1. Lauer and Asher mention there are two different roles the researcher can play in an ethnography: being a participant observer, and being an outside observer. Is there a difference of validity between ethnographies with a participant observer and ethnographies with an outside observer?
2. Is reliability even possible in any ethnography design? If so, how? If not, why not?
3. Because ethnography is one of the only methods which is highly conscious of the researcher’s role in the community, could it be argued that ethnography is a more valid form of research than other forms?
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
October 23, 2007 at 2:23 pm
rcjgraves
What an excellent, creative and PROFESSIONAL SOUNDING title you have for your blog.
October 23, 2007 at 7:32 pm
rubyruijie
Hi, Elizabeth, I am both happy and surprised that our first questions are quite similiar. This is actually a very difficult question. I would think that there will be different criteria to assess the validity of these two different kinds of ethnographic research. Participant observers might have the chance to be in the inside circle and explore something unexpected. The outside observers might look at the community from a different perspective. It is very interesting that the participant observer needs to defamiliarize themselves with their communities to get a more objective view. This suggests that we still expect them to carry out their research based on the general assumptions of the objectivity of the research. Therfore, I would still assess the validity of these two kinds of research based on the basics we have learned in class but I do expect different things from them. I expect participant observer to offer me something surprising and interesting while outside observer to offer me something “calm and cold.”
October 23, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Brittany
2. Is reliability even possible in any ethnography design? If so, how? If not, why not?
E- this is a question that I had as I was reading as well. It seems like reliability is an issue, but perhaps in a different way than some of the other methods we’ve been looking at. Lauer and Asher say that ethnography “[r]esearchers must also be concerned about the replicability, its repeatability with the same results” (48), but I don’t know if that’s a realistic concern since groups change and, depending on other factors (the researcher, the time, the location, how well a community accepts a researcher) results may change.
October 23, 2007 at 9:07 pm
englishgeek
Great questions, Elizabeth! As I read your 1st question, I wondered if part of what must be considered in answering the question is actually a matter of determining (or, perhaps, simply recognizing) what is valued. Since this idea of validity is linked with what others in the field deem to be valid or important, I think that it is important to determine what is valued–both within the community being studied and within the research community-as-a -whole. So, then, would a participant-researcher value different data than an outside observer? It might be interesting to complete 2 different ethnographies about the same community during the same time frame–one by a participant-observer and one by an outside observer–in order to better compare what is actually valued and in order to create a stronger sense of reliabilty and validity.