Ethnographic Fieldwork Methods

Lassiter outlines concrete steps for achieving a more deliberate and overt collaborative practice throughout the processes of fieldwork and writing. As a participatory action situated in the ethical commitments between ethnographers and consultants and focused on the co-construction of texts, collaborative ethnography, argues Lassiter, is among the most powerful ways to press ethnographic fieldwork and writing into the service of an applied and public scholarship.

Making use of his own research experiences in Papua New Guinea, Southern Ontario, and Newfoundland, Wayne Fife teaches students and new researchers how to prepare for research, conduct a study, analyze the material (e.g. create new social and cultural theory), and write academic or policy oriented books, articles, or reports. The reader is taught how to combine historic and contemporary documents (e.g. archives, newspapers, government reports) with fieldwork methods (e.g participant-observation, interviews, and self-reporting) to create ethnographic studies of disadvantaged populations.

Essential reading for anyone wishing to engage with images, technologies and society, Doing Visual Ethnography is a milestone in ethnographic and visual research. The third edition of this classic text includes new chapters on web-based practices for visual ethnography and the issues surrounding the representation, interpretation and authoring of knowledge with the rise of digital media. The book provides a foundation for thinking about visual ethnography and introduces the practical and theoretical issues relating to the visual and digital technologies used in the field.

Linguistic Fieldwork is a practical guide to all the steps in linguistic fieldwork, from planning where to work to applying for funding, from the first session on a new language to writing up the data, from turning on the recorder to depositing the recordings in an archive.

Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw present a series of guidelines, suggestions, and practical advice for creating useful fieldnotes in a variety of settings, demystifying a process that is often assumed to be intuitive and impossible to teach. Using actual unfinished notes as examples, the authors illustrate options for composing, reviewing, and working fieldnotes into finished texts. They discuss different organizational and descriptive strategies and show how transforming direct observations into vivid descriptions results not simply from good memory but from learning to envision scenes as written.

An anthology of anthropologists' writings on theory and debates about society and culture; structure and agency; identities and technologies; subjectivities and translocality; meta-theory, ontology and epistemology; language and meaning; subjectivity and objectivity; and localities and globalities. This text may be useful for situating your fieldwork experiences within a theoretical framework.

The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers provides 29 different approaches to coding, ranging in complexity from beginner to advanced level and covering the full range of types of qualitative data from interview transcripts to field notes. Each approach includes a discussion of the method's origins in the professional literature, a description of the method, recommendations for practical applications, and a clearly illustrated example.

The Handbook of Qualitative Research in Education offers both basic and advanced discussions of qualitative methods used in educational research. See especially Part 3: Data Collection, which includes practical instructions for interviews, focus groups, archival research, and visual methods.

This book explains the methods and approaches needed to understand a language in its full cultural context and to document it accessibly and enduringly. Scholars and fieldworkers consider the application of new technological approaches to recording and documentation, but never lose sight of the crucial relationship between subject and researcher.