Observation and Field Notes in Ethnograghy
0Monday, October 22, 2012 by Dongxia Wang
In Sheffir’s article “Doing the Ethnography”, the author describes his personal experience while doing his graduate studies at in social science. He didn’t have much theoretical background about ethnography, but his graduate research idea came across Hasitic Jews . The best advice given by his advisor was to attend the religious service, observe it and record it. By adhering to the advice, the author obtained the value from doing it and started to give the similar advice to his students. Ethnography is commonly called field research by sociologists. The main process of ethnographic research is to observe what people are doing, how they do it and why they do it. The researchers need to describe what they have observed. Field notes accounts for huge importance in ethnographical research. The researchers need to make notes about what people say and what people. Also they need to write down their own thoughts, questions and things to follow up, etc. The researchers need to transcribe those note in timely fashion in order to make it clear and complete when the memory is still fresh. All those descriptions are valuable when the researcher need to make comparisons.
