INTRODUCTION TO ETHNOGRAPHIC AND QUALITATIVE …



Interpretive Methods

56: 163:691:01

Spring 2017 Tuesdays 6-8:40 p.m.

Room 309, 405-407 Cooper Street

Professor Lauren Silver, ljsilver@camden.rutgers.edu, Office: 405-407 Cooper Street, Room 313, Phone: 856-225-2354

Office Hours: Tuesdays 3-4 and Thursdays, 11-12

This course provides an introduction to ethnographic and qualitative research, focusing on the daily social contexts of children and youth. Ethnography is the study of culture and social organization primarily through participant observation and interviewing. Ethnographers carry out their research by becoming a participant/observer, to varying degrees, in the social setting they wish to study. Ethnographic research provides descriptive and interpretative analyses of the routine practices of everyday life. Accounts represent different ways people make sense of their lives and describe the types of social organization (for example, gender relations, class systems, or racial divisions) that, in part, serve to structure or pattern behavior.

Course goals: This course has both practical and conceptual goals. 1). Students should learn how to do a small-scale qualitative research project, and in the process they should gain skills in various qualitative research methods such as interviewing and writing fieldnotes. 2). Students should explore conceptual and ethical questions that have been raised with respect to qualitative research with children. Some questions concern the nature of the knowledge produced by qualitative research: What counts as good evidence for knowledge claims about a subject’s world? What is the relationship between what people say and what outside observers think they are doing? Other questions concern the social position of the researcher in qualitative research: Does one have to be a member of a group to do good qualitative research on that group? How can adults gain access to and study children and youth’s social worlds? What unique ethical and methodological concerns should one consider when researching children? Should qualitative research have practical or critical goals? What distinguishes qualitative from quantitative research?

Course Requirements: To complete the course successfully students are expected to 1). Do the reading. 2). Attend on-time and participate in class (Attendance at ALL graduate seminars is required—you are allowed one excused absence before your course grade is lowered). 3). Complete the assignments listed on the syllabus, which require you to prepare in advance and contribute to in-class activities: observation exercise and emic concept. 4). Do a small-scale field study. This fourth assignment requires that you prepare and submit five elements at different times during the semester, as indicated on the syllabus: an IRB packet, interview protocol, sample fieldnotes, a transcribed interview, and a final report. You will be graded on how well you demonstrate the practical skills and conceptual issues raised in the course. Primary evidence for this will be the final project report, but class participation and the short building assignments will also provide relevant evidence.

Please note that IRB approval is required.



I will submit materials from all students together to the IRB on two occasions.

1). On January 24, you will submit copies of your certificates to me indicating successful completion of the Human Subjects Certification Program.



2). On February 7, you are required to submit an IRB Project Packet: project description, letter of permission from official site supervisor on their letterhead, as well as your consent and assent forms.

Grading: See below and class participation is assumed but also worth 5% of your grade. If you have more than one excused absence, your final grade will be lowered by ½ a letter grade. If you earn an A, you will receive an A-.

Assignment Schedule:

|January 24 |Provide Copy of Certificate of Completion for Human Subject Certification |

|February 7 |IRB Project Packet (5%) |

|February 21 |Submit observation exercise (5%) |

|February 28 |In-class exercise: Bring three documents/objects |

|March 7 |In-class exercise: Bring three copies of interview guide |

|March 21 |Submit fieldnotes (5%) |

|April 4 |Submit interview transcripts (5%) |

|April 11 |Submit Emic concept (5%) |

|May 4 |Submit final report (70%) |

Required Texts

Best, Amy L. (Ed.) 2007. Representing Youth: Methodological Issues in Critical Youth Studies.

New York: New York University.

Davis, Dana-Ain and Christa Craven. 2016. Feminist Ethnography: Thinking Through

Methodologies, Challenges, and Possibility. New York: Rowan & Littlefield

Emerson, R.M., Fretz, R.I., & Shaw, L.L. 2011. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, 2nd Ed.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Maxwell, J. A. 2013. Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach, 3rd Ed. Thousand

Oaks, CA: Sage.

The texts can be purchased from the Rutgers University Camden Bookstore. All other articles and chapters listed on the syllabus can be found on the library’s electronic reserve.

Please note that the supplemental readings listed on the syllabus are not required.

