{"id":14277,"date":"2020-03-27T19:54:10","date_gmt":"2020-03-27T19:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/transfer.writingcommons.org\/?post_type=section&p=14277"},"modified":"2021-08-06T10:52:43","modified_gmt":"2021-08-06T14:52:43","slug":"ethnography","status":"publish","type":"section","link":"https:\/\/writingcommons.org\/section\/research\/research-methods\/qualitative-research\/ethnography\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethnography"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Ethnography involves studying a specific culture or community. By living among the members of a culture and playing the role of participant-observer, ethnographers attempt to define the beliefs, rituals, symbols, problems, and patterns of behavior that distinguish this culture from other dominant cultures. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The purpose of ethnography is not to generalize from a smaller population to a larger one. Instead, ethnographers are conducted to better understand specific groups and how those people are influenced by their environment. While ethnographers typically interview key informants in the culture, their emphasis in writing an ethnography is not to tell discrete life stories. Instead, ethnographers use their observations, conclusions from informal and formal interviews, results of psychological tests, and interpretations of insider-written documents to weave together an account of key people in the community and to explicate the community’s values, ceremonies, problems, and prospects. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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