Anthropology in Credo Reference: Methods

The word ‘ethnography’ has a double meaning in anthropology: ethnography as product (ethnographic writings – the articles and books written by anthropologists), and ethnography as process (participant observation or fieldwork).

From Key Concepts in Ethnography
A case study investigates a few cases, or often just one case, in considerable depth. In ethnography, case studies are used in various ways to illuminate themes or draw inferences.

From Key Concepts in Ethnography
Coding is a euphemism for the sorting and labelling which is part of the process of analysis.

From The A-Z of Social Research
The ‘problem’ is that ethnographers are part of the social world they study and do not collect uncontaminated data, the ‘solution’ is that they should situate the data by reflecting on how their presence and other contingencies helped to create the data.

From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
There is a troubled relationship between the representation of anthropological fieldwork and the actuality of any particular fieldwork. In sober fact, fieldwork can take as many forms as there are anthropologists, projects, and circumstances.

From The A-Z of Social Research
Content analysis involves the description and analysis of text in order to represent its content. This takes the form of enumeration, such as counting the frequency of words and the number of column inches, and more qualitative assessment of the words and terms used, as undertaken in certain forms of discourse analysis.

From Key Concepts in Ethnography
Fieldnotes are the written record of the observations, jottings, full notes, intellectual ideas, and emotional reflections that are created during the fieldwork process.

From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
The method required extensive interviewing of named individuals in order to: (1) collect vital statistics among a non-literate population, and (2) record their pedigrees, which reflected rights and responsibilities relating primarily to descent, succession, and inheritance.

From The A-Z of Social Research
Interviews are one of the most widely used and abused research methods. They provide a way of generating data by asking people to talk about their everyday lives. Their main function is to provide a framework in which respondents can express their own thoughts in their own words.

From Key Concepts in Ethnography
Participant observation is the main method of ethnography and involves taking part as a member of a community while making mental and then written, theoretically informed observations.