"The way we do things around here": the culture of ethnography

Towards a definition of ethnography

This is a conference on 'Ethnography and Education', and the reason each of us is here is, presumably, because we feel our activities and interests as researchers lie within these two areas. Part of our task here is to explore what these two activities - ethnography and education - actually are. By sifting through and debating each others' work, the methodologies and the substantive and theoretical outcomes, perhaps we hope to reach a deeper appreciation of what both education and ethnography are about.

As a group of ethnographers, it must be important to have some idea about what we think we are doing; as Spindler and Spindler (1992:60) observe, "without a unique subject matter as well as a methodology, there is no discipline". And while the strength of our discipline must depend partly on its flexibility, and openness to diverse ways of working, there must be some common threads - technical and philosophical - which enable us to say, yes, we all belong at this particular conference, and we have a discipline which guides our work. In this paper, I have decided, perhaps rashly, to suggest what I think ethnography is, in the hope that this will stimulate debate about not only what counts as ethnographic work, but, by implication, what counts as good ethnographic work. This exercise is worthwhile if only to counter the disturbing (albeit amusing) remark attributed to an official of an American state department of education:

Anything anyone wants to do that has no clear problem, no methodology, and no theory is likely to called 'ethnography' around here (Spindler 1982:1).

This paper develops ideas from a chapter by Geoffrey Walford and myself (Massey and Walford 1998) in the book 'Children Learning in Context', an edited volume of papers from this conference two years ago. Our definition was formed within certain constraints in that we concentrated originally on those elements of ethnography which we saw as most relevant to studying children learning. No doubt readers will therefore be able to find gaps and problems in our definition which, we hope, may provoke some collegial discussion.

Rather than attempt to provide an exhaustive definition, I have confined myself to identifying what I see as the minimum requirements for a research project to be called ethnographic, as opposed to, say, just qualitative or naturalistic. For a study to be called an ethnography, it needs, at the very least, each of the following seven elements:

1. A Study Of A Culture

Ethnographers stress that we move within social worlds, and that to understand the behaviour, values and meanings of any given individual (or group), we must take account of some kind of cultural context. In this respect, ethnography balances attention to the sometimes minute everyday detail of individual lives with wider social structures.

The word 'culture' is notoriously difficult to define, but it is hard to avoid in a discussion of ethnography. A culture is made up of certain values, practices, relationships and identifications. Spindler and Spindler (1992:70) have the following definition of 'culture':

For each social setting (i.e. classroom) in which various scenes (e.g. reading, 'meddlin', going to the bathroom) are studied, there is the prior (native) cultural knowledge held by each of the various actors, the action itself, and the emerging, stabilising rules, expectations, and some understandings that are tacit. Together these constitute a 'classroom' or 'school' culture.

An ethnographer will try to define a particular culture by asking questions such as 'What does it mean to be a member of this group?' and 'What makes someone an insider or an outsider here?'. The ethnographer tries to make sense of what people are doing by asking 'What's going on here? How does this work? How do people do this?' and hopes to be told by those people about "the way we do things around here" (Deal 1985).

Answering those questions requires an openness to learning from those who inhabit that culture, and a willingness to see everything and suspend premature judgment on what should be selected as data. The usefulness of the information may not be immediately apparent, but is often collected and stored anyway. This quality of openness lies at the heart of ethnography, in its processes, purposes and ethics.

2. Multiple Methods, Diverse Forms Of Data

Cultures are complex and multi-faceted. To reach even a rudimentary understanding of them requires an openness to looking in many different ways. Different situations must be sampled many times - including the now widely accepted parameters of people, place and time - to establish what and who counts as being part of a culture.

Ethnographers often need to adopt a 'magpie' attitude to information. Data may consist of written documents, the researchers' own fieldnotes (including observational notes, and records of spoken communications such as discussions, chance conversations, interviews, and overheard remarks), audiotapes and videotapes; quantitative data may also be included, such as survey or experimental findings. Gold (1997:393) suggests that the fieldwork phase of an ethnography is complete only when 'both the ethnographer and his or her informants have exhausted their ability to identify other kinds of informants and other sorts of questions of relevance to the research objectives': ethnographers will keep looking, listening, asking, watching, experimenting, and so on until they feel they have enough to make sense of what is going on.

