Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
● Understand the basics of ethnographic research - What, why, and how
● Consider the emerging field of digital ethnography
All research is immersive, but ethnographic research is particularly immersive because it calls upon the researcher to situate themselves in the social contexts of their research subjects. Ethnographic research calls on the researcher to be a close observer of the practices, language, culture, beliefs, and other aspects of the life of their research subjects. Ethnographic research ranges from observing the political strategies of candidates on the campaign trail in small town USA to living in remote Chinese counties and interviewing officials on their local development strategies.21
What is ethnographic research? As noted by Reeves et al., “Ethnography is the study of social interactions, behaviours, and perceptions that occur within groups, teams, organisations, and communities.”22 Ethnography calls upon the researcher to engage in “thick description” (attributed to Clifford Geertz) of a research site. Accordingly, ethnography has its roots in anthropology. Ethnographic fieldwork became prominent during the early twentieth century, when scholars such as Bronislaw Malinowski sought to document in detail the lives of people in remote locales such as Papua New Guinea and the Canary Islands. The purpose then, as now, was not just to collect detailed notes on the lives of others, but also to answer questions raised by social science theories about human behavior, motivations, and organization.
Why engage in ethnographic research? Ethnographic research is a powerful tool for building a more holistic understanding of hitherto unknown or very superficially understood phenomena in the social world. For solo researchers, ethnographic research is a particularly demanding and resource intensive form of data collection. Yet, it has the potential to accomplish something that is highly valued in research: depth of understanding. When presented with a world event as complex as, say, the economic rise of China in the late twentieth century, conducting ethnography at sites where there is a great deal of economic dynamism can be illuminating and anchor our understanding of large, abstract global events. China’s economic “miracle” is due to decisions made by individuals, in response to incentives embedded in their social context. Ethnographic fieldwork, more than any other research tool, helps generate knowledge about these individual- and society-level factors.
How does a researcher conduct ethnographic research? First and foremost, a researcher must record their observations when engaged at their research site (or sites). These observations may take the narrative form of diary entries, for further distillation when writing up research findings. Observations may be captured in a more analytical way from the outset of the ethnographic research, for example noting categories of behavior and adding annotations accordingly. To take the example of a researcher immersed in a Chinese township, their field notes might be sorted into observations about economic life, political life, social life, and so forth. These initial recorded observations form the bulk of ethnographic data. Second, ethnography may also draw on the qualitative tools noted earlier in this chapter such as interviews and documentary sources. Researchers may shift away from pure observation to conduct interviews with research subjects in order to collect data in a more focused way. And documents can supplement (or call into question) observations. In all, the goal is to build a rich portrait of a place and its people in order to address an underlying research question.
Digital Ethnography
Given vast changes in information and communication technologies (ICT), new sites for ethnographic research have emerged in recent decades. Whereas traditional ethnography relied on researchers being situated in a physical space and observing social life there, digital ethnography challenges these notions of physical immersion. Instead the researcher is immersed in relevant digital spaces such as online chat rooms and other social media platforms where information is exchanged. Digital ethnography asserts that there is a “materiality of digital worlds, which are neither more nor less material than the worlds that preceded them.”23
The Internet, like all social spaces, is deeply political. Government documents are uploaded to government webpages in “transparency” initiatives, and societal actors in turn upload leaked government documents to sites such as Wikileaks to further challenge official narratives. Myriad groups now create Facebook pages, build virtual communities, and push out information via such twentieth and twenty-first century information and communication technologies (ICT). Political parties seek to reach constituents via various social media platforms, and US president Trump has drawn attention to the power of “tweeting” via the online communication tool Twitter. Far- right political movements located in wealthy democracies around the world have created global networks through a variety of social media platforms. These platforms have created the capacity for rapid and far-reaching mobilization of like-minded individuals.
All of this creates a rich opportunity for research and analysis. Researchers engaging in digital ethnography seek to record and identify patterns in the digital worlds of their research subjects.
A researcher attempting to map the political strategies of groups supporting Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro might subscribe to the Facebook pages of various groups supporting the president and his political party, for example. She might record the messages that are posted on such sites and conduct content analysis on the kinds of vocabulary employed. Or she might examine photos uploaded to these Facebook pages to determine the tactics used to signal who “belongs” to such a movement.
In short, new ICT offer many new -- and potentially lower cost -- possibilities for conducting research on important political topics. An important debate animating the study of social movements and state-society relations concerns the nature of Internet-based technologies: to what degree are they “liberation technologies” versus tools for continued repression by authoritarian governments?24 Researchers engaging in digital ethnography are opening up a rich trove of data sources to begin to weigh in on this and other debates.