Sakai: We will be using some of the features of the Sakai web class management site. To get started, go to sakai.rutgers.edu and log in with your Rutgers net ID and password. Please visit the site frequently. If you experience any trouble, please contact the Help Desk.

Course Schedule

January 17

Introduction: Overview of course, project, and assignments

Discuss Handout: guidelines for projects and IRB requirements

January 24

Studying Culture and Social Organization among Children and Youth

Greene, S. and Hill, M. 2009. Researching Children’s Experience: Methods and

Methodological Issus. In S. Greene & D. Hogan (Eds.), Researching Children’s

Experiences (Chapter 1). Los Angeles: Sage.

Edmond, R. 2009. Ethnographic Research Methods with Children and Young People. In

S. Greene & D. Hogan (Eds.), Researching Children’s Experiences (Chapter 7).

Los Angeles: Sage.

Best, A. L. (Ed.) 2007. Representing Youth (Introduction and Chapter 1)

Davis, Dana-Ain and Christa Craven. 2016. Feminist Ethnography (Chapter 4)

Supplemental Readings:

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. Thick Description. In The Interpretation of Cultures.

Hammersley, M. & Atkinson, P. 1995. Ethnography. New York: Routledge (Ch. 1: What

is Ethnography?).

Venkatesh, Sudhir. 2008. Gang Leader for a Day (Chapter 1). New York: Penguin Press.

Assignment Due: Complete Human Subjects Certification Program and bring a copy of certificate to class.

January 31

Overview: Qualitative Research Design

Maxwell, J.A. Qualitative Research Design.

February 7

Ethics: Considerations when Children are Research Subjects

Hill, M. 2009. Ethical Consideration in Researching Children’s Experiences. In

S. Greene & D. Hogan (Eds.), Researching Children’s Experiences (Chapter 4).

Los Angeles: Sage.

Punch, Samantha. 2002. Research with Children: The same or different from research

with adults? Childhood Vol. 9(3): 321–341. (located under resources, sakai)

Cocks, Alison. 2006. The Ethical Maze: Finding an Inclusive Path Towards Gaining

Children's Agreement to Research Participation. Childhood 13(2): 266-274. (located

under resources, sakai)

Davis, Dana-Ain and Christa Craven. 2016. Feminist Ethnography (Chapter 3)

Assignment Due: Submit IRB project packet (see guidelines on page 8): includes project description, consent/assent forms, and a letter from the official site supervisor on their letterhead granting permission to conduct fieldwork.

February 14

Fieldwork: Negotiating Access and Researcher Roles

Best, A. L. (Ed.) 2007. Representing Youth (Chapters 6 and 9).

Davis, John, Watson, Nick and Sarah Cunningham-Burley. 2008. Disabled Children,

Ethnography and Unspoken Understandings. In Christensen, Pia and Allison

James (Eds) Research With Children: Perspectives and Practices. New York:

Routledge. (located under resources, sakai)

Thorne, Barrie. 1994. Gender Play (Chapter 2: Learning from Kids). New Brunswick,

NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Discuss Handouts: Guidelines for fieldnotes, negotiating a research relationship

February 21

Participant Observation and Fieldnotes

Emerson, R.M. et al. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (Chapters 1-4)

Assignment Due: Observation Exercise

February 28

Document Research and Digital Ethnography

Readings: TBD

In-class Exercise: Bring in 3 physical documents or digital documents from your field site.

Discuss Handouts: Guidelines for interviews

March 7

Interviewing and Focus Groups

Clark, Cindy Dell. 2011. In a Younger Voice. (Chapter 4: Individual Depth Interviews

and Chapter 5: Focus Groups.)

Westcott, H.L. & Littleton, K.S. 2009. Exploring Meaning in Interviews with Children.

In S. Greene & D. Hogan (Eds.), Researching Children’s Experiences (Chapter

8). Los Angeles: Sage.

Mayall, Berry. 2008. Conversations with Children: Working with Generational Issues. In

Christensen, Pia and Allison James (Eds.), Research With Children: Perspectives

and Practices, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge. (located under resources, sakai)

Hennessy, E. & Heary, C. 2009. Exploring Children’s Views through Focus Groups. In S.

Greene & D. Hogan (Eds.), Researching Children’s Experiences (Chapter 13).

Los Angeles: Sage.

