counts as "good writing" in the community, i.e. what are the norms for genres?

• How are individual genres related to each other in the discourse community?

• How do the genres and the purposes for the discourse community relate?

• What types of specialized vocabulary or "jargon" do they use?

• How do this group's writing practices fit into what we have conceptualized as a discourse community? How is oral discourse used to

complement written discourse? Or vice versa?