Speaker 1: Hey, it's Dr. Rich. I want to just give you a little introduction to my video on ethnographic research. I want you to be sure you understand when you can and when you can't do ethnographic research. It's not like all the other easy stuff where you can just do a qualitative case study of phenomenology. Here, there's certain parameters. Make sure what they are, and I will share them with you right here to make sure you do. Ethnography is really the study of individual cultures. That is the main theme of this lesson, individual cultures. One must have a first-hand knowledge of these individual cultures, and through this lesson, I will share several thoughts I have, more so my school of thought, on how to conduct ethnographic research, and who can and who should not be doing such research. I want to set the stage here with this ethnographic research, and that is it needs to be in a setting during the research, not used to be. The person needs to actually be in this setting, part of the culture, not perhaps at a time they used to be, and now they want to write about because they have experience in it. That's not what this is about. Ethnography is about the researcher truly being part of the culture that is being examined, and oftentimes what we're doing with ethnographic research is studying a culture, not just one person or several people, but we're examining the culture as a whole. I'll give several examples in this lesson. You must be in the same situation, not just an observer, and that's what makes this research design somewhat unique. It would be easy for me to do a case study in a hospital setting, in an emergency room, because I can go in, interview people. I can look at their documents. I don't have to be a doctor. I don't have to be an emergency room technician. I don't have to have had firsthand experience to do research in a certain setting, but here in ethnography, I would have to. I could not apply an ethnographic research study to the hospital unless I worked literally in that culture. Now culture can mean an organizational culture. Oftentimes, it's a culture of people, of a society. So ethnographic research has broad spectrums, but still it's about a specific unique culture and the person doing the research should be part of that culture. You have to have a true reflection of who you write about. If I was to write about that case study, for example, in a hospital setting, I don't have a true reflection. I just know what I'm told from the people I interview and the information that I receive. I don't know what it's like for a nurse to suffer through long hours, 12, 16 hours a day, one patient after another. That can only come from a nurse or somebody who has actually had that type of experience. Keep in mind the whole concept of ethnographic research is to study a culture which the researcher is part of at the time of the research. It's a systematic study in the sense that there are rules on how to do such ethnographic research. It's not just go do anything, talk with anybody. It's designed still with the concept of some sort of problem in mind that dissertation research or any research applying ethnographic research design would produce information to help people make a better decision. And it's that examination of the cultural phenomena. If, for example, you want to do a study of American Indians in the United States, if you were an American Indian living in such an environment, then that would be fine. It doesn't mean that just because you were an American Indian and you no longer live in that culture that you should be able to do this research or you might do a phenomenological design, but not ethnographic. Keep in mind the focus of this is of a culture and the researcher must be within that culture. Research within the culture is what this type of research is designed to produce. Give information about what's happening in that specific culture from the first-hand experiences of the researcher. And the idea is that you can produce meaning that's reflective of those in the group, reflective of those in the group, not the perspective of others looking in, but the meaning of those within the group. If it happens to be that group of nurses in the hospital, in the ER setting, it's going to reflect what those people actually have done. It's going to allow the researcher, as long as they have that nursing experience, to relate to such information in a way that perhaps I cannot because I don't have the same education. I don't have the same lived experiences. We're going to still present empirical data because we're going to analyze documents and I'll give you several of those, which one might use in an ethnographic study in a few moments. It's going to be interviews, going to be observation. So there's a lot of empirical data, but there'll also be secondary data as well. It's not uncommon that you could find secondary data, particularly in a hospital setting. If you were to look at the American Indian culture, you're still going to find a lot of information that's out there perhaps in folklore or in stories that will be able to be used in the ethnographic study. The ethnographic study can reflect the present as well as the past. The past being an understanding of the history and how something came to be in that culture today. If you're going to look at the American Indian culture, well, it's long standing traditions over hundreds of years. That information is important to understand how they are today in that culture. Ethnographic research allows for that first-hand observed behavior with the understanding of the behavior of the people in there because the person doing the research is part of that group. It provides the concepts, but not causal or correlation explanations. It's not about what happened based on something. It doesn't mean what happened in the emergency room or in the American Indian population or their culture is a correlated fact from something else or causal that what we have today is caused by something else. It's something that's happened over time. It's developed. It's matured to what it is today in these cultures. Nothing wrong with understanding where the cultures came from to what they are today. And that's part of the ethnographic understanding is to gain a sense of transition. When we're doing an examination of any culture, we don't just look at the culture today, but we look at how it became what it is today. It's the shared learning patterns of values of the people. The behaviors of the people, their beliefs, and the language of a culture shared by a group of people. Perhaps if you go into an emergency room, you're going to realize that they have a language you're not familiar with as is common in almost any industry. When I was in the military, we had our own language. In research, there's its own terminology. And in a culture such as the American Indian culture or any culture around the world, there's certain languages of that culture. It doesn't mean it's not English or it's not a certain language where you might live in your country. It's your first language. It means that there's slang terminologies. There's words that the average person wouldn't understand unless they have the same knowledge level skills, abilities, training, and education of those within the culture. It's not uncommon that people from different cultures have different values, different behaviors, different beliefs. There's some understanding and some work that people do in industry that good is good enough. But