You may be asking yourself this question for the first time, or perhaps for the twentieth time. For a full reading, refer to the Handbook . What follows is a brief synopsis of issues from the Handbook intended only as an introduction and general orientation.
Qualitative research is probably the oldest form of inquiry.
Ethnography then, is a descriptive anthropological term referring to a people and their cultural foundations. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, especially, exploration by the Spanish, French, English and Dutch revealed the existence of cultures vastly different from their own. Much of what we know about various indigenous cultures comes from these early descriptions which have fallen into their respective places along an ethnographic time line extending into the twentieth century. It crosscuts the humanities and the social and physical sciences. Since qualitative research involves multiple methodologies, the research itself is often referred to as a bricolage.