In order to 'develop the story as it is experienced by participants' (Woods 1994:311), and gain a multi-dimensional appreciation of the setting, the ethnographer must be prepared to consider many different types of data. These can be generated only through the use of multiple methods, which may include interviewing, observing, quantitative work, and assembling cultural artifacts. It makes sense then, that a study which uses only one field technique (however exhaustively) does not constitute an ethnography, since it can generate only one kind of data.

3. Engagement

The ethnographer believes that 'observation of culture in situ' (Denscombe 1995:184) is the best way of getting to know it intimately. Hence Woods' (1994:310) description of the 'most prominent features of an ethnographic approach' as 'long-term engagement in the situation as things actually happen and observing things first-hand.' Ethnographers work on the premise that there is important knowledge which can be gained in no other way than just 'hanging around' and 'picking things up' from a naturalistic setting. Spindler and Spindler (1992:63) are unequivocal:

The requirement for direct, prolonged, on-the-spot observation cannot be avoided or reduced. It is the guts of the ethnographic approach.

The principle of engagement by the researcher contains two elements: human connection with participants, and an investment of time. There is an assumption that, as the researcher becomes a more familiar presence, participants are less likely to behave uncharacteristically. Gold (1997:394) explains: 'The fieldworker uses face-to-face relationships with informants as the fundamental way of demonstrating to them that he or she is there to learn about their lives without passing judgment on them ...' The idea is that participants 'perform' less, and, as trust builds, reveal more details of their lives. So the success of an ethnography depends on the researcher developing and maintaining a positive personal involvement with participants (Denscombe 1995:178), staying as close as possible to what and who is being studied, and returning perhaps many times to the field. Spindler and Spindler (1992:66) also argue that "only the human observer can be alert to divergences and subtleties that may prove more important than the data produced by any predetermined categories of observation or any instrument."

Part of how an ethnographer learns about a culture is through a process of enculturation, which takes time. Participants and settings need time to show what's going on. As the researcher enters the culture more deeply, new questions and avenues open up, requiring further investigation. 'Blitzkrieg ethnography' (Rist 1980), where the researcher spends only two or three days in the field, is therefore a contradiction in terms: a prolonged period of investigation is essential for an ethnographer to get to know the ways of a culture. Walford (1991:91) touches upon the issue of how long is 'prolonged':

... I eventually spent about 225 hours spread over 29 days at the college, including two staff development days from October until Christmas. I like to think of this as 'compressed ethnography', although there are many who would argue that it is inappropriate to use the term ethnography for such a short period.

It is important to realise that ethnography's requirement of a prolonged period of observation is not driven by quantitative thinking, although it may appear that way. The core issue is the quality of work which can be conducted. Spindler and Spindler (1992:65) define time required not primarily in terms of numbers, but by what degree of understanding the researcher must reach before leaving the field:

[T]he validity of ethnographic observation is based on observation in situ that lasts long enough to permit the ethnographer to see things happen not once but repeatedly. [...] We must observe these happenings often enough so that finally we learn nothing significant by their reoccurrence. A researcher knows when that point has been reached. Then one should observe still longer, to be sure that one's sense of that point in time is not premature nor the result of fatigue.

When they suggest, for example, at least 3 months for "an adequate study of a single classroom", "with observation continuing for a significant portion of every school day", they add that it "would be better if this 3-month period were spread over an entire school year, because some things just do not happen during a 3-month period (Spindler and Spindler 1992:66)". The driving principle is the need for some kind of completeness, which can be achieved through sampling people at different places, and at different times.

4. Researcher As Instrument

Denscombe (1995) points out that much detailed and useful background information on a setting is often subjectively informed, echoing Woods (1994:313), who describes an ethnographer as 'his or her own primary source of data.' Whether the researcher's subjectivity is a weakness or strength is not the issue. Experiencing the world subjectively is a way of life, and not one that we can choose, and is therefore an inevitable feature of the research act.