In-class Exercise: Bring 3 copies of interview guide. You will get feedback from your classmates.

March 21

Data Analysis

Emerson, R.M. et al. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (Ch. 5 & 6).

Anderson, Leon. Analytic Autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

35(4): 373-395. (located under resources, sakai)

Spyrou, Spyrous. 2016. Researching children’s silences: Exploring the fullness of voice in childhood research. Childhood, 23 (1):17-21. (located under resources, sakai)

Supplemental Reading:

Baker, C. 2004. Membership Categorization and Interview Accounts. In Qualitative

Research: Theory, Method and Practice, 2nd Ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Assignment Due: Fieldnotes documenting observations

Discuss Handouts: Reflections on Data Analysis, Strategies for Focusing a Qualitative Study.

March 28

Ethnographic Writing

Emerson, R.M. et al. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (Ch. 7 & 8)

Caully, Darrel. 2008. Making Qualitative Reports Less Boring: The Techniques of

Writing Creative Non-fiction. Qualitative Inquiry, 14(3): 424-449. (located under resources, sakai)

Lahman, Maria K.E., Katrina L. Rodriguez, Veronica M. Richard, Monica R. Geist,

Roland K. Schendel and Pamela E. Graglia. 2011. Re(Forming) Research

Poetry. Qualitative Inquiry, 17(9): 887-896. (located under resources, sakai)

Davis, Dana-Ain and Christa Craven. 2016. Feminist Ethnography (Chapter 6)

Discuss Handout: Research Report: Outline, Critical review of ethnographic reports

April 4

Visual Qualitative Methods

Guest Instructor: Dr. Daniel Cook

Readings: TBD

Assignment Due: Interview Transcript

April 11

Standards of Quality and Verification

Eisenhart, M.A. & Howe, K.R. 1992. Validity in Educational Research. In The Handbook

of Qualitative Research in Education.

Forthcoming. Small, Mario Luis. Lost in Translation: How Not to Make Qualitative

Research More Scientific. National Science Foundation.

Ellis, Carolyn. 2000. Creating Criteria: An Ethnographic Short Story. Qualitative

Research, 6(2): 273-277. (located under resources, sakai)

Bochner, Arthur. 2000. Criteria Against Ourselves. Qualitative Research, 6(2): 266-272.

(located under resources, sakai)

Assignment Due: Emic concept

April 18

Creative and Participatory Methods with Children

Best, A. L. (Ed.) 2007. Representing Youth (Chapters 11, 12, 13)

Veale, A. 2009. Creative Methodologies in Participatory Research with Children. In

S. Greene & D. Hogan (Eds.), Researching Children’s Experiences (Chapter 14).

Los Angeles: Sage.

Davis, Dana-Ain and Christa Craven. 2016. Feminist Ethnography. (Chapter 7)

April 25

Final Class: Research Project Presentations.

Final Reports DUE May 4

Interpretive Methods

Guidelines for Fieldwork Project

Overview

The range of possible projects for this course is broad. You will select a field site where children (ages 3-18) are engaged in everyday activities (i.e. local school, community center, or after-school program). The main requirements are that the mini-study takes place in a field site and that it involves participant observation, qualitative interviewing, and the collection of documents. Data collection should continue throughout the semester. Therefore, you should find a site where it will be feasible for you to participate in mundane everyday activities over a period of time. This will allow you to observe similar types of interaction several times in order to determine social patterns as well as unique events or practices.

The central aims of this course are for you to learn about interpretive and qualitative methods and explore ethical research practices with children. You will do this through conducting a simple short-term project, in attempt to explain a particular social phenomenon of importance to children as well as bring together different types of data and sources of evidence in writing up an account.

Human Subjects Certification

In order to gain the training necessary to conduct human subject research for your course project, the IRB requires that you first successfully complete the web-based Human Subjects Certification Program. Expect the preparation and exam to take a minimum of three hours. You are required to complete certification by January 24. You should bring with you to class a printed certificate, which will then be submitted together as a class to the IRB.

Please see this site for a link to the web-based program:



Data Collection:

(1) You are required to complete interviews with three participants (3-4 hours of audio-recorded interviews). You can interview children and/or the adults who interact with children at your field site. You MUST follow practices of informed consent and assent, which we will go over in class. Furthermore, you MUST avoid any questions that might elicit emotionally distressing topics for a subject. You are required to transcribe half an hour of one interview for review by me, as well as relevant sections of the other interviews for your report.

