ETHNOGRAPHY AND GROUNDED THEORY

A. Ethnography Research

Ethnographic designs are qualitative research procedures for describing, analyzing, and interpreting a culture-sharing group’s shared patterns of behavior, beliefs, and language that develop over time. You conduct an ethnography when the study of a group provides understanding of a larger issue. You also conduct an ethnography when you have a culture-sharing group to study—one that has been together for some time and has developed shared values, beliefs, and language. You capture the “rules” of behavior, such as the informal relationships among teachers who congregate at favorite places to socialize (Pajak & Blasé, 1984).

1. Educational anthropologists focused on subculture groups such as:

a. Career and life histories or role analyses of individuals

b. Micro ethnographies of small work and leisure groups within classrooms or schools

c. Studies of single classrooms abstracted as small societies

d. Studies of school facilities or school districts that approach these units as discrete communities

2. Types of ethnography design:

a. Realist Ethnographies, is an objective account of the situation, typically written in the third-person point of view, reporting objectively on the information learned from participants at a field site.

b. Case Studies, is an in-depth exploration of a bounded system (e.g., activity, event, process, or individuals) based on extensive data collection.

c. Critical Ethnographies, are a type of ethnographic research in which the author is interested in advocating for the emancipation of groups marginalized in our society.

3. The characteristic of ethnography research:

a. Cultural theme is a general position, declared or implied, that is openly approved or promoted in a society or group.

b. Culture-sharing group in ethnography, is two or more individuals who have shared behaviors, beliefs, and language.

c. A shared pattern, is a common social interaction that stabilizes as tacit rules and expectations of the group.

d. Fieldwork, means that the researcher gathers data in the setting where the participants are located and where their shared patterns can be studied.

e. Description, Themes, and Interpretation.

- A description in ethnography is a detailed rendering of individuals and scenes to depict what is going on in the culture-sharing group.

- Thematic data analysis in ethnography consists of distilling how things work and naming the essential features in themes in the cultural setting.

- interpretation in ethnography, the ethnographer draws inferences and forms conclusions about what was learned.

f. Context or Setting, is the setting, situation, or environment that surrounds the cultural group being studied.

g. Researcher Reflexivity, refers to the researcher being aware of and openly discussing his or her role in the study in a way that honors and respects the site and participants.

B. Grounded Theory

A grounded theory design is a systematic, qualitative procedure used to generate a theory that explains, at a broad conceptual level, a process, an action, or an interaction about a substantive topic. In grounded theory research, this theory is a “process” theory—it explains an educational process of events, activities, actions, and interactions that occur over time. Grounded theory generates a theory when existing theories do not address your problem or the participants that you plan to study.

1. Types of Grounded Theory Design

a. The Systematic Design, emphasizes the use of data analysis steps of open, axial, and selective

coding, and the development of a logic paradigm or a visual picture of the theory generated.

In this definition, three phases of coding exist.

b. The Emerging Design

The more flexible, less prescribed form of grounded theory research as advanced by Glaser (1992) consists of several major ideas:

-          Grounded theory exists at the most abstract conceptual level rather than the least abstract level as found in visual data presentations such as a coding paradigm.

-     A theory is grounded in the data and it is not forced into categories.

-     A good grounded theory must meet four central criteria: fi t, work, relevance, and modify ability. By carefully inducing the theory from a substantive area, it will fit the realities in the eyes of participants, practitioners, and researchers. If a grounded theory works, it will explain the variations in behavior of participants. If it works, it has relevance. The theory should not be “written in stone” ( Glaser, 1992 , p. 15) and should be modified when new data are present.

c. The Constructivist Design

2. The Characteristics of Grounded Theory Research

a. Process Approach, is a sequence of actions and interactions among people and events pertaining to a topic.

b. Theoretical sampling, means that the researcher chooses forms of data collection that will yield text and images useful in generating a theory.

c. Constant comparison is an inductive (from specific to broad) data analysis procedure in grounded theory research of generating and connecting categories by comparing incidents in the data to other incidents, incidents to categories, and categories to other categories.

d. Theory Generation is an abstract explanation or understanding of a process about a substantive

topic grounded in the data.

e. Memos are notes the researcher writes throughout the research process to elaborate on ideas about the data and the coded categories. In memos, the researcher explores hunches, ideas, and thoughts, and then takes them apart, always searching for the broader explanations at work in the process.

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