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Ethnographic Research

Decent Essays

topic of assignment: ethnography. submitted by Umair Ijaz.
(roll Number 1 BS English 4th semester) submitted to: Sir Waseem Akhtar. date of submission: 12-06-2012.

OUTLINE
In this chapter, I shall define ethnography and describe its central characteristics and principles. I shall also look at the key research concepts of reliability and validity as they relate to ethnography, and will discuss the importance of context to ethnographic inquiry. In the final part of the chapter, I shall highlight some of the 'central concerns of this topic by contrasting psychometry and ethnography, The chapter seeks to address the following questions:
• - What do we mean by ethnography?
• - What are the key principles guiding ethnographic research?
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It fellows that if we want to find out about behaviour. we need to investigate it in the natural contexts in which it occurs, rather than in the experimental laboratory. Arguments in favour of field research as opposed to laboratory research are supported by studies of particular phenomena which come up with different findings according to whether the research is conducted in a laboratory or in the field. For example, Bellack, Hersen, and Turner (1978) found that subjects performed in a role-play situation very differently from the way they performed in real-life social situations where the same behaviours were observed. It has also been observed that parents and pupils respond differently to questions according to whether they are posed in school or at home.
The dilemma, as we saw in Chapter 1, is that In dealing with the problem of generalisability (an issue of external validity)and placing the research in the field, one increases the possibility of a threat to the internal validity of the research, because intervening variables may make it imoossible to ascribe a causal relation between the variables under investigation. However, not all ethnography is out to ascribe such causal relationship and so the problems which beset the quantitative researcher in a field setting become unimportant.
2. the qualitative-phenomenological hypothesis: The second hypothesis identified by Wilson is the ,qualitative

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