Ethnography: Step-by-Step

Citation

Fetterman, D. M. (2019). Ethnography: Step-by-Step (4th ed.). SAGE Publications. (Applied Social Research Methods series; copyright 2020.)

Chapter Summary

The fourth edition has seven chapters and an appendix on organising field notes, and belongs to SAGE's Applied Social Research Methods series. Fetterman, an anthropologist whose career has been largely in applied and evaluation research, presents ethnography as both a research method and a product, usually a written text, and organises the book as a sequence of steps from defining a problem to ethics. The chapter titles carry a running metaphor of a trek through the wilderness, and Chapter 1 compares the path to the trail from Kathmandu to Everest Base Camp. New to this edition, according to the publisher, are case examples from the author's work at the Recovery Café (a community for people affected by addiction, homelessness and mental illness), Stanford University's School of Medicine, Pacifica Graduate Institute and Google; updated discussion of qualitative data analysis and videoconferencing software; expanded treatment of culture, contextualisation, emic and etic perspectives and symbols; feminist and queer theory with an emphasis on positionality and reflexivity; and Questions for Reflection at the end of each chapter.

Chapter 1: An Overview: The First Step

A tour of the whole process. Ethnography is defined as telling a credible, rigorous and authentic story from the insider's point of view; the ethnographer enters the field "with an open mind, not an empty head", already equipped with a problem, a theory, a design, techniques and ethical guidelines, and must make biases explicit. The chapter argues that the problem must come before the method, illustrates basic versus applied research with two studies of incest, and surveys theory: phenomenological versus positivist paradigms, ideational versus materialist theories, and critical lenses such as feminist and queer theory (with the author's study of LGBT content in medical education as an example). It then outlines fieldwork, formal analysis and the written ethnography, stressing that analysis runs alongside data collection, and closes with a map of the remaining chapters.

Chapter 2: Anthropological Concepts: Walking in Rhythm

The concepts that guide an ethnographer's thinking: culture, the holistic perspective, contextualisation, the emic perspective and multiple realities, the etic perspective, a nonjudgmental orientation, inter- and intracultural diversity, structure and function, symbol and ritual, micro- versus macro-level study, reflexivity and operationalism.

Chapter 3: Methods and Techniques: A Wilderness Guide

The data collection toolkit. Sections cover fieldwork, selection and sampling, entry, participant observation, interviewing, lists and forms, questionnaires, projective techniques, additional eliciting devices and unobtrusive measures. Chapter 1 adds that the interviewing discussion distinguishes structured, semistructured, informal and retrospective interviews, grand tour and specific questions, key informants, and life histories.

Chapter 4: Ethnographic Equipment: Gearing Up

The tools of the trade, beginning with the ethnographer as the "human instrument" and moving through pen and paper, digital voice recorders, smartphones, web mapping services, tablets, computers and database software, cameras, video and cinema, and the internet, including videoconferencing, online surveys and collaborative documents.

Chapter 5: Analysis: Finding Your Way Through the Forest

Analysis as a continuous activity, from thinking itself through triangulation, patterns, key events, maps, flowcharts, organisational charts, matrices, content analysis and statistics, to crystallisation, the moment when the picture comes together. Qualitative data analysis software is discussed in connection with documenting patterns.

Chapter 6: Writing: Recording the Miracle

Writing at every stage: research proposals, field notes and their organisation, memoranda, interim reports, and final products from reports and blogs to data visualisations, articles and books. It also treats elements of style, including thick description and verbatim quotation, the ethnographic present and ethnographic presence, ethnographically informed reports, the use of literature, and revising and editing.

Chapter 7: Ethics: Walking Softly Through the Wilderness

Ethics is placed last, according to Chapter 1, because it requires the full context of the earlier steps. The sections cover historical context, the ethnographer's role, academic and applied ethnography, and the research life cycle. Chapter 1 lists the basic standards discussed (permission, honesty, trust, pseudonyms, reciprocity, rigorous work) and the harder dilemmas of "guilty knowledge" and "dirty hands".

Key Concepts

Chapter 1: An Overview

• Problem before method: the research question should determine the approach, not the other way round.
• Basic and applied research: theory-driven, grant-funded work versus contract work answering a sponsor's question, a boundary the author sees as increasingly blurred.
• Ideational and materialist theories: explanations that look to ideas versus material conditions as the drivers of change.
• Analysis concurrent with data collection: the ethnographer as a human instrument making analytic choices throughout fieldwork.

