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Ethnographic methods

Article · November 2011

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Giampietro Gobo
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Ethnography is a methodology with more than one hundred years of history. It arose in the Western

world as a particular form of knowledge about distant cultures (typically non-Western ones) which

were impenetrable to analysis consisting only of fleeting contact or brief conversations. After

having entered several disciplines of social sciences (anthropology, sociology and psychology), in

recent times ethnography has become an important tool also in political science (assuming the name

of political ethnography) as part of interpretive methodologies and research.

Competing definitions of ethnography

Defining a term is always difficult because there as many definitions as there are different points

of view. Paul Atkinson and Martyn Hammersley observe that the definition of the term

ethnography has been subject to controversy. For some it refers to a philosophical paradigm to

which one makes a total commitment, for others it designates a method that one uses as and

when appropriate.

But the controversy extends further. Since 1980s the meaning of ethnography has been

expanded to such an extent that it encompasses forms of research extremely diverse from a

methodological point of view. Everything is now ethnography: from life stories to analysis of

letters and questionnaires, from autobiography to narrative analysis, from action research to

performance, to field research lasting a few days to several years (Gobo 2008a). For example

leading scholars as James Lull and David Morley pointed out that what is passing as

ethnography in cultural studies fails to achieve the fundamental requirements for data collection

and reporting typical of most anthropological and sociological ethnographic research.

Ethnography has become an abused buzz-word and has been diluted into a multitude of
sometimes contrasting and contradictory meanings, become synonymous with qualitative

studies.

In this increasingly polysemous in meaning, there are at least three terms that merge with

‘ethnography’: ‘participant observation’, ‘fieldwork’ and ‘case study’ (Gobo 2008a). However they

should not mix up. The expression ‘case study’ denotes research on a system bounded in space and

time and embedded in a particular physical and socio-cultural context. Research is conducted using

diverse methodologies, methods and data sources, like participant observation, interviews,

audiovisual materials, documents, and so on. The term ‘fieldwork’ stresses the continuous presence

of the researcher in the field, as opposed to ‘grab-it-and-run’ methodologies like the survey, in-

depth interview, or analysis of documents and recordings. In this case, too, diverse methodologies

and methods may be used. Finally, ‘participant observation’ is a distinctive research strategy.

Probably, participant observation and fieldwork treat observation as a mere technique, while the

term ‘ethnography’ underlines the theoretical basis of such work stemming from a particular history

and tradition.

An update definition

The stretch of the term ‘ethnography’ has emptied its original meaning. Ethnography was born

as a technique based upon direct observation. On the contrary interview and survey are mainly

based upon listening and asking questions. Of course, in ethnography is also essential to listen to

the conversations of the actors ‘on stage’, read the documents produced by the organization

under study, ask people questions, and so on. Yet what most distinguishes ethnography from

other methodologies is the role of ‘protagonist’ assigned to observation.

Ethnographic methodology comprises two research strategies: non-participant observation and

participant observation. In the former case the researcher observes the subjects ‘from a distance’

without interacting with them. Those who use this strategy are uninterested in investigating the
symbolic sphere, and they make sure not to interfere with the subjects’ actions so as not to influence

their behavior. Of course there are several intermediate situations between the two extremes of

participant and non-participant observation.

Participant observation has the following characteristics:

1. the researcher establishes a direct relationship with the social actors

2. staying in their natural environment

3. with the purpose of observing and describing their behavior

4. by interacting with them and participating in their everyday ceremonials and

rituals, and

5. learning their code (or at least parts of it) in order to understand the meaning of

their actions.

A historical sketch

The birth of ethnographic methodology is commonly dated to the period between the late nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries. It developed internally to ethnology, a discipline which in the first

half of the 1800s split away from traditional anthropology, which was then dominated by the

physical and biological paradigm. Ethnology was more concerned to study peoples (through

comparison of their material artifacts) and their cultures, and to classify their salient features.

Before the advent of ethnographic methodology, ethnologists did not collect information by means

of direct observation; instead, they examined statistics, the archives of government offices and

missions, documentation centers, accounts of journeys, archaeological finds, native manufactures or

objects furnished by collectors of exotic art, or they conversed with travelers, missionaries and

explorers. These anthropologists considered the members of native peoples to be ‘primitives’: they

were savages to be educated, and they could not be used as direct informants because they could not

be trusted to furnish objective information.

through the work of various authors, among them the English anthropologist of Polish origin,

Bronislaw K. Malinowski (1884-1942), and the English anthropologist Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown

(1881-1955). British social anthropology of ethnographic stamp assimilated the positivist

intellectual climate of its time and put itself forward, according to Radcliffe-Brown (1948), as a

“natural science of society” which was better able to furnish an objective description of a culture

than the other methods used by anthropologists at the time. Radcliffe-Brown’s polemic was directed

against then dominant speculative or ‘desk’ anthropology, which preferred to rely on secondary

sources rather than undertake direct observation of social facts (customs, rituals, ceremonies) in

order to uncover the ‘laws’ that govern a society.

