Qualitative Research: An Introduction to Methods and Designs

How Does an Ethnographer Start?

The first generation of ethnographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries engaged in what has come to be known as salvage ethnography (Gruber 1970), an attempt to document the rituals, practices, myths, and languages of traditional cultures facing extinction from dislocation or modernization. However, over the past fifty years this emphasis on what Harry Wolcott (1999) has called place-based “ethnographic broadside” (p. 25), that is, the desire to document everything about a particular society, has shifted to a problem focus in which a particular problem or topic of interest guides the entire research endeavor. Such problems are guided and propelled by a specific set of research questions. As Margaret ...