Chapter 2: Anthropological Concepts

• Emic and etic perspectives: the insider's view of reality and the outsider's social-scientific interpretation.
• Contextualisation and holism: placing data in their wider setting and trying to see the whole.
• Reflexivity: awareness of the researcher's own position and influence.

Chapters 3–4: Methods and Equipment

• Participant observation and interviewing: the core of fieldwork, with many types of interview and question.
• Unobtrusive measures: data gathered without direct interaction.
• The human instrument: the ethnographer as the most important research tool.

Chapters 5–7: Analysis, Writing and Ethics

• Triangulation: testing one source of information against others.
• Thick description and verbatim quotation: the means of making an account credible.
• Guilty knowledge and dirty hands: ethical dilemmas that arise from what the researcher learns and does in the field.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A complete, ordered process. Seven chapters move from problem and theory through concepts, methods, tools, analysis and writing to ethics, and Chapter 1 explains why each step comes where it does. Newcomers can read straight through; experienced researchers can use the chapters as self-contained references, as the author intends.
• Grounded in real projects. The sample chapter is full of the author's own cases (a national programme for school dropouts, a research library in conflict, a hospital emergency room, a kibbutz, a study of medical education), and the fourth edition adds new ones. Endorsements quoted by the publisher stress clarity and simplicity of writing.
• Strong on applied work. The book takes seriously ethnography done under contract deadlines, interim reports for clients and short repeated field visits, which suits students in education, health, business and evaluation as well as anthropology. Endorsers report using it with graduate students in law, design, nursing, medicine and education.
• Practical and current on tools. A full chapter on equipment and updated coverage of analysis software, videoconferencing and data visualisation are rare in short methods books.

Limitations

• Breadth over depth. Each technique gets a section, not a chapter; students who need detailed help with fieldnote writing, interviewing or coding will need specialised texts.
• A particular stance on objectivity. Chapter 1 frames the ethnographer as "both storyteller and scientist", warns against advocacy crossing into research, and treats ethnography largely in terms of credibility and rigour. Students coming from the critique of ethnographic writing will find less discussion of representation and authority than in more reflexive texts, though the new edition adds feminist and queer theory.
• Lists of headings can feel like a checklist. The many short sections suit reference use; readers wanting a sustained argument about what ethnography is will find it elsewhere.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the ethnographic methods list, Fetterman is the most procedural of the introductory books. Raymond Madden's Being Ethnographic is its natural partner: a short guide that dwells on what ethnography is, on reflexivity and on the nature of the field, where Fetterman sets out what to do at each step. Reading Madden for orientation and Fetterman for procedure is an effective way to start a course or a first project.

Martyn Hammersley and Paul Atkinson's Ethnography: Principles in Practice is the more extended and reflexive treatment of the same process, a good next step for students writing a dissertation. Robert Emerson, Rachel Fretz and Linda Shaw's Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes develops the topic that Fetterman's Chapter 6 covers in a few sections. H. Russell Bernard and Amber Wutich's Research Methods in Anthropology is a comprehensive textbook covering qualitative and quantitative methods side by side, and goes much further than Fetterman into sampling, structured data collection and analysis. James Clifford and George Marcus's collection Writing Culture supplies the critical debate about ethnographic authority that Fetterman's confident account of credibility does not engage.

How to Use This Book

The book suits undergraduates and graduate students in anthropology, education, sociology, health and other professional fields who are planning a first ethnographic study, and evaluators who want to use ethnographic techniques. No prior qualitative training is assumed.

• Start with Chapter 1, which previews the whole book; answer its Questions for Reflection about your own project.
• Core for designing a study: Chapters 2 and 3, the concepts and the methods. Read them before entering the field.
• Reference during fieldwork: Chapter 4 for equipment and Chapter 6's sections on field notes and memoranda; the appendix shows how to organise notes.
• After data collection: Chapter 5 on analysis, then Chapter 6 on writing up.
• Do not leave ethics to the end of the project: although Chapter 7 comes last in the book, read it before applying for ethical approval.

Use the author's cases as models: for each technique, note how he applied it and what it yielded. For depth on any single technique, follow the references into the specialised literature or the fieldnotes and methods books on the course list.