AC & ETNOGAFI Flashcards
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Research strategy
The overall approach to answering your research question.
Action research
a cycle of posing questions, gathering data, reflection & deciding on a course of action
Action research characteristics
- Concentration on practical issues.
- An iterative cycle of plan-act-reflect.
- An emphasis on change (doing things that make a difference).
- Collaboration with practitioners (people living & working in the situation under study are active participant in the research).
- Multiple data generation methods.
Action research process
problem design action evaluate reflect
Reflection
a process of entering into dialogue based on the data collected & guided by a systemic framework to discover the root causes of the organization’s problems.
Application
- Educational research • Community research • Feminist research
- Nursing studies
- Social work
- Work-life studies
Ethnography?
- Study of people in naturally occurring settings or “field”.
- Use methods of data collection which capture: • Ordinary activities.
- Social meanings.
- Researcher participates directly: • Part of the setting.
- Part of the ongoing activities.
- Aim: is to collect data in a systematic manner.
• The ethnographer tries to produce a holistic description
- People
- Culture
- Societies
- Organizations
- Social relationships • Social processes
- Behaviour in-situ
Why do ethnography in organizations?
• To understand how things work in organizations. • Cultural aspects.
• Management is a social process.
• Involves negotiation & construction of meaning to get things
done.
• Critically assess managerial practices. • E.g. How suppression takes place?
Ethnography process
1) “Seeing”
• Through the eyes of the people being observed.
2) Artefacts
• What people use to do their work. • It tells us a lot about that work.
3) Description
• Paying attention to the mundane details.
4) Contextualism
• Conveying messages in a complete manner.
• To understand the wider social & historical context.
• Field notes are on:
- Substance: your recording of the things that are said or events that happen (include what, where, when, who & the emotional atmosphere at the time).
- Methodology: your thought & comments on the research process (e.g. difficulty in gaining access to someone).
- Analysis: your reflections on how the other two sections relate to your original research question, theories, literature, etc.
• Thin description
- Factual account without any interpretation.
* Insufficient & misleading account of an aspect of a culture.
• Thick description
- Explain cultures in-depth.
- Specifies details, conceptual structures & meanings. • Composed not only of facts but also includes:
- Commentary
- Interpretation
- Interpretations of those comments
- Interpretations of those interpretations
Advantages of ethnography
Rich data.
• Direct observation of events & practices. • Non-reliance only on self-report.
• Better understanding of the behaviour & inherent tacit knowledge.
Disadvantages of ethnography
Extraordinarily time consuming.
• Can be unpredictable.
• Extreme heterogeneity of data. • Difficult to analyse.
• Difficult to make sense-of it.