The ethnographer must aim to keep an open mind about 'what is going on here' and what might be the best ways to talk or write about whatever is being studied. But recognising the presence of subjectivity is not the same as saying 'anything goes'. After all, at the very least, "one begins fieldwork not with a tabula rasa but with a foreshadowed problem in mind" (Wilcox 1982:459), and "one is utilising one's knowledge of existing social theory to guide and inform one's observations" (p. 458). In other words, there is a context - social and sociological - to the context one is studying.

Somehow a balance must be struck between suspending preconceptions and using one's present understandings and beliefs to enquire intelligently. Dey (1993:63-4) puts it this way:

... there is a difference between an open mind and empty head. To analyse data, we need to use accumulated knowledge, not dispense with it. The issue is not whether to use existing knowledge, but how [...] The danger lies not in having assumptions but in not being aware of them ...

To achieve such awareness, and guard against methodological and substantive 'blindness', the ethnographer must work systematically, constantly reviewing the evolution of his or her ideas, reflecting on why particular decisions were made, why certain questions were asked or not asked, why data were generated a particular way and so on. Above all the ethnographer must try to articulate the assumptions and values implicit in the research, and what it means to acknowledge the researcher as part of, rather than outside, the research act. For Hammersley and Atkinson (1995:192), reflexivity, which demands 'the provision of ... a 'natural history' of the research' as experienced and influenced by the researcher, is a 'crucial component of the complete ethnography.' Through this 'reconstructed logic of enquiry' (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995: 21), the ethnographer is able to say what he or she has learnt, and how he or she learnt it.

5. Multiple perspectives

Each person's account of the world is unique. What the researcher offers is an account which can be examined critically and systematically because the means by which it was generated is clearly articulated. It is often in the nature of ethnography that participants' accounts and actions appear to be in the foreground, and that the researcher has managed to 'get out of the way', acting only as 'information broker' (Goodson and Mangan 1996:48). However, whether easily visible or not, it is the researcher who remains the highest authority, who selects from what has been seen and heard, and constructs the final account.

The researcher's power in this respect needs to be tempered for this account to be credible, such that we as readers feel that something of the culture has been illuminated rather than further obscured by the idiosyncrasies of a single observer/commentator. This can - and should be - achieved in at least three ways. First, as suggested earlier, the ethnographer must be culturally open-minded from the start, prepared to challenge his or her own theories and understanding, constantly testing them. This also implies that what people other than the researcher have to say has value as well.

Second, all claims about the culture must be based on some kind of empirical experience of that culture. Such evidence must be presented to or be available to the reader so that he or she can evaluate the claims made by the writer. It is in the nature of ethnography that a wealth of data is generated, recorded and stored; the writer's job is to share with the readers precisely which data have led to a particular claim.

Third, participants hold knowledge about themselves which nobody else has. Thomas (1928:572) argued that 'if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.' If this is true, then what people believe to be the reality of their world must be important information in understanding their activities, values, meanings and relationships and in working out 'what is going on'. The most direct means of getting this information is to ask those people. So the researcher's power can also be tempered by seeking multiple perspectives and allowing them to influence the researcher. This has methodological implications:

Rather than relying on a preconceived framework for gathering and analysing data, ethnographers use their interactions with informants to discover and create analytical frameworks for understanding and portraying that which is under study. The procedures used in this direct and intimate acquaintance with the empirical world provide assurance that the data collected are grounded in informants' actual experiences (Gold 1997:399).

Hargreaves (1991:11) claims that 'failure to understand the teacher's voice is failure to understand the teacher's teaching'. Perhaps we should also say, failure to understand a social actor's voice is failure to understand the actor's acting. Building accounts of life as seen through the eyes of the actors themselves will almost always challenge existing images of them and what they do. Enabling a relatively unheard voice to come to the attention of a wider audience is always a political act. This becomes even more significant when those individuals are speaking about matters in which they hold unique knowledge and which directly concern them. One could argue that people even have a right to have a say in matters directly affecting them. There are both methodological and ethical implications of highlighting actors' perspectives.

