CCT208H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter Qualitative, 5: Salvage Ethnography, Participant Observation, Ethnocentrism
5 Dec 2016
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A field study may tackle a setting as broad as a neighborhood or as small as a hairdressing salon. In conducting field research, a researcher attempts to understand everyday life from the perspective of the participants. Resear(cid:272)her stri(cid:448)es for (cid:862)intimate familiarity(cid:863) (cid:449)ith the group studied. Researcher immerses themselves into the setting they are studying. Most common method of fieldwork is participant observation, becoming a participant in the study but retaining some distance as an observer. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, most ethnographic reports were made by travelers, explorers, missionaries, merchants and colonialists; they recorded their observations of the people they met. Often these reports offered voyeuristic accounts of life in culturally and geographically distant societies. While (cid:373)a(cid:374)y early tra(cid:448)elers" a(cid:272)(cid:272)ou(cid:374)ts (cid:449)ere highly insightful and informative, others were very provincial, ethnocentric or biased. In the nineteenth century, there was an increased interest in domestic ethnographies, as investigators wrote about conditions in their own societies to promote social change.