Malinowski is commonly regarded as being the first to systematize ethnographic methodology. In

his famous Introduction to Argonauts of the Western Pacific – the book which sets out his research

conducted in the Trobriand Islands of the Melanesian archipelago off eastern New Guinea –

Malinowski described the methodological principles underpinning the main goal of ethnography,

which is to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world. To

this end, Malinowski lived for two years (between 1914 and 1918) among the Kula of the Trobriand

Islands. He learned their language (Kiriwinian), used natives as informants, and directly observed

the social life of a village, participating in its everyday activities. Malinowski inaugurated a view

‘from within’ that American anthropologists of the 1950s would call the ‘emic’ perspective – as

opposed to the ‘etic’ or comparative perspective, which instead sought to establish categories useful

for the analyst but not necessarily important for the members of the culture studied.

From the 1920s onwards, ethnographic methodology was incorporated into sociology – where it

was adopted by researchers who mostly belonged to Chicago School – and then into psychology

and (recently) political science. Although it was imported from anthropology, however, fully

seventy years previously the French mining engineer and later sociologist Pierre Le Play (1806-

1892) had used primitive forms of participant observation, when he had stayed with the working-
class families that he was studying. The English philanthropist Seebohm B. Rowntree (1871-1954)

also used primordial forms participant observation (after 1886) for their inquiries into poverty and

living conditions in the London slums.

Ethnography and political science

Ethnographic methods have recently reached also political science, long ruled mainly by official

statistics, survey and comparative methods. The entry of ethnography has been favored by two

cultural and theoretical changes in this discipline: the interest for “micro” dimensions of political

phenomena, and the openness towards the insights of qualitative research. These two changes have

been pushed by important scholars as Sidney Tarrow (1995) and Charles Tilly (2001), who

proposed to bridge qualitative and quantitative approaches through “triangulation”, to explore the

micro-macro link, considering that a purely quantitative approach lacks in discovering causal

mechanisms of political processes.

As said for other disciplines, the term ‘ethnography’ in political science has assumed a variety of

meanings and it has become synonymous of ‘fieldwork’. Within this frame of meaning can be

located the work of Weinstein (2007), about political violence and civil wars, and Wood (2000) on

democratic transitions in South Africa and El Salvador. Basing mainly upon narrative interviews

(with the addition of some observations, official statistics and governmental documents) the authors

aim to reach the experience, the subjective perspective, the point of view of people involved in

violent actions (Weinstein) and democratic transitions (Wood).

Weinstein (2007) tries to discover specific causal mechanisms (why some rebel groups decide to

use indiscriminate violence against civilians) going beyond traditional quantitative studies which

explain this phenomenon of violence through macro-variables as income and so on. The author

analyzes the inner dynamics (the recruitment of members and the inner hierarchical structure) of

some rebel groups in Peru, Mozambique and Uganda. He finds that indiscriminate violence against
civilians is acted mainly by rebel groups with external financial resources, as those coming from

drug trafficking, foreign monetary supports and so on. Consequently they do not search and need

civilians’ involvement and consensus on their political actions.

Wood (2000), analyzing the democratic transitions in South Africa and El Salvador, discovers that

these two countries are very different looking at the structural variables (economic development,

race composition and so on) but quite similar in the link between political élite and economic élite.

She focuses also the bottom-up violent mobilization of workers, pointing out that it produces an

increase of costs affecting the whole production system (and consequently the economic élite):

strikes, damages, economic uncertainty, a decrease of foreign capitals flow and so on. In order to

solve the situation the economic élites push for the reform of authoritative regime, and the

economic and productive system which support this form of government. Wood pinpoints the

everyday life political processes, the impact of social actors’ local actions on national politics, the

effects of micro-events on macro-phenomena.

