Throughout this essay I will be evaluating the contribution of an ethnographic approach to research on friendship. I will be looking at, and including evidence to support both sides of the argument as to whether or not this research method is in fact useful when it comes to gaining knowledge about friendship. As well as evaluating this method, I will compare it against others to reflect on the strengths, weaknesses and the typical data collected. I will look at some of the questions about friendship that have been addressed, and then whether this is the best method or if there are others that could have been more suitable.
Ethnography is a qualitative method of research in which the researcher takes part in the activities of a group such that they are able to complete their observations over a period of time in a natural, real-life environment.
When it comes to investigating friendship, one question that has been raised is ‘what is the role of friendship in the life of a 13 year old?’’. Several sources of data include ethnographic notes taken whilst spending time with a group of friends during school lunch breaks and diary/blog entries etc. Firstly, in this case the researcher would need to carefully consider the strengths and weaknesses of each type of data, for example, when looking at a blog the information/data available is likely to be information that the author wants to share with a wider audience whereas a diary entry is more private. In this case, both documents
Subsequently Corsaro took a different approach to studying children's friendship, Corsaro was more interested in maintaining the children's individual view of the word “friend” and seeing how children talk to each other about this. In addition Corsaro wanted to see what this may mean to children from different backgrounds and personal beliefs.
Compare and Contrast the approach to studying children’s friendships taken in the Bigelow and La Gaipa (1975) study with that taken by William Corsaro.
Friendship means different things to different people in different cultures. Friendship is also different from other kinds of relationship such as love, family and professional. The influential power on people’s behaviour, style, ideas and life is dominant and remarkable and therefore worthwhile for scientific investigation. This essay will compare and contrast the academic research of three dominant and pioneer scientists on the development psychology discipline and especially in the field of children’s expectations and children’s understanding of
Ethnography tells about a culture and the members that comprise this culture. A definition is the scientific description of the customs and individual people of a culture. The process of doing this assignment allowed me to explore another aspect of a cultural group. I was able to learn extensively about interactions between individuals and how see them as a culture. The group that comprises my ethnography is a cultural group very common to Utah. The culture I focused on was the LDS culture, to be more specific I studied a sub-culture of this group. My subculture was a group of 12 year old adolescents that are a Sunday school class in this culture.
Friendship opens our minds to different views and perspectives and change our perceptions. It has the power to change people’s views on life in a positive way. True friends will do anything to keep their friendship alive, no matter the barriers. Potok proves through the friendship of Danny and Reuven that friendship can be achieved no matter the barriers. He proves that friendship is a key value to life through his motif
As we begin to go on an excursion through literature, it is important to understand the concept of what an ethnography is. Ethnography is known to be a descriptive type of work that analyzes culture and customs of individual people. James Clifford has implemented this work into his studies and has influenced many others to do the same. I saw through the books I have read, ethnography makes these books become vivacious for a reader.
Ethnographic approach to the research on friendship provided data which couldn’t be obtained using other approaches. Therefore, it extended our knowledge in this topic beyond the limits that constrain other methods of research. On the other hand, its shortcomings make its results questionable. Yet, some of these can be verified using different approaches or discover things that other approaches wouldn’t find that easily but can research them further. Concluding, the benefits of ethnographic approach overcome it shortcomings – especially when
he few studies of friendship conducted between the 1950s and 1970s (Reina 1959; Paine 1974; Gilmore 1975) emphasized the instrumental functions of friends and their structural significance. Analyses of social networks (e.g. friends, patrons and clients) in urban centres (cf. Whyte 1955; Boissevain 1974) also attempted to uncover a structured form for urban relationships. Instrumentality, or the exchange of practical and emotional support between friends, was the chief aspect of friendship emphasized by functionalism. But this is only one of the possible characteristics of friends. Above all, friendship is often perceived and valued as an affective and voluntary relationship, in which sociability and equality between friends are stressed. Although
Answer: Ethnographic research is different from other social science approaches to research because it goes more in depth. With an ethnographic research you are required to eat, sleep, and breath what is being studied. In order to get a better understanding you will need to incorporate such living (as that of the culture being studied) into your life. It’s more of a research to gain the knowledge of a current situation as oppose to something that has happened in the past. For example Sterk was researching prostitution. She followed the lives of many
There are over six billion people on Earth today. Each of those people has countless relationships, which extend further into an immense network of relations among thousands of individuals. These relations can be romantic, professional, unconditional, mutual, or the strongest of all, friendship. Friendship is a term used to denote co-operative and supportive behavior between two or more beings. In this sense, the term connotes a relationship which involves mutual knowledge, esteem, and affection and respect along with a degree of rendering service to friends in times of need or crisis. Friends will welcome each other's company and exhibit loyalty towards each other, often to the point of altruism.
Friendships of virtue, unlike friendships of utility and pleasure, which can include a circle of friends, are strictly one on one relationships. These types of friendships can only occur between two people of the same virtues and both persons have to be virtuous. One can only become virtuous through wisdom and age. Therefore friendships of virtue are not found among young people. It is a relationship of mutual respect and love. The persons in this type of relationship are not in it because they gain something from the relationship, they are not friends because
Friendships are special relationships that begin the development of social skills in each human person. Every time we open the door to form new friendships it begins with an experimental and holistic practice of philosophy and science. Whether we recognize the use of philosophy and science or not it’s being applied to shape friendships. The formation and bond of friendships has been studied for many years through science, philosophy, and theology. The point of this paper is to give the point of view and purpose of friendship according to science, philosophy, and theology and how it is applied to our everyday life.
In recent years there have been a number of studies regarding how children perceive friendship (Brownlow, 2012). Children may have different understandings of what friendship means to them depending on their age or where they live. Two methods used in this field are content analysis and ethnology. This essay will illustrate the similarities and differences between the two methods through the work of two groups of researchers. Content analysis was used by Brian Bigelow and John La Gaipa, and ethnographic research was carried out by William Corsaro. The essay will show that although the researchers worked in the same area of study with some similarity in their approach, they produced contrasting data that was therefore analysed
Yet, it is its own qualitative research method. Whereas quantitative closed-ended questionnaires utilise large samples, ethnography has usually small samples. An ethnographer spends a considerable time with her sample, aiming to learn as much as possible about it in a natural setting, in order to find out about social life when and where it happens, letting the subjects use their own concepts. The ethnographer aims to go into the situation with as few previous assumptions as possible (Greener, 2011: 84). Thus, ethnography, unlike closed-ended questionnaires, explicitly aims to avoid creating variables or imposed
Ethnography is a strategy of analysis coming from anthropology and sociology where the researcher studies the common forms of a person’s actions,vocabulary, and movements of a complete social cluster in an ordinary location over a lengthy period of time. Documents gathering often includes clarifications and dialogues(Creswell, 2014).A qualitative researcher uses ordinary locations, they are the main mechanism, collects numerous origin of evidence, uses inductive and deductive statistics study, put emphasis on contributors’ significance, has a developing strategy, reflexivity, and develop a complete explanation.