Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes

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Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes

• Robert M. Emerson
• Rachel I. Fretz
• Linda L. Shaw

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What is ethnographic field research?

• The study of groups and people as they go about
  their everyday lives, involving
• 1. Entering into a social setting to participate
  in the routines, develop relations with members,
  and observe what is happening
• ? participant-observation
• 2. Writing down in a systematic way your
  observations to produce a textual record of your
  experience

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1. Participation

• Immerse yourself in others social worlds
• Enables you to grasp what is meaningful to
  members
• Gives you access to peoples experiences as
  dynamic processes and interactions
• Allows you to experience for yourself events and
  the limitations/constraints of others lives that
  give rise to such experiences

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1. Participation

• Immersion precludes passive/detached observation,
  meaning
• DO NOT BE A FLY ON THE WALL!

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1. Participation

• Immersion involves resocialization
• Becoming subject to their behavioral norms and
  matrix of meanings
• Learning what is required to become a member of
  their social world
• e.g. joining a church or religious group and
  studying its beliefs

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1. Participation

• The inside-outside distinction
• You cannot become a natural member
• Participation as an ethnographer is always
  transient, and never as committed or constrained
  as a natural member
• The act of researching and writing is
  marginalizing, ensuring that you will certainly
  remain an outsider in some small way

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2. Creating a written account

• Transforming and reducing a passing event that
  exists at a certain point in time into a
  permanent record, this involves selection!
• There is no single or accurate way to write ones
  observations of an event because of differences
  in perception and interpretation
• 3 accounts of a supermarket express lines, each
  begins with a different perspective that compels
  them to make different choices on what to
  emphasize, marginalize, omit

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2. Creating a written account

• Ethnographers take a stance in writing fieldnotes
• A stance is an orientation towards that topic of
  study
• Ones stance can be a theoretical discipline, or
  a system of personal/moral beliefs, or political
  orientation
• Ones stance will influence which interactions
  draw your attention, and the way you frame them

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2. Creating a written account

• Social interactions in natural settings are
  multichanneled while writing is linear
• It is impossible for one observer to record or
  notice everything in a scene
• Must chose which dimensions of an event you would
  like to record
• an ethnographer who does not know the language of
  a social setting can still benefit from his/her
  understanding of non-verbal cues

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2. Creating a written account

• Methods and Findings are inextricably linked
• An ethnographers data is a product of the
  methods used, it is not just objective data
• Any single situation consists of multiple
  realities, one method will lead to one aspect of
  this reality
• Fieldnotes should account for this limitation

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2. Creating a written account

• Indigenous vs. preconceived meanings
• Understand what an experience means to those
  experiencing it, and preserve these indigenous
  meanings
• Personal reactions or preconceived concepts
  should be marginalized, as they hinder your
  understanding of indigenous meanings
• Do not entirely deny personal reactions but
  compare and contrast them to indigenous responses

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2. Creating a written account

• Ethical Considerations
• Immersion may involve intimate relationships with
  people, is it a betrayal of trust or invasion of
  privacy to record their experiences textually
• Does full disclosure of research intentions
  relieve the ethnographer from ethical concerns?

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2. Creating a written account

• An alternative perspective
• Ethnographers have no obligation to disclose
  research intentions to subjects
• Social life involves ones consent to be
  observed, by either by-standers or social
  researchers
• All social beings dissemble their lives,
  maintaining separate public and privates spheres

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2. Creating a written account

• Ethical Considerations
• Some may see ethnographic research as an invasion
  of ones intimate and private experiences.
• ? Is this justified by the claim that this
  research serves the greater good?

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Participating in order to write

• Record initial impressions
• - environment tastes, smells, sounds, sights,
  spatial details, colors
• -people gender, class, race, appearance, dress,
  interactions with one another, tone, mannerisms
• Record dialogue verbatim rather than as
  summarized dialogue

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Participating in order to write

• Pay attention to what members react to as
  meaningful or interesting
• Account for the fact that indigenous meanings are
  not static, they are inextricable from when,
  where, and from whom they were discovered

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Participating in order to write

• Keep your range of interests broad if you
  observe a single situation, be open to observing
  others of a similar type
• Keep in mind that exceptions to a pattern that
  youve observed can buttress your argument, try
  to discover what conditions led to such an
  exception

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Participating in order to write

• Avoid making unqualified generalizations
• e.g. She wasnt a talker as opposed to
• She didnt say very much
• Avoid making inferences about a persons
  motivations or internal thoughts
• Make note of what someone says, and how they say
  it, but not why

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Participating in order to write means.

• Orienting yourself to see events and interactions
  as potential written records

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The process of jotting notes

• Concentrate on a remembered scene more than on
  single words which can narrow your attention to
  the entire scene after the fact
• Record as much detail as quickly as possible
• Save evaluation and editing of the scene until
  you have written all the details you can
  remember, your notes should be as spontaneous as
  the interactions you are observing