Class Notes

Qualitative Methods

11.26.2013

We need to get the PowerPoint for the ethnography lecture and be prepared to interrogate during the presentation.

Hammersly and Atkinson Presentation

In discussing ethics, Hammersly and Atkinson note the differences between procedural ethics (IRB) and ethics in practice. They also write about microethics, which are the ethics for everyday choices rather than ethics that address big issues. When we have issues arise, they are referred to as ethically important moments.

One of the ways to deal with certain admissions (child abuse, sexual abuse) is to make a statement of what you heard and what the consequences of that statement are, asking if they really meant to say what they did. Our choices in responding to this are reflective of our paradigms. We have to be reflexive, particularly when reporting our research.

Ethnography

Hammersly and Atkinson use a very positivistic perspective in describing ethnography, asserting that you can make true or veritable statements.

Traditionally, ethnography was the creation of guides to other cultures. This was heavily linked to colonization and the exoticizing of non-Western populations. After WWII, the interpretive turn appears in social science, which starts integrating narrative, phenomenology, existentialism, social construction, and social action theory. This shift suggests a move from us understanding them to us understanding us. We use public texts to make claims that we know about social life. At present, we have participant observation, auto-ethnography, and long-form interviews.

When deciding whether something works as an ethnographic method, we must ask about certain aspects of the work. There must be an explanatory target—there must be enough there to constitute a true ethnography. The method needs to be connected to the target using warrants, rules of evidence, and conventions of practice (calendars, recording, participation, and reflexivity). There must also be certain recognized practices, such as participant observation/member knowledge, removed observation/recordings, protocol analysis (for activities that are not particularly visual), and interviews. Only objectivist measurement and statistics are excluded as an ethnographic practice.

Social theory is what separates ethnography from the other social sciences; it theorizes the self and social relationships. This is different than what we see in psychology, which privileges methodological individualism, finding all answers within the individual. Social theory is interested in the self, which is what is produced as an expression of identity (who we want to be) and subjectivity (who we are forced to be) in performance. The self is also incomplete. Cultural memberships move individuals into congregations, and the ethnographer is interested in finding their set of understandings (local social reality). We have ways of being in the world, and these are naturalized practices beyond our control (micro-expressions). We should also pay attention to durable relationships and memberships. The self is encoded in subjectivity, located in relationships, apparent through performance, and is an acting agent. The agent is always within a domain, situated within implications and understandings, and is in an improvisational performance. These all occur within cultural domains, which include disciplines (systems of practical training), apparatuses (resources and practices of social structurations), economies (systems of valuation appropriate to the subject position and performance), and hegemonies (cultural process of complicity, implication, invocation, and evocation). Invocation involves noting your own position/self, and evocation is the same done by someone else. We can use disciplines, apparatuses, economies, and hegemonies as aspects of culture to investigate in ethnography. The incomplete self desires completion and finds it within the other, creating both desire and resistance. This means that the completion of the self in the other breeds resistance because any completion occludes becoming anything else. We resist the process of becoming.

In social theory, the relationship is the fundamental unit of social life and it is the object of study. Relationships are always between two individuals in subject positions, which are invariable culturally coded components of the self that have rights and obligations of being. We usually will highlight the rights of specific subject positions and ignore the obligations (at least for those subject positions we like or aspire to). The relationship also allows for control.

The way that social theory treats action is through seeing it as a semiotic system of performance, on the same level as language. All actions are culturally encoded, and they include behaviors and acts, which form routines, rules of enactment, and rules of association.