Collecting Data Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Collecting Data - Essay ExampleIt is not unusual for ethnographers to live in the husbandry for months or even years. The middle stages of the ethnographic method involve gaining informants, utilize them to gain yet more informants in a chaining process, and gathering of data in the form of observational transcripts and interview recordings. Data analysis and theory development come at the end, though theories may emerge from cultural immersion and theory-articulation by members of the culture. However, the ethnographic look forer strives to avoid theoretical preconceptions and instead to induce theory from the perspectives of the members of the culture and from observation. The researcher may seek validation of induced theories by passing play back to members of the culture for their reactionEthnography is a form of research focusing on the sociology of meaning through close field observation of sociocultural phenomena. Typically, the ethnographer focuses on a community (not ne cessarily geographic, considering also work, leisure, and other communities), selecting informants who are known to have an overview of the activities of the community. Such informants are asked to identify other informants representative of the community, using chain sampling to obtain a saturation of informants in all empirical areas of investigation. Informants are interviewed multiple times, using information from previous informants to elicit clearing and deeper responses upon re-interview. This process is intended to reveal common cultural understandings related to the phenomena under study. These subjective but collective understandings on a subject (ex., stratification) are very much interpreted to be more signifi understructuret than objective data (ex., income differentials). Ethnography is a qualitative research method that is used by anthropologists to describe a culture. Culture has many definitions but usually consists of origins, values, roles, and material items as sociated with a particular group of people. Ethnographic research, therefore, attempts to fully describe a variety of aspects and norms of a cultural group to enhance understanding of the people being analyse.Historically, anthropologists who performed ethnographic research often would live in the community being investigated. Ethnographic research has focus on various foreign cultures to gain understanding about native people who are isolated from Western civilization. One famous anthropologist who performed this type of research was Margaret Mead. Her classic study of three New Guinea cultures explored those cultures gender characteristics and roles. By studying a variety of cultural norms, gender characteristics, and roles, this type of research can help scientists categorize nature versus nurture gender characteristics. Many ethnographic studies have documented cultural roles that challenge Western perspectives of innate gender characteristics.(1)In ethnographic studies, the o rientation of the researcher is termed etic or emic. An etic orientation is a view from an outsiders perspective. For example, if an ethnographer studied the culture of perioperative nurses and had no perioperative nursing experience, that researchers interpretations would be from an etic perspective. If a perioperative nurse studied the culture of the OR or the organization of AORN, those interpretations would be from an insiders, or emic, perspective.Ethnographic resea