It is now half a century since Joey explained to Paul Willis: 'Vandalising […] that's the opposite of boredom -- excitement, defying the law', one of many similar comments subsequently recorded in "Learning to Labour" (34). The book rapidly became an academic best-seller, and has since become an academic 'national treasure'. But, before…

In Goffman's terms, qualitative interviews are social encounters with their own realities. Hence, the 'situational critique' holds that interviews cannot produce knowledge about the world beyond these encounters, and that other methods, ethnography in particular, render lived life more accurately. The situational critique cannot be dismissed; yet…

Ethnographic and interview research have made significant contributions to cumulative social science and influenced the public conversation around important social issues. However, debates rage over whether the standards of positivistic social science can or should be used to judge the rigor of interpretive methods. I begin this essay by briefly…

This article examines the practices of ethnographers carrying out research in and, especially, on organizations. Ethnographers studying organizations, like other ethnographers, emphasize close observation and understanding the meaning of actions, words, and artifacts; they differ from other fieldworkers, though, in focusing on the organization…

This paper uses examples from research conducted in preschools in Japan, China, and the United States to illustrate the features and virtues of return interviews with informants with whom ethnographers have long research engagements. Return interviews and long research engagements are powerful research strategies that help the ethnographers ask…

The ever growing diversity poses challenges for social work educators, who are engaged in developing new pedagogical methods for enhancing multicultural practice. Within the framework of a diversity course, I have developed a pedagogical practice for training social workers to work in a diverse, multicultural reality. Students conduct an…

This paper builds on previous research (Ball, 2012, Ball & Junemann, 2012) to explore some aspects of the embodiment of policy. The author draws on Larner and Laurie's (2010) work on technocratic expertise and how, as she puts it, "privatisation ideas and practices are transferred in embodied forms," and in particular her argument…

This paper is a methodological ethnography aiming to highlight the difficulties in using conventional methods in connection with an explorative philosophy: Deleuze and Guattari's. Taking an empirical point of departure in conversations about the future with students in upper secondary school, the struggle to find a scientifically valid label…

This experimental paper, 'Interview with Self', is not so much the findings of a research project, but rather the continuing process of it. It is part of an auto-ethnographic study of the creative making process, presented here in its unedited form as an example of a methodology and as an artefact of practice. The use of digital technologies and…

The paper explores a collaborative self-study, autoethnography research project, which aided in informing practice for the teaching of reflective practice in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) at an Australian university. Self-report methods were used, because it enabled the collection of a variety of self-awareness data…

This dissertation draws on data from a quarter-long case study implementing a number of social science and humanities research methods. This study was conducted at the University of Washington in two sections of First-Year Composition and investigates the boundary-marking interactions that occur in a writing class by tracing the experiences of…

Intended to guide scholars who are new to qualitative research, this methods brief focuses mostly on what reviewers look for in manuscripts submitted for publication. The author acknowledges that reviewers' preferences likely reflect their theoretical perspectives, research-oriented coursework, mentors, and research and writing experiences. The…

Design ethnography is the appropriation of ethnography for the purposes of informing design. This paper investigates the effects of these appropriations, through a comparative study of how designers and anthropologists approach the same field site and by a review of new techniques introduced by designers to do ethnography. The techniques reviewed…

In this article, we introduce participant viewpoint ethnography (PVE), a phenomenological video research method that combines reflexive, interview-based data with video capture of actual experiences. In PVE, participants wear a head-mounted camera to record the phenomena of study from their point of view. The researcher and participant then review…

This paper introduces institutional ethnography (IE) as a useful and systematic process for examining organizations and work data through the lens of stakeholders, at different levels, and considering the different forces at play. Drawing from ethnomethodology, IE focuses on how everyday experience is socially organized. Ideological shifts have…