However, as Spindler and Spindler (1992:70) point out, "knowing what natives know is not enough." A researcher may well be able to discover and articulate things about individuals and groups which they cannot see themselves, as well as things which neither the participants or researcher can see at the outset of the study. Moreover, while the traditional ethnographer works on the assumption that group members' knowledge and perspectives are particularly valuable, s/he would also expect to challenge/problematise them ('making the familiar strange'), balancing respect for participant accounts with skepticism and an outsider's perspective. Spindler and Spindler (1992:70) argue that "some of the sociocultural knowledge affecting behaviour and communication in any particular setting being studied is implicit or tacit, not known to some participants and known only ambiguously to others."

Spindler and Spindler (1992:73) believe that there can be a diplomatic (if not methodological) problem with this, for "the implicit is often implicit because it is unacceptable [to members of the culture] at the explicit level." Moreover, the researcher's interpretation or "cultural translation" is "influenced, at least, and transformed, at worst, by [...] theories and models" which are often "extraneous to the cultural knowledge of the native" and therefore regarded as suspect by natives. The ethnographer has to walk a very fine line.

6. Cycle of hypothesis and theory building

The openness which has underpinned many of the elements so far is particularly evident in the ethnographer's constant commitment to modify hypotheses and theories in the light of further data. Gold (1997:395) describes it as the 'running interaction between formulating and testing (and reformulating and retesting).'

In this type of enquiry, developing a theory is not so much an event as a process. As new data emerge, existing hypotheses may prove inadequate, the ethnographer's sense of what needs to be looked at and reported on may change, and explanations of what is going on may be supplanted by ones which seem to fit better. Such an approach is consonant with emergent design, another distinguishing feature of ethnography.

7. Intention And Outcome

An ethnographer asks (though perhaps not in so many words) 'How do things work around here, and what does it mean to be a member of this group?'. S/he aims 'to discover how people in the study area classify or label each other, how they find meaning in activities they care about in life, and how they engage in processes in which they individually and collectively define (antecedents and consequences of) their situations (Gold 1997:391).' Spindler and Spindler (1992:70) hold a similar view:

The object of ethnographic research by anthropologists is to discover the cultural knowledge that people hold in their minds, how it is employed in social interaction, and the consequences of this employment.

Any attempt to generalise findings beyond the case itself should be regarded as suspect, since statistical random sampling is rarely a feature of ethnographic research. Rather, as with other kinds of qualitative work, the intention is to achieve some kind of understanding of a specific case, whether it be a culture, people or setting. Of course, the fact that we publish our findings suggests that we feel they are applicable to other settings and are possibly generalisable in some way, a fact not on lost on either Spindler (1982:8) or Hammersley (1992). The latter suggests that empirical generalisation is possible in some cases if 'typicality' of a defined population at a given time can be established.

In describing the outcome of this kind of research, Denscombe (1995:182) draws attention to the 'storytelling' aspect. An ethnography contains descriptions of local places, snapshots of people's lives and relationships, their inner thoughts and feelings, their outward appearances, anecdotes of personal triumphs and disasters, rules, contradictions and meanings. And at the end of all of this, through a judicious blend of empirical experience, systematic activity and appropriate theory, the ethnographer hopes to construct a coherent story that takes the reader into a deeper and richer appreciation of the people who have been studied. As Wilcox (1982:462) succinctly puts it:

The goal of ethnography is to combine the view of an insider with that of an outsider to describe a social setting. The resulting description is expected to be deeper and fuller than that of the ordinary outsider, and broader and less culture-bound than that of the ordinary insider.

For the ethnographer, partial enculturation is the means by which the final story is reached, and s/he then leaves the field in order to tell other people about what has been learnt; s/he rarely needs or intends to stay around afterwards. What might an ethnographer do differently if he or she expected to become or remain a member of the group beyond the life of the study? What research methods would s/he use, what questions would s/he ask, what story or stories would s/he tell, and how would the findings be disseminated?

