Qualitative Research: An Introduction to Methods and Designs

What Do Ethnographers Do?

How do ethnographers gather these multiple perspectives of insiders and outsiders? Ethnographers engage in fieldwork, that is, they collect data in natural settings to document beliefs and practices from people's own point of view. Ethnographic research is different from other forms of research in that fieldwork, so essential to ethnography, is conducted in situ, or in the setting or settings themselves. Basic to the fieldwork approach is the tenet that individuals' beliefs and actions cannot be detached from their context. Fieldwork provides the opportunity to take into account what anthropologists call people's practices, or activities, within the context in which they are enacted. James Clifford (1997) argues that ...