OVERVIEW OF METHOD
At its very root, ethnography consists of spending time with people and recording their responses and behaviors. The classic ethnographies such as the Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Malinowski 1922) or The Nuer (Evans-Pritchard 1951) would attempt to observe and record all aspects of societies including social, economic, political, and ideological organization, religion and belief, landscape, subsistence, kinship, conflict, marriage alliances, etc. This was possible as ethnographers spent multiple years in the same site.
Recently, the focus has changed to question-oriented or question-driven ethnography where the ethnographer goes to the field and gathers data to answer a posed question. While this approach still requires trust building between respondents and ethnographers, the specific focus usually means that ethnographers today spend less time in the field than did their predecessors.
The methods used today in a nutshell are:
PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION
Using participant observation, the ethnographer engages with the respondents and the community, to gain an etic and emic perspective. This is the primary strength of ethnographic techniques since it enables comparison of reported behaviors and norms with observation of practiced and lives behaviors and norms.
INTERVIEWS
Interviews are usually informal or formal conversations specifically meant to elicit data and information from respondents. Interview techniques used in ethnographic research can range from
FOCUS GROUP DISCUSSIONS
These are not as actively used in most academic ethnographic approaches, but can be used to gain access to information and data from a large group of respondents in relatively little time. The ethnographer usually asks structured questions, and may ask each respondent in the focus group in turn, or may allow the focus group to determine the nature and order of responses. Often, the ethnographer has to maintain control over the group to enable the quieter people to speak up and to prevent a few respondents from dominating the conversation.
QUESTIONNAIRE-BASED SURVEYS
Usually employed by ethnographers interested in scaling, transferring, or generalizing their research, surveys are used to increase sample size and often ask questions that have already been tested and verified through participant observation, and other forms of interviews. Specifically, the surveys are used when the ethnographer has already built trust in the community and hence can be reasonably sure of getting more accurate and precise responses from the respondents.