Beyond inquires based on a general fieldwork, in political science are now appearing real

ethnographies as the work of Ashforth (2005) about violence and democracy in South Africa. He, a

white American man, spent 3 years as host in a family of Soweto, the well-known black township

on the outskirts of Johannesburg. During his permanence Ashforth realizes how it would be

extremely difficult to understand the local politics (macro) without considering the witchcraft

phenomenon (micro) and its role in the interactional relations (micro). Through the participation to

the everyday life of the community, he acquires the conceptual categories, the constellation of

meanings and the culture of the Soweto’s residents. He learns that witchcraft believes are a remedy

to the everyday life uncertainty and insecurity, how envy and jealousy produce the social conditions

of the witchcraft success and how the latter shapes the relations between individuals, social groups

and political institutions on issue as the diffusion of Aids, its social consequences and the health

policies. In addition he discovers the effects of on the making of the concept of democracy among

community members, their acceptation of violence, the shape of the concept of social justice, the
affirmation of a modern democratic and liberal State.

The adding value of ethnography

As said, ethnographic methodology gives priority to observation as its primary source of

information. This purpose is also served, in secondary and ancillary manner, by other sources of

information used by the ethnographer in the field: informal conversations, individual or group

interviews, and documentary materials (diaries, letters, class essays, organizational documents,

newspapers, photographs, and audiovisual aids). However, the overriding concern is always to

observe actions as they are performed in concrete settings. As John Heritage stresses, if one is

interested in action, the statements made by social actors during interviews cannot be treated as an

appropriate substitute for the observation of actual behavior. In fact, there is an oft-documented gap

between attitudes and behaviors, between what people say and what they do. Ethnography is

therefore the privileged methodology to analyze and understand social and political actions in their

making.

The presence of the researcher in the field helps to better capture the conceptual categories of social

actors, their point of view (emic), the meanings of their actions and behavior, the social and

political processes. As Auyero (2006) and Aronoff (2006) maintain, political ethnography

highlights the neglected aspects by the quantitative analysis such as the impact of micro-politics on

macro-phenomena, the complexity of everyday life, the network of participants’ meanings, their

motivations, the making of political action, the practices of politics.

Ethnographic methods are useful to analyze political phenomena consisting not in macro-structures

and fixed roles, but in interactions among participants, families and small groups (Tilly 2006),

emancipating from the ethnocentrism (etic) which still characterizes scientific explanations of

political science.
 The ethnography and its enemies

Notwithstanding the acknowledged usefulness of ethnography, however there still several well-

known commonplaces and prejudices about it.

Is ethnography a highly subjective method?

It is often argued that ethnography is a highly subjective method, in the sense that is very

sensitive to the researcher’s attitudes and perceptions. In other words, if different researchers

visit the same setting, they will see different things, and their ethnographic notes will record

different aspects. Instead, a questionnaire or a discursive interview, if conducted correctly, are

more likely to obtain similar replies (reliability) regardless of who the interviewer is. And yet

experience shows that this idea has scant empirical grounding (Gobo 2008b).

A while ago, some students of mine conducted an ethnography in a pub. Two groups (formed of

three students each) visited the same pub at a distance of a few days from each other. The fact

that they had chosen the same pub was absolutely coincidental, in the sense that they had not

agreed on it beforehand. Nevertheless, the two groups had a specific research design: to study

the rituals, ceremonials and behaviors of consumption in pubs. They then produced a report.

And I discovered, to my great surprise, that they had observed and discovered practically the

same things.

Hence the research design makes a greater contribution to discovery (or construction of data)

than does the researcher him/herself. Ethnography, therefore, is anything but a highly subjective

methodology (even if subjectivity is ever-present, as in all methodologies).

Behaviors are more consistent than attitudes and opinions

What does the experience just described tell us theoretically? In other words, why did six

different observers in the same pub notice practically the same things? Because what an
ethnography mainly observes are behaviors (rituals, routines, ceremonials), and these are much

more stable over time than are attitudes and opinions (the privileged fields of inquiry for

discursive interviews and surveys), as proven in the well-known Richard La Piere’s experiments

in the early 1930s. Those who deal with organizations know very well that altering a behavior

requires more time than altering an attitude, not to mention opinions, which are sometimes so

volatile that they change from one day to the next.

Can ethnographic research be replicated, reproduced?

From this it follows that, because behaviors are temporally rather stable, the results of

ethnographic research can be repeated and reproduced. With two requirements:

¾ the presence of a precise research design which has guided the research;

¾ that no significant changes have taken place in between one research and the next.

Ethnography and generalization

A recurrent criticism towards ethnographic methods is the impossibility to generalize their

results because based on few cases, sometimes one only. However there are numerous

disciplines which work on a limited number of cases: for instance palaeontology, archaeology,

geology, ethology, biology, astrophysics, history, genetics, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive

science, psychology (whose theories are largely based on experiments, and therefore on research

conducted on non-probabilistic samples and on few cases). According to Howard Becker, these

disciplines are unconcerned about their use of only a handful of cases to draw inferences and

generalizations about thousands of people, animals, plants and other objects. Moreover, science

studies the individual object/phenomenon not in itself but as a member of a broader class of

objects/phenomena with particular characteristics/properties.