You are required to submit a brief project description, interview protocol, as well as your consent and assent forms to me on February 7. You must also submit an approval letter from the site supervisor at your field site on their letterhead, which will be submitted to the IRB for approval.

(2) You are required to complete 12 hours of observation at your field site. You will need to write extensive fieldnotes after each observation to describe fully the activities and interactions observed.

(3) You will collect documents about your field site (These may include descriptions on websites or policies/rules about particular sites). Documents enable you to consider the official descriptions of a site in relation to the practices you observe.

Sharing and discussing your research products and process is key to the learning experience in this course. This raises issues of confidentiality. You should inform participants in your study that interview transcripts and fieldnotes will be shared with fellow students and the professor in the course. You MUST also ensure them that you will not identify them in any documents, and you MUST changes names to pseudonyms in any data that you share so that your informants will not be identifiable. Everyone in this class is also required to respect the confidentiality of the information that will be shared.

Restrictions:

(1) No covert research: This type of research is ethically questionable and not allowed.

(2) No comparative studies: Your main research question should not take the form of “What is the difference between _____ and ______?” In other words, you should not attempt to understand the difference between two settings or two categories of children. While comparative studies are central to qualitative research, you will not have the time to do a comparative study effectively in one semester.

(3) No evaluative studies: Your research question should not the form of “What is the effect of_____ on ______?” While evaluation studies are critically important, they typically require that the “outcome” of some intervention, curriculum, practice, or program be “measured.” Evaluation studies typically require a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. Conducting an adequate evaluation study will not be feasible in this course.

IRB Project Packet: Due February 7

Your narrative should be 2-3 double-spaced pages in length.

• State the purpose of your proposed study (one or two main research questions and/ or study objectives.)

• Provide background for your particular project interest—you do not have to include a literature review but this is where you can state briefly any expertise that prepares you to conduct this project and in a way that is sensitive to your research participants.

• Explain your research design: You should state that you are doing a qualitative project that involves observation, interviewing, and document analysis.

o Explain where you are conducting the study and how this site will enable you to address your research interests

o Describe the interactions you will be observing and how these will help you address your research questions. You will state that you will do 12 hours of observation and will write fieldnotes to document your observations.

o Describe who you will be interviewing and what you hope to learn from your participants. State that you will do three interviews and you should mention how many will be with children (ages) and how many will be with adults (i.e. teacher, program director). State that you will record and then transcribe your interviews.

o You should identify the types of documents or materials you will be analyzing and why.

• State that you will code your interview and fieldnote data for relevant themes and then will submit a course report that analyzes the relationships among essential themes identified across data sources.

• What potential difficulties (personal, practical, conceptual, or methodological) do you foresee in doing this project? How might you deal with these?

Observation Exercise: Due February 21

First, find another student as a partner to do the exercise with. You will be doing the first part of the exercise independently. Second, choose a public space of some kind to observe: a street corner, a sports event, a shopping center, or any other public place where people (preferably children or youth) are engaged in some activity. Too little activity will not give you enough data to work with, as well as possibly making people feel “watched”. You and your partner should pick different positions from which to observe the activity, but you should both be looking at the same general space. Once you have chosen your positions, go through the following steps:

1. Describe the setting. Part of this description should be a map of the activity, noting features

of the physical environment that seem to be significant. Also record the date, day of the week, time of day, weather, and other factors that you think may be relevant to understanding what’s happening.

2. Write a general description of what’s going on. This is mainly for background and context. Also record your reactions and thoughts about what’s going on, but keep these reactions distinct from the description.

3. Start describing in detail the activity you are seeing. At this point, keep your description concrete, specific and chronological—“when the lighted sign on the post changed from walk to wait, the six people approaching the corner continued across the street,” it is better than “pedestrians didn’t obey the traffic signal.” At this point, your guiding question is “What is going on here?” Your notes for this part of the exercise should consist of event-by-event narrative, rather than generalizations. Part of the time, pay attention to particular individuals; at other times, try to describe collective actions. Separately, record your thoughts and inferences about the motives, perceptions, and values of the people you’re watching, and why you think the things you’re seeing are happening.

