How to Conduct Effective Ethnographies

How to Conduct Effective Ethnographies

Definition of Concepts:

Ethnographies are a way to understand culture on its own terms. By doing this you can try to gain knowledge from a culture by examining their practices, beliefs, rituals, and values. After this you can gain an understanding for why these things have such great meaning to their culture. Then you can try to make sense of their culture, without adding your own judgment. Some of the tools ethnographers use is observation, participation, and asking questions.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. To conduct an effective ethnography you first need to decide what you want to research

2. Then you need to determine where would be the best place for you do to your research

3. Once both of these are figured out you can plan out what questions you want to ask the people in the community you research

4. These questions should allow them to answer in their terms, not yours

5. To benefit your study you can also do additional research before going straight into the community you are going to study

6. This will give you a better understanding of their values and practices

7. Now you are ready to go into the community of your choice and start observing

8. To make your ethnography effective you need to first start out by just observing and taking notes on what you see

9. Then you can start to participate some to gain more knowledge about what they are doing

10. Once you feel comfortable in their environment you can start to ask them the questions you planned out

11. After you have done these things you have completed an effective ethnography

12. Now you just need to analyze your results

How I used this Concept in one of my Projects:

In my project I was trying to prove my hypothesis that Social networks such as Facebook, have allowed not only people’s social network to expand, but their real life network of people as well.

After completing my ethnography I was able to clearly see my results. The results from my ethnography were that everything posted in my news feed was either updates of people’s days or events that they will be attending. I also saw that there were a lot of conversations after the posts that people posted no matter if it was an event or just an update. I saw that once an event was posted in started a conversation about actually attending the event together. Then once I examined the conversations after the updates they seemed very different. I could tell that the people that started the conversations were just online friends and that they weren’t actually going to see each other in person. After just observing my news feed I started to observe my friend’s profile instead I found different results. Almost all of the people’s profiles I looked at had over a thousand friends. Some people had as few as three hundred friends and as many as five thousand. I also looked at people’s profile to see whom they are talking to and every profile had the same few people on it. It was the same people over and over again who commented on updates, events, and pictures. It was very rare that I saw a random post on someone’s profile and when I did it normally asked how the person was and that they haven’t seen the person in a while. I also looked at people’s photo albums and found that the same people that commented on that person’s profile was in all of their pictures. Most photo albums would have the same few people tagged in almost all of the pictures and then one or two random people tagged.

Analysis of Ethnography

Overall my results ended up disconfirming my hypothesis because in the end Facebook did not help expand people’s online or real life social networks. My results proved my hypothesis wrong because after observing my results I could see that Facebook has helped people stay connected as friends, but has not helped people make new friends. I could see this all over Facebook because everything that was posted by people was updates or their day and what events they would be attending. These posts seemed to spark conversations mainly between friends that talk on a day-to-day basis, so this shows me that Facebook is mainly a tool to help people stay in contact and socialize in a way they have never been able to socialize before. I did see a difference though in the conversations that was after the status updates and conversations after the events. It seemed that updates of people’s day allow them to converse with old friends, or maybe friends they do not see often. I could conclude this because most of the conversations were asking how the person had been and what they have been up to. This proves to me that Facebook helps people keep in contact even if it is just saying hello. Then the conversations after the events people are attending showed me that it helps people that see each other everyday communicate though a social network. When observing how many friends people had I was shocked because it would be impossible to stay closely connected to thousands of people. But after observing which people talked to who, I came up with the conclusion that people know almost everyone on their friend’s list from school, they just do not talk to them on a daily basis. I feel that people like the easy accessibility though if they wanted to talk to someone that hadn’t talked to in while. That is one of the benefits I could see from analyzing Facebook; you can have thousands of friends but only talk to them when you want to and they will still be your friends. I could conclude this from seeing how many friends someone has on their friend list compared to how many people he or she actually talk to on their profile and have pictures with. People had thousands of friends and only interactions and pictures with a handful of them.

I used this concept of ethnographies for one of my projects to prove if my hypothesis was correct. My hypothesis was that I predicted that social networks such as Facebook, have allowed not only people’s social network to expand, but their real life network of people as well. So I decided that the most effective way to determine if my hypothesis was correct or not was to conduct ethnographies. I first started by doing some background research about online communities. I read Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Communities, which said that online social networking makes it possible for people to have the freedom online to talk to who they want and when they want. Once I finished my research about my community I developed a hypothesis to test. I then developed some questions to ask people while in the Facebook Community to give me a better understanding. These questions were why are you apart of the Facebook community, has Facebook ever damaged any of their friendships, has Facebook has made you more distant from your friends, and if they have more Facebook friends than they do friends in real life. After observing the Facebook Community and asking my questions I was able to conduct an effective ethnography.

Assignment for the Class:

I would like you to go off of the first project and test your hypothesis by using ethnographies. You need to first develop your hypothesis from the organization of your choice. Then you need to test your hypothesis by using ethnographies and from there you can develop your argument for the first part of the project.

For this assignment I would like you to give me all the notes you take during your ethnographies. I would like you to use a journal every time you attend an event and take notes. Then after the event I would like you to write a reaction to what you saw and how that relates to your hypothesis. For this assignment you need to attend at least 3 events for your organization.