For these reasons it is anything but odd to think that the results of an ethnographic research can

be generalized. As Randall Collins stated much of the best work in sociology has been carried
out using qualitative methods without statistical tests. This has been true of research areas

ranging from organizational and community studies to micro studies of face-to-face interaction

and macro studies of the world system.

In addition if the focus of ethnography is on behaviors, and given that these are stable in time,

then it is likely that generalizations are possible. Obviously, precise criteria must be followed in

the choice of samples (Gobo 2008b). Nevertheless ethnography is not precluded from making

generalizations.

Sampling cases or instances?

It will be by now clear that the term ‘case’ is used ambiguously in ethnographic research. In

surveys and discursive interviews, the cases correspond to the number of persons to interview

(the sample), who are usually interviewed only once. Indeed, it is rather rare for several

interviews to be conducted with the same person (during a single piece of research). Hence

statistic calculations and analyses of the interview texts are performed on cases.

Ethnographic research is very different. What is usually referred to as the ‘case’ (the

organization or the group studied) is in fact the setting. The cases are instead the hundreds of

instances (pertaining to rituals, ceremonials and routines) that the researcher observes, or the

dozens of individuals that s/he meets dozens of times during his/her presence in the field. The

researcher is not interested in the organization (or the group) per se but rather in the behaviors

which take place within it. Consequently, in order not to create confusion with the other

methodologies, it would be better in ethnographic research to abandon the term ‘case’ and

replace it with that of ‘instance’.

The future of ethnography

Even if ethnography is a methodology with more than one hundred years of history, it is
 perceived (especially in political science) as a new method. The reason why ethnography is

becoming in these times so fashionable is probably due not to its inner features but the socio-

historical period we live by. If the relationship between science and society (on how social

beliefs have influenced knowledge and scientific theories, and vice versa) has been widely

proven; and also the relationship between technology and society (on how the birth of certain

artifacts like the bicycle or the personal computer are related the type of society that has

produced them) has been tested, it therefore seems necessary to enlarge these perspectives by

acknowledging the relationship between society and research methods, the interdependence

among social beliefs and methodologies. The ethnography and society are mutually constitutive:

on the one hand, ethnography (as survey and in-depth interviewing in a previous age) requires a

particular type of society for it to come into being and develop; on the other, these research

methods strengthen the society which has produced them.

Probably we are entering the ‘observation society’ (Gobo 2008b), a social formation in which

watching and scrutinizing are becoming the dominant cognitive modes alongside the others, like

listening, feeling, hearing and eavesdropping, typical of the ‘interview society’, where survey

methodology comes from. This phenomenon also accounts for the increasing demand in various

sectors of society – from marketing to security, television to the fashion industry – for observation

and ethnography. Ours are becoming observation societies.

Within the increasing popularity of interpretive methods, sponsored by epistemological approaches

as constructivism, postmodernism, feminism and relativism, political ethnography is in position to

play a major role. The need of an emic perspective, which aims to capture the social actors’ point of

views, perspectives, meanings, motivations and emotions, has an important chance in the

ethnographic methods.

Giampietro Gobo

Università degli Studi di Milano

Ethnography, Research Methods

Further Readings

Aronoff, Myron J. (2006). Forty years as a political ethnographer. Ab Imperio, 4, pp. 1-15.

Auyero, Javier (2006). Introductory note on politics under the microscope. Special issue on

political ethnography I. Qualitative Sociology, 29, 257-9.

Ashforth, Adam (2005). Witchcraft, violence and democracy in South Africa. Chicago: Chicago

University Press.

Gobo, Giampietro (2008b). Re-conceptualizing generalization. Old issues in a new frame, in

Alasuutari Pertti, Brannen Julia and Bickman Leonard (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Social

Research Methods, London, Sage, pp. 193-213.

Gobo, Giampietro (2008a). Doing Ethnography. London: Sage.

Tarrow, Sidney (1995). Bridging the quantitative-qualitative divide in political science. American

Political Science Review, 89, 2, 471-4.

Tilly, Charles (2001). Mechanisms in political processes. Annual Review of Political Science, 21-41.

Tilly, Charles (2006). Political Ethnography as art and science. Qualitative Sociology, 29, 409-412.

Weinstein, Jeremy (2007). Inside rebellion: the politics of insurgent violence. New York: Cambridge

University Press.

Wood, Elisabeth Jean (2000). Forging democracy from below: insurgent transitions in South Africa

and El Salvador. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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