The Ethnographic Approaches
In this post I take a brief look at Ethnography as a research approach, and its offsprings Autoethnography and Linguistic Ethnography.
Ethnography
In their introduction, Gobo and Molle (2017) state that the ethnographic approach was developed in the Western world as a way of undertaking research of other, very different, cultures that needed more than a light touch to gain understanding of, and whilst acknowledging genuine ‘good intentions’ it does remain an approach of colonial origins (p. 3). Ethnographic researchers pursue ‘systematic observations’, in situations where they are physically present, witness events for themselves, and provide a detailed account (p. 5).
The authors go on to explain that observation can be ‘non-participant’, in which the researcher is not interacting with the subjects, or ‘participant’ in which the interaction is deemed essential to understanding behaviour (p. 6). The former may be considered more objective, whereas the latter allows for the researcher to gain further insights through a degree of immersion.
Following its beginnings in anthropology, this approach has been used in numerous other fields of study. Isaacs (2013) offers a useful overview in a TEDx talk, which includes the example of Lucy Suchman’s research at PARC in which she thought that “if you’re building technology for people you should watch them using it” (3:12), and observes two men attempting to use an early photocopier, without much success! Isaacs describes these two men as “world-renowned computer scientists”, so shouldn’t be too shy of technology. And today, Isaacs continues, companies undertake usability testing to verify their designs (4:45).
Autoethnography
If you take the essence of ethnography, and bring that together with aspects of autobiography, you have autoethnography (Ellis, Adams and Bochner 2010, p. 3). In their overview of this approach, Ellis, Adams and Bochner define it as seeking to “describe and systematically analyse … personal experience … in order to understand cultural experience” (p. 1). The ethnographic researcher will place themselves within a setting in order to observe it, but the autobiographical part of this approach is a result of experiences which, the authors point out, are lived through in life and are recalled retrospectively by the researcher (p. 3).
Autoethnography, as described by Ehn (2011, p. 53) is “where you use your own experiences as a starting point or as examples of more general conditions. You are both the subject and the object of observation”.
Likewise, returning to Ellis, Adams and Bochner, they posit that the work of the autoethnographer not only encompasses analysing their own experience, “but must also consider ways others may experience similar epiphanies; they must use personal experience to illustrate facets of cultural experience”, and in order to do so “might require comparing and contrasting personal experience against existing research” (p. 4). This, I feel, is where there is divergence from a regular autobiography, in that it makes some attempt to form connections with the experiences of a wider humanity.
Linguistic Ethnography
According to Shaw, Copland and Snell (2015), linguistic ethnography has not yet developed to the point at which it can be given a definitive definition, and has tended to be used as an ‘umbrella term’ (p. 2). More helpfully, they state that the goal of a group of linguists was to “bring together researchers who were interested in bringing linguistic and ethnographic perspectives together and, collectively, engage in methodological and theoretical debate” (p. 4). Copland and Creese (2015) introduce this as “an interpretive approach which studies the local and immediate actions of actors from their point of view and considers how these interactions are embedded in wider social contexts and structures” (p. 13).
I do not know if this is of use to my present project, but as a linguist myself it caught my attention. Because one area of my project relates to how tutors communicate with students, perhaps this is pertinent, but as I haven’t committed the time to better understand this approach, I would be unwise to claim it as the way forward: it strikes me that I need nothing more than discourse analysis to explore language used and its implication.