Newsgroups: bit.listserv.qualrs-l
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1992 19:15:00 PST
              <QUALRS-L@UGA.BITNET>
From:         Tom Weisner UCLA 310-825-0040 <IAR8TSW@UCLAMVS.BITNET>
Subject:      Gary Shank's request

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    To: Gary Shank

From: Tom Weisner, Professor of Anthropology, UCLA

RE: request for short opinions on "what qualitative research means to
me".

Qualitative research is an essential means to explore and understand the
cultural places in which we live our lives -- to do ethnography.
Ethnographic research uses participant observation and qualitative
methods, and takes seriously the participants' own views of their lives.

Whether in schools and classrooms or not, qualitative methods are crucial

for discovery, understanding, validation, and dissemination of research.

Ethnographic work often involves a sustained, long-term approach to
research, with intense personal involvement by the researcher.  This
often places the ethnographer as a participant in events and openly an
active constructor of the data being collected.  Implicit choices in
other methods are made explicit in ethnographic work.  The confusion and
complexity of everyday events come to the fore; neat analytical
categories are tested by this intense exposure to real activities which
are multiply-shaped.  The role of the meaning and interpretation of
events is more visible to the ethnographic researcher.

  Ethnography is not limited only to using qualitative research, as a
perusal of any of the methods texts or articles in the field will show.
Qualitative methods are fully complementary with other methods for
understanding the cultural place.  The well-trained researcher is trained

in how and WHEN to use qualitative methods, and when to use other
complementary methods.

Ethnographic work, like all methods, requires a complex set of skills
which the literature in the field has described.  These include managing
one's fieldwork role, varying notetaking skills, coding techniques for
qualitative data, the use of field data recording techniques for
systematic observation and sampling, the ability to use varying
interviewing techniques, managing the memory requirements of field work,
unique ethical and subject protection issues, techniques for optimizing
reliability and validity in field research, and strategies for writing
and presenting ethnographic data.

As with any other methodological approach in the social sciences,
ethnographic research has an extensive literature covering all of the
standard topics of concern to any methodology, including proven
systematic ways to assess the reliability and bias in qualitative data
(Agar, 1980; Bernard, 1988; Edgerton &  Langness, 1974; Levine,
Gallimore, Weisner, & Turner, 1980); Miles & Huberman, 1984; Lofland &
Lofland, 1984; Narroll & Cohen, eds,1970;  Pelto & Pelto, 1978; Spradley,

1979, 1980; Weisner, 1993; Werner & Schoepfle,1987a, 1987b).










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