Mini-Ethnographic Research/Narrative
Write an essay about 8-10 pages may include pictures, charts, maps, diagrams, etc.
As an ethnographic researcher, you'll be studying a social group or space to gain understanding of its social dynamics and how it relates to the larger cultural environment. Select a community/cultural group or social environment to observe, interview, participate in, and then represent in report form.
The group or locale should be one that you'll be able to observe openly and on multiple occasions. Possible campus subjects include the meetings of a student club or organization, a room in the residence halls, a university office, a part of the library, an eating place, a campus event, a study group, a common gathering place, etc. Off-campus subjects might be a workplace, volunteer group, exercise space/class, commercial establishment, or specific public place-a park, (limited area of a) neighborhood, or similar location.
Your research purpose is to gain understanding of the group's or space's dynamics, practices, codes, rituals, artifacts, proxemics, common affects, language use, and other social habits and routines, with the ultimate goal of gaining insight-for yourself and your readers-on its ways of being and sense of relationship to a larger social world. Some questions to consider:
• How is its identity formed? How does the group/space come into social existence?
• How are insiders/outsiders established? How are social and physical boundaries formed?
• How does communication work within it? Who gets to influence it? What are the rhetorical patterns and styles? Who speaks, and who doesn't?
• What are the proxemics? How is spaced used, and to what purpose(s)?
• How do visual signs operate?
• Do members/users follow any rituals?
• What does it feel like to be in this group or space? What are the codes of member behavior?
• What are the benefits of membership/occupation, as the inhabitants experience them?
Research methods:
Remember that your role is to understand the system of the group or place you're studying-not to judge, but to represent, and through your report to help others come to understand the ways of the group/place. Observe IRB guidelines on subject privacy.
• As you observe, take field notes. Include dates and times of observations, interviews, and other contacts. After any direct participation in the community, take notes on what you did, how you felt, how others interacted with you, etc.
• Sketch maps of space and interactions.
• Collect/describe artifacts; take pictures, if appropriate.
• Interview (formally or informally) members/users.
• Research any relevant background information. (group's history. Location's history)
Rhetorical issues:
Your report should present a theory about the cultural group/space-an interpretive reading of your data that leads to the group's space's "story," its agenda as its members operate in it and as they connect to the larger culture. We'll discuss issues of arrangement/organization, style, voice, and document design options. Plan on including details, quotations from interview subjects, visual elements, such as maps, and other means of creating credibility. Sometimes you may want to include evidence in an appendix; decide how directly relevant the material is and/or how well it fits into the flow of the report. Voice is critical; you need to speak of, for, and as a group or location inhabitant, and you'll need to decide how bright a line you think is fair to draw between your observations and your involvement: ie, will you write as an insider? Will you yourself be part of the group or location's "argument?" Are you invested in the values, traditions, rituals, purposes of group? If so, you'll have to adopt a "critical" (doesn't mean negative, means analytic) stance from which to report.