Essays
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Ethnography in the Digital Age - Howard, Alan
This essay explores the ways in which ethnography, both as a methodology and a product of research, has adapted to the rapid growth of digital technology and the new venues for research that it has spawned. On the one hand, digital technology affords social scientists new means of recording, storing, and analyzing data. On the other hand, digital media have been responsible for the creation of new venues for research, mostly on the Internet in the form of websites, blogs, social networks, and multiplayer online games. As a methodology, ethnography, with its beginnings in the anthropological study of non‐Western societies, has proved to be highly adaptable to the task of making sense of, and giving meaning to, computer‐mediated communications in its various forms. This has led to its adoption in the study of online sites by researchers from a number of different disciplines attempting to come to grips with the cultural nuances of digitally formed communities. Ethical problems posed by more powerful forms of surveillance and access to personal information are discussed. The boundaries between public and private domains have become increasingly blurred, resulting in complex issues relating to informed consent. As a product, digital ethnographies allow for nonlineal, hyperlinked presentations that permit new forms of engagement between authors and readers not afforded by traditional published monographs. -
Ethnography: Telling Practice Stories - O'Reilly, Karen
In this essay I argue that the central emerging trend in ethnography is the telling of practice stories, that is narrative (or story‐like) accounts that make sense of social phenomena by understanding how people respond to constraints and opportunities but in turn create the cultures, constraints, and opportunities within which others act. Drawing either overtly or implicitly on different versions of what has become known as practice theory, contemporary ethnographers increasingly aspire to unravel the processes involved in the ongoing constitution of social life. This constitution is made up of free will as well as structures that restrict action. The key principles of ethnography, established to challenge preconceptions and to yield complex understandings, remain fundamental to its methodology. This is despite massive social change and the emergence of “new ethnographies” to understand such things as globalization and technological change. These key principles are exactly what are required for the analysis of social life as practice. Ethnography pays attention to people's feeling and emotions, their experiences and their free choices, but also to the wider constraints and opportunities that frame their agency. And they do this always in the context of people's daily lives, cultures, and communities, using the key methods of watching, taking part, sharing in conversations and listening. -
How Brief Social‐Psychological Interventions Can Cause Enduring Effects - Kenthirarajah, Dushiyanthini (Toni)
In recent years, several studies have shown that brief, theory‐based social‐psychological interventions can cause large, enduring effects on important outcomes, such as school achievement and marital relationships. How are such effects possible? We propose a field‐theory model: this model distinguishes “nudge” interventions—interventions designed to change a “snapshot” in time such as a particular decision or behavior—from interventions designed to change a “movie”—core beliefs or other aspects of the self and thus people's behavior as it unfolds over time in diverse settings. Movie interventions target underlying social‐psychological processes—such as students' confidence that they belong in school or individuals' felt security in close relationships. These psychological processes can interact with naturalistic variables—such as how people interact with one another and the relationships they build—to propel intervention effects forward in time. In this model, real‐world factors can serve as proximal outcomes that catalyze long‐term effects. An important implication is that such interventions can sometimes amplify their effects over time, if the targeted recursive process “snowballs.” A second implication is that the long‐term effects of movie interventions are dependent on the context—specifically, on whether the context affords naturalistic variables that can catalyze changes in the self forward in time. To illustrate this field‐theory model, we compare it to Mortensen and Cialdini's (2010) full‐cycle model. Although both models share important features, including an emphasis on laboratory research, the latter treats forces in the world as “noise” and predicts that the effects of psychological interventions will dissipate, not strengthen with time. In addition to their applied potential, movie interventions raise profound new theoretical questions, such as how psychological processes unfold over time and do so in interaction with social contexts. Exploring these questions represents an exciting direction for future research. -
Participant Observation - Jorgensen, Danny L.
Investigating the meanings of human existence as they are constructed and enacted by people in everyday life situations and settings presents serious challenges for all forms of human studies. Participant observation, whereby the researcher interacts with people in everyday life while collecting information, is a unique method for investigating the enormously rich, complex, conflictual, problematic, and diverse experiences, thoughts, feelings, and activities of human beings and the meanings of their existence. Use of this distinctive method emerged with the professionalization of anthropology and sociology where it gradually was formalized and later spread to a full range of human studies fields. Its practice nevertheless remains artful, requiring creative decision making about problems and questions to be studied, appropriate settings and situations for gathering information, the performance of membership roles, establishing and sustaining trusting relationships, ethics, values, and politics, as well as record making, data analysis and interpretation, and reporting results. This essay provides a brief sketch of the method of participant observation and an overview of a few of the more central issues of its practice, including its location historically within the framework of different views of social scientific methodology.