Two examples of the ethnographic design approach are shadowing and self-observations
"Shadowing is an ethnographic technique to understand a person's real-time interactions with products, services or process and their shifting contexts and needs over the course of a day. Shadowing often focuses on particular events or tasks participants are willing to share. Talk Aloud and closure interviews are used to clarify questions.
Self-observations / Diaries is a method used when it is difficult or impossible to directly access a certain place (like people's homes) or access is too time consuming. It consists of asking people to provide self-observations about their activities in the form of log reports or diaries, for example. Although this method involves the subjectivity of the participants in the data collected, it can be valuable to get a glimpse of life through the eyes of the people that are being studied."
(Experientia)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Birth and Death in The Romanian Folk Belief
"Romanian traditions and customs, which accompany the important events of life have been and still are under investigation by researchers in various fields, including folklorists and ethnographers.
The ethnographic research is mostly characterised by concrete information, collected in the studied areas, by a variety of facts, by attempts to describe the accomplishment of each custom and, in some cases by attempts to find out their role and significance in social life. Among these works the first to mention are the volumes published by Simion Florea Marin in Bucuresti in 1892 and dedicated to the three great cycles of customs connected with birth, wedding and death."
(Joanna Kretsu-Kantsyr)
CONTRIBUTOR
Valeria MartiSHARE
Audience Research: Reception Analysis
"Despite the (implicit) nominal link to the work on what is also called 'Reception Theory', within the field of literary studies, carried out by Wolfgang Iser, Hans Jauss and other literary scholars (particular in Germany), the body of recent work on media audiences commonly referred to by this name, has on the whole, a different origin, although there are some theoretical links (cf., the work of Stanley Fish) than the work in literary theory. In practice, the term 'reception analysis', has come to be widely used as a way of characterising the wave of audience research which occurred within communications and cultural studies during the 1980s and 1990s. On the whole, this work has adopted a 'culturalist' perspective, has tended to use qualitative (and often ethnographic) methods of research and has tended to be concerned, one way or another, with exploring the active choices, uses and interpretations made of media materials, by their consumers.
As indicated in the previous discussion of 'The Media Audience', the single most important point of origin for this work, lies with the development of cultural studies in the writings of Stuart Hall at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, England, in the early 1970s and, in particular, Hall's widely influential 'encoding/decoding' model of communications (see the discussion of 'The Media Audience' for an explanation of this model). Hall's model provided the inspiration, and much of the conceptual framework for a number of C.C.C.S' explorations of the process of media consumption, notably David Morley's widely cited study of the cultural patterning of differential interpretations of media messages among The 'Nationwide' Audience and Dorothy Hobson's work on women viewers of the soap opera Crossroads. These works were the forerunners of a blossoming of cultural studies work focusing on the media audience, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, including, among the most influential, from a feminist point of view, the work of Tania Modleski and Janice Radway on women consumers of soap opera and romance, and the work of Ien Ang, Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, Kim Schroder and Jostein Gripsrud on international cross cultural consumption of American drama series, such as Dallas and Dynasty.
Much of this work has been effectively summarised and popularised, especially, in the United States by John Fiske, who has drawn on the theoretical work of Michel de Certeau to develop a particular emphasis on the 'active audience', operating within what he terms the 'semiotic democracy' of postmodern pluralistic culture. Fiske's work has subsequently been the object of some critique, in which a number of authors, among them Budd, Condit, Evans, Gripsrud, and Seamann have argued that the emphasis on the openness (or 'polysemy') of the message and on the activity (and the implied 'empowerment') of the audience, within reception analysis, has been taken too far, to the extent that the original issue--of the extent of media power--has been lost sight of, as if the 'text' had been theoretically 'dissolved' into the audience's (supposedly) multiple 'readings' of (and 'resistances' to) it.
In the late 1980s, there were a number of calls to scholars to recognise a possible 'convergence' of previously disparate approaches under the general banner of 'reception analysis' (cf. in particular, Jensen and Rosengren), while Blumler et al. have claimed that the work of a scholar such as Radway is little more than a 're-invention' of the 'uses and gratifications' tradition--a claim hotly contested by Schroder. More recently, both Curran and Corner have offered substantial critiques of 'reception analysis'--the former accusing many reception analysts of ignorance of the earlier traditions of media audience research, and the latter accusing them of retreating away from important issues of macro-politics and power into inconsequential micro-ethnographies of domestic television consumption. For a reply to these criticisms, see Morley, 1992."
(David Morley, The Museum of Broadcast Communications)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Art of the Email Interview
"Our first iteration of the email interview was something like an open-ended survey. It explained the project and supplied the appropriate participant information and consent forms. Then, it listed the questions. It was in many ways a participant friendly version of the interview guide.
While the turnaround on the email interview surveys was really good from a time perspective, we felt that the answers we were getting were very short, to the point, and formal. This is in contrast to our in-person interviews, where answers to one question would often meander through several equally interesting subjects in the process of their completion.
So I thought a lot about how the in-person interviews were different from the email interviews, and I realized it was that with in-person interviews, the participant doesn't know all of the questions you will be asking up front. Usually we tell them what kind of questions we will be asking, or what kind of information we are looking for, but the specific questions are unknown. As a result, the participant will often include a lot more information in the answer to each question. There was something about seeing all of the questions all at once that was cutting off this meandering; something about having all of the questions in front of the participant at once made the answers short and to the point.
So our solution was to send email interview questions one at a time.
This was a tremendous success. When we sent the questions one at a time, the answers were long, rich, and varied. ...
We have tried out the second iteration of email interviewing on several participants, and have been blown away with their responses.
There are probably restrictions that come with this method. It is probably not appropriate for people who do not normally communicate via text-based mediums. (Our participants are very comfortable with the written communication of the internet, so in our case this has not been an issue.) It might also be less appealing to very busy executives-our coursemate Cora is doing a project with such folks, and she feels that her participants would become irritated with the process after three questions."
(Rachel Shadoan, 31 July 2010)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Indigenous Peoples of the Philippines
"In the Philippines, the term 'indigenous peoples' is legally defined by Republic Act No. 8371, otherwise known as the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997. IPRA defined 'indigenous peoples' (IPs) or 'indigenous cultural communities' (ICCs) as:
A group of people or homogenous societies identified by self-ascription and ascription by others, who have continuously lived as organized community on communally bounded and defined territory, and who have, under claims of ownership since time immemorial, occupied, possessed and utilized such territories, sharing common bonds of language, customs, traditions and other distinctive cultural traits, or who have, through resistance to political, social and cultural inroads of colonization, nonindigenous regions and cultures, became historically differentiated from the majority of Filipinos. ICCs/IPs shall likewise include peoples who are regarded as indigenous on account of their descent from the populations which inhabited the country at the time of conquest or colonization, or at the time of inroads of non-indigenous religions and cultures, or the establishment if present state boundaries, who retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions, but who may have been displaced from their traditional domains or who may have resettled outside their ancestral domains (IPRA, Section 3h)."
(Nestor T. Castro)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