Conclusion

It is only by examining what ethnography is - its aims, methods, possibilities and problems - that we can establish what unique contribution it can make to understanding social life, and make decisions about its appropriateness as a investigative strategy for a given research question. No doubt, the term 'ethnography' will continue to be used to describe many different kinds of research activity. Perhaps for some it does not matter that it is used to designate studies which do not have much methodological similarity. Of course, if 'ethnography' comes to mean too many different things to too many different people, then it ceases to be a useful term at all, and we might as well discard it or, at the very least, develop more precise terms to describe the different activities which are supposedly encompassed by the word.

What I have tried to do here is identify the underlying values, practices and identifications which my use of the word is intended to signal. Perhaps one of the most important principles is to gain a deeper understanding of what we might mean by the word 'culture'. So, as an ethnographer, I would like to ask those attending this conference: what is going on here? what does it mean to be a member of this culture? It is not necessary for anyone else to agree with my suggestions, but it might be helpful if, while we are at this ethnographers' convention, we could spend some time talking about what conventions define us as belonging together in one discipline: ethnography.

I believe that ethnography is alive, but I am not so convinced that it is well. There is, without doubt, a culture of ethnographers. It is our job to attend to the culture of ethnography, that is, the care, growth and indeed survival of ethnography as a discipline. In order to do that, we need first, to remind ourselves of its anthropological roots, and second, to move towards a consensual understanding of its defining characteristics that is both flexible enough to respond to a constantly changing research environment and society, and rigorous enough to stand up to the widest possible academic scrutiny.

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to Geoffrey Walford for numerous helpful discussions and feedback on earlier drafts of this paper; also to Thomas Spielhofer for his detailed and challenging comments. The views expressed and shortcomings, problems and contradictions inherent in this paper are entirely my responsibility!

References

Deal T.E. (1985) 'The symbolism of effective schools', Elementary School Journal, 85, 5, 601-620 - reprinted in Westoby, A. (Ed.) (1985) Culture and Power in Educational Organisations, Buckingham, Open University Press

Denscombe, M. (1995) 'Teachers as an audience for research: the acceptability of ethnographic approaches to classroom research', Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, 1, 1, 173-191

Dey, I. (1993) Qualitative data analysis: a user-friendly guide for social scientists, London, Routledge

Gold, R. (1997) 'The ethnographic method in sociology' Qualitative Enquiry, 3, 4, 387-402

Goodson, I. and Mangan, J.M. (1996) 'Exploring alternative perspectives in educational research', Interchange, 27, 1, 41-59

Hammersley, M. (1992) 'The generalisability of ethnography', in What's wrong with ethnography?, London, Routledge, 85-95

Hammersley, M. and Atkinson, P. (1995) Ethnography: Principles in Practice, London, Routledge (first published 1983)

Hargreaves, A. (1991) 'Restructuring restructuring: postmodernity and the prospects for educational change', Unpublished paper, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Massey, A. and Walford, G. (1998) 'Children Learning: Ethnographers Learning', in Walford, G. and Massey, A. (Eds.) Children Learning In Context, JAI Press, New York, 1-18

Rist, R.C. (1980) 'Blitzkrieg ethnography: on the transformation of a method into a movement', Educational Researcher, 9, 2, 8-10

Spindler, G. (Ed.) (1982) 'Introduction', in Doing the ethnography of schooling, New York, CBS Publishing, 1-13

Spindler, G and Spindler, L. (1992) 'Cultural process and ethnography: an anthropological perspective', The handbook of qualitative research in education, London/New York, Academic Press, 53-

Thomas, W.I. (1928) The child in America, New York, Knopf Walford, G. (ed.) (1991) Doing Educational Research, London, Routledge

Wilcox, K. (1982) 'Ethnography as a methodology and its application to the study of schooling: a review', in Spindler, G. (Ed.) Doing the ethnography of schooling, New York, CBS Publishing, 456-488

Woods, P. (1994) 'Collaborating in historical ethnography: researching critical events in education', International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 7, 4, 309-321

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