There is a dearth of methodological guidance on how to conduct participant observation in private spaces such as family homes. Yet, participant observations can provide deep and valuable data about family processes. This article draws on two ethnographic studies of family life in which researchers conduct in-depth interviews, recruit families, and…

The notion of the ethnographer as participant observer, as an active agent rather than passive observer, is well established within conversations about method and methodology. Less well explored is the extent to which the inherent curiosity and inquisitiveness of the ethnographer might be reciprocated: how might this be established and how might…

This article examines the processes of educational ethnography and questions the traditional use of the field notebook and research relationships. It forms part of an ongoing collaborative study analyzing university students' learning trajectories. Guided by inclusive ethics, the study proposes that researcher-participant collaboration is…

This article explores how researchers adapt to disruptions that cost them access to their field sites, advancing a uniquely sociological perspective on the dynamics of flexibility and adaptation in qualitative methods. Through interviews with 31 ethnographers whose access was preempted or eliminated, I find that adaptation varied systematically…

This article is a response to the methodological problems I experienced during fieldwork. It follows that the article is an experiment of creating alternative possibilities for thinking about ethnocentrism as a phenomenon in transformation in a contemporary, innovative, higher educational setting. Throughout the article, I argue for the…

Ethnography as a methodological approach presents the fieldworker with many ethical crossroads throughout the research process. This is because of the unique position that ethnographers find themselves in, the environments that they research and the relationships which are formed. This paper presents four confessional vignettes from a broader…

In qualitative methods, there are various approaches that can be used to answer particular social questions, for example ethnography and case study. Two studies conducted by different researchers in China and Australia using these approaches were described and analysed in order to find out their similarities and differences in terms of…

This article describes the experiences of two doctoral students immersed in the process of learning ethnographic research. Through the use of a composite narrative of our experiences observing the culture at a division one university baseball complex, we contribute to the literature by sharing our perspectives as ethnographers-in-progress. We…

Ethnographers are particularly interested in writing. They have paid particular attention to the practices of making field notes and to the ways in which their public texts represent those that they have encountered and studied. To date there has been less attention paid to the kinds of writing that used to make sense of experiences in the field.…

There is unexamined potential for developing and testing rival causal explanations in the type of data that participant observation is best suited to create: descriptions of in situ social interaction crafted from the participants' perspectives. By intensively examining a single ethnography, we can see how multiple predictions can be derived from…

When embarking on ethnographic fieldwork, a researcher must carefully consider how to present oneself when entering the field. Presentations of self become particularly important when the culture under study maintains narrowly defined expectations for personal appearance and behavior. The more defined the expectations, the more important it is for…

Through the materiality of fieldwork at a high-achieving high-poverty high school, I discuss how the collision between practices of feminist methodology and the materiality of fieldwork forced me to rethink the "feminist" in feminist research. Using the work of Karen Barad, this material-discursive account of methodology as ontology…

This paper is the outcome of research conducted between June 2010 and January 2011 as part of understanding the building the education revolution (BER) a major policy initiative of the Australian Federal Government which commenced when Julia Gillard, now PM, was the Federal Minister of Education. The BER policy initiative was part of an economic…

Netnography (Kozinets, 2010) is an ethnographic approach to study communities that exist primarily online. Engaging in online participant observation, the netnographer connects to the online community through a computer screen, and the field is located inside the screen. Although it has been used in marketing research extensively, netnography is a…

In this paper, the author first places story telling in context within the broad range of effort associated with case study methods. Then, the author discusses aspects of fieldwork which underlie story telling, first moves, key questions, tricks, listening, looking and synthesis. The author concludes with evaluative criteria for story telling and…