Chapter 5 Flashcards
What is ethnographic fieldwork?
The practice whereby an anthropologist is immersed in the daily life of a culture to collect data.
What is participatory action research (PAR)?
Anthropologist and the community work together to understand the conditions that produce the communities problems and find solutions to those problems.
What is community based participatory research? (CBPR)
A collaboration involving partners from within a community in all aspects of the research process. Most importanty, CBPR begins with a research topic of importance to the community and works towards achieving social change equitably.
What is community-based monitoring?
A process where concerned agencies, industry, academia, community groups and local institutions collaborate to monitor, track and respond to issues of common community concern.
What are the stages of field research?
Selecting a research problem, formulating a research design, collecting the data, analyzing the data, interpreting the data, writing up and presenting the results.
How do anthropologists select a research problem?
Use a problem-oriented approach, ask how and why a particular issue came to be and then seek what can be done about that issue.
How do you formulate a research design?
Find out how to identify who to talk to, methods of data collection to be used, and length of time for research. Also write funding and ethics proposals.
What are the 2 primary data-collecting techniques?
Participant observation and semi-structured interviews.
How do you analyze the data?
Transcribe recordings of interviews, responses to surveys get organized into a spreadsheet for coding, software (ATLAS.ti and Nvivo) help with identifying qualitative patterns. For quantitative analysis, SPSS is the most used software.
What are some questions asked when interpreting data? Is this stage easy?
Have the research questions been answered, what patterns/trends emerge from the analysis and what do they mean, how can you explain the findings, how do findings compare to similar studies, how generalizable are the findings, has this resulted in methodological or theoretical issues? This stage is one of the most difficult.
What is participant observation and what are the advantages and disadvantages?
Involves living with and observing the people under study.
Advantages- Generally enhances rapport, distinguish actual from expected behaviour, observation of nonverbal behaviour, experience of behaviours being observed
Disadvantages- Practical only for small sample size, difficult to obtain standardized, comparable data, problems recording information=incomplete data, obtrusive effect on subject matter.
What are interviews used for?
To obtain information on how people think or feel
What are the different types of interviews?
Unstructured- Broad, open-ended questions are asked
Semi-structured- Interview guide covers topics or themes that are needed to be addressed
Interview guide-List of questions and topics that anthropologist uses to guide interviews
Structured interviews- Ethnographic data gathering technique in which large numbers of respondents are asked a set of questions.
What is census taking?
The collection of demographic data about the culture being studied.
What is ethnographic mapping?
Data-gathering tool that locates where the people being studied live, where they keep their livestock, where public buildings are located etc, to determine how that culture interacts with its environment.
What is document analysis?
Examination of data such as personal diaries, newspapers, colonial records etc.
What is ethnohistory?
The use of historical documents, oral traditions, as well as other archaeological and ethnographic methods to understand the history of ethnic groups, both past and present.
What are the reflexive methods of research?
Narrative ethnography, situated knowledge.
What is narrative ethnography?
Ethnographer discusses the influence of his or her own personal and cultural context on the ethnography, which are co-produced and focus on the interaction between themselves and their collaborators.
What is situated knowledge?
Anthropological knowledge that is influenced by the anthropologist’s age, gender, religion, socio-economic status, ethnicity, education, sexual orientation, and historical and cultural context.
What is autoethnography?
Ethnographer attempts to understand another culture through a description and analysis of their own fieldwork experience.
What is a life history?
The story of a collaborators life experience in a culture that provides insight into their culture.
Anthropological fieldwork is primarily…
Experiential.
What is qualitative data?
Gathered from personal interviews, oral histories, observations, and interactions with community members.
What is quantitative data?
Numerical data such as population trends, morbidity and mortality rates, household and community size, number of births and marriages, income, education etc. Good for telling us how many, bad for telling us why.
What are the 5 priority funding areas of the SSHRC? (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada)
1) Aboriginal Research 2) Canadian Environmental Issues 3) Digital Economy 4) Innovation, Leadership, and Prosperity 5) Northern Communities: Towards Social and Economic Prosperity.
What are OCAP principles?
Principles of ownership, possession, and access that ensure First Nation communities actively participate in ethnographic research-Canadian anthropologists must respect this.
What are some things to remember when conducting participant observation research?
Overcome apprehension from the locals, introduce oneself in a way that the locals understand, go slow, communicate to locals genuinely witha want to learn from their expertise.
What is unique about the ethnographic interview?
Interviewer and participant often speak different languages, broad in scope, cannot be used alone and must be used in conjunction with other data gathering techniques.
How does one measure validity of data?
1) Ask a number of different people the same question-if they all answer the same way independently of another, the data can be assumed to be valid. 2) Ask the same person the same question over a period of time. If a person answers them differently, then you can assume that the responses may not be truthful. 3) compare responses with people’s actual behaviour.
What is an example in the textbook of ethnohistory?
Ingeborg Marshall’s study of the Beothuk- they were the first group of native North Americans to be contacted by Europeans, and disappeared in 1829.
What is the genealogical method of data collection?
A technique of data collecting in which the anthropologist writes down all the kin of a research collaborator. Can deduce how family members relate, what the gender roles in the community are, whom marries whom etc.
What is one example of the use of the genealogical method?
When anthropologists discovered the cause of Kuru, a fatal neurodegenerative disease among the Fore of New Guinea-caused by women eating their deceased kin and contracting the disease. Disease found to not be hereditary, but cultural in nature.
What is proxemic analysis?
The study of how people in different cultures distance themselves from one another in normal interactions.
What is event analysis?
Documentation of who participates in events such as circumcision ceremonies, marriages, and funerals.
What is the Human Relations Area Files? (HRAF)
Developed by George Peter Murdock at Yale University, helps to develop statistical, cross cultural comparative studies.
What is intersubjectivity?
Shared meanings constructed through the interactions of people from different perspectives- idea that collaborators are as equally situated as the ethnographer.
What is systematic sociological introspection?
An examination of the ethnographers’ emotions, thoughts, and behaviours during fieldwork and how they impact data collection.
What is one of the best known life stories?
The one if Nisa, 50 something !Kung woman living in Northeastern Botswana, who told her story about her relationships and life, and helped researchers gain a better understanding of what a females life was like in the !Kung tribe.
What is multi-sited fieldwork?
Looks at how forces of globalization influence local communities. Conducted in more than one location, united by a common research topic or theme.
What are some ways that culture shock manifests itself?
1) Sense of confusion over how to behave
2) Sense of surprise/disgust after realizing some of the features of a new culture
3) A sense of loss of old familiar surroundings
4) A sense of being rejected/not accepted
5) A loss of self-esteem because the person does not seem to be functioning effectively
6) A feeling of impotence at having so little control over the situation
7) A sense of doubt when the persons own cultural values are brought into question.