4. As you observe, begin to focus on something that seems interesting to you: a pattern that you see, or a particular aspect of the activity that you’re observing.

5. When you’ve done roughly 15 minutes of detailed observations (steps 3 and 4), stop. Go back over your notes, filling in important but missing details from memory, and add your interpretations of what you saw. In addition make notes to yourself about problems and questions that came up as you were observing, and ideas that you would investigate further if this were an ongoing study.

6. At your computer, rewrite your rough field notes, putting them into a usable form (i.e., in a form that you would be able to use in an ongoing study). This basically involves making the notes more organized and coherent. The rewritten notes should be based on your rough notes: add corrections, additional ideas, etc. that emerged from your discussion with your partners, but keep these distinct from your original observations.

7. Bring your notes and reflections to class. You will have some time to get together with your partner and compare notes, accounts, and interpretations. How do your accounts differ? What points did you disagree on? Why do you think this happened? What differences were there in how you took field notes, and what were the relative advantages of the different approaches?

Adapted from Joseph Maxwell and Jeff Shultz

Emic Concept Assignment: Due April 11

Write a memo on a particular emic concept that you have identified in your research. By “emic concept” I mean a concept in your informants’ own language and thought, one that they use to think and talk about their perspectives and experiences, rather than one that you as a researcher have brought to or developed during your research. For example, “cutting class” is an emic concept for most high school students; “resistance to school culture” and “hidden curriculum” are not.

For this assignment, you should pick a single important concept that has emerged in your research, and address the following questions.

1. What, specifically, is the concept that you’ve identified? For whom is it an emic concept? How did you discover it? Why do you think it is important?

2. What can you infer about the meaning of this concept for the participants in your study? Provide evidence to support these inferences.

Next, use your description of the emic concept to reflect on conceptual questions about qualitative research. What is the relationship between what people say they are doing and what an outsider might think they are doing? Does the emic concept you have described miss or distort some important aspect of people’s experience? If so, what warrant do you have for claiming this? If not, could you give purely emic description of your research site, or are some outsider categories necessary? Why?

Memo should be 3-4 double-spaced pages.

Research Report Guidelines

Due May 4

I. Introduction to the topic and its significance [1 page]: General statement of the problem you studied and its significance (why should the reader be interested in your research?).

II. Literature review [1-2 pages]: Identify one controversy (unresolved issue, dilemma, debate) in your field to which this study will speak. Critically analyze the way the problem you are addressing has been defined and studied, and the conclusions that have been reached in prior research. How does your study relate or differ from previous research or this topic or research question? (Refer to 3-4 studies for this assignment. This is just an exercise, not an adequate literature review).

III. Research Questions [1 page]: Usually two main questions, with one or two subsidiary (refining) questions nested within each major question. (You can report here or in the methods section on how your sense of the problem and questions changed over the course of your study).

IV. Methods [3-4 pages]:

A. Describe the setting [1-2 paragraphs]: Why did you choose to study your research question in this setting?

B. Access, roles, and ethics [1 page]: Discuss issues involved in gaining access and defining a role in the context in which you carried out your research. How did who you are influence the kind of data/perspectives you were able to obtain? How did you negotiate your role(s)? Discuss any ethical considerations that might have emerged and how you addressed these issues.

C. Methods you used and for what purposes [1-2 page]: how did you collect the data you needed to answer your research questions? Identify the kinds of evidence you gathered and show how the different types helped you to answer your questions. In terms of participant observation research, where did you participate and in what ways? With whom? Report how much time you spent in the field. How did you decide whom to interview? For what purposes or to gather what kinds of information? Report how many informants you interviewed, the types of people interviewed, and how long the interviews tended to last. What sources did you use for documentary evidence?

V. Your account/data analysis: Rather than simply reporting your finding, in qualitative research you discuss the major themes and present your assertions related to these themes/issues. You substantiate your assertions using various data (triangulate multiple data sources) and textured descriptions (single quotes/multiple voices, general descriptions, interpretive commentary, vignettes, documentary evidence, etc.)

VI. Future research [1 page]: If you could go back to your site and do a more extended project, how would your questions and methods change? What additional research would you now like to do?

VII. Reference list: Full bibliographic information for all references cited.

(Overall length: 20-25 pages, double-spaced.)

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