in a hospital setting where human lives are at stake, good may never be enough because they have to have behaviors and beliefs that they need to find exactly what's wrong. They need to make sure that they save lives, not just take care of lives and move them to another situation within the hospital. The idea of ethnographic research is this detailed, in-depth description of everyday life and practices. So if you were going to go into a hospital setting, you wanted to look at how the emergency room culture is, you wouldn't necessarily do it like you would in a case study where you might look at what happened on one day in one event because that's a day, that's an event, that's a situation that we would be doing research on. Here, we would be looking more so to look at how is everyday practice of an emergency room occurring and therefore we can learn how it is all the time. And then maybe we might want to complement ethnographic research with a case study of situational outcomes when there's something that's out of the normal and then we can have some comparisons. I'm going to give you an idea of several forms of ethnographic research. Just like in almost every research method and design, there are different ways, different options, different approaches to collecting and analyzing data. One of the ways is to consider the realistic ethnographic research where it's a third-party perspective, supposed to be an objective view, in the culture but out of sight. That means you may have been in that culture at one time and you're still in that culture, but you're not involved with them on a day-to-day basis in your research. You're standing back. You're staying out of sight. So let's say, for example, you happen to be an emergency room nurse who has been qualified to work in an emergency room for 10 or 15 years. When you do the research, you may just be an observer, maybe watching what aspects of everyday people are doing in that emergency room situation all the way through from day one of the research. Maybe it's going to be for 30 days, but you're not going to be involved with situations when they have to take care of patients or prepare to take care of patients. You're just going to be observing them. You're out of sight. You're kind of just in the background and you still have the information and knowledge of if you were working there, but in this understanding of realist is the idea that you have the experience, but you're going to see what other people do and that may be the essence of then interviewing people, then gaining more insights and more data from the observation results. Another part is critical ethnography. This is taking a stance for the groups that have been marginalized. This is groups that are marginalized. More so, I would direct this towards different types of cultures of people. Again, the American Indian, I will use that as a culture and we might define them as having been marginalized over 200 plus years of the United States. That's unfortunate that they have been marginalized, but how have they been marginalized? And so if we're wanting to look at that culture as it is today and often look at the sense of maybe they were victimized or they had some suppression happen to them over the years as the American country came to be the United States and how the demographics of the United States has changed because of that in 200 years. And of course, like all research, particularly qualitative research, we find that the results are often subjective and biased. This is understandable because if one has little experience within the culture, they may be biased, but we can somewhat account for that bias. We can consider it a certain limitation. We can consider certain assumptions about those results that come from the researcher. We can maybe have more than one researcher involved in the process. So instead of just one person observing, it's several and then there's a comparison of notes to find out what's happening with less bias if possible. Some of the sources to consider when you do ethnographic research are the direct observation. I mentioned an opportunity where you might be a direct observer, an emergency room. This is probably one of the most common types of data collection for ethnographic research that I'm aware of. But we're also going to look at many other items or sources and one of them could be artifacts. This comes in handy particularly when we're looking at a culture of people such as the American Indian or if you want to look at Eskimos or you want to look at any type of culture. There's usually some artifacts that go back sometimes hundreds and thousands of years. We would consider those in our data analysis. We could certainly look at government reports if you're doing something like the emergency room situation where you want to look at that in regards to an ethnographic study. Then you might be not only looking at government reports, but organizational reports, organizational guidance that's provided. Maybe there has been research already done. Maybe there is some sort of reports from emergency room use over the years. Any kind of reports would be considered as data for this type of research. Definitely we would look at what's happening in the media and that could be social media. It could be the news. It could be magazines. If you were going to do any kind of research in the culture of people again, going back and using the Indians, American Indians specifically in the United States. There's been stories, movies, documentaries about the American Indian over the many years. All those sources would be reasonable and logical to consider for an ethnographic research design. Now you're probably starting to get a sense that this may not be as simple as doing a case study or phenomenological design. It's not. There are many more opportunities for data to be analyzed and evaluated in ethnographic research. And that is why oftentimes the outcome of ethnographic research is so powerful because there's so many different sources one can use to gain new insights. You can use books, articles, and different research reports as well. It's not only government reports or company reports. You can look at all the different research that's out there that you can find. Any kind of articles. This does not mean to be peer-reviewed journal articles or empirical research articles. It could be articles from newspapers and magazines. We can also look at books. They can be scholarly books. They can be how-to books. They can be biographies or autobiographies. There's many different sources again that one can consider when doing ethnographic research. The interviews, of course, can be done like in most types of qualitative research. The actual interviews. But keep in mind, if you're the interviewer, you must have the same experiences as those you're interviewing. It's not like me going to interview American Indians and finding out what their culture is like today or what their concerns are because I'm not an American Indian. I don't even live in that culture and I know very little about it other than a third-party, long-distance observer of what's happened in that culture. So the interviewer must be one of the same qualifications as those being interviewed. Folklore. I mentioned folklore because in many cultures there's different folklore. Folklore could be real and it could be stories. Stories of over the years. I know that in the Hawaiian culture they have a concept of talking story and that talking story is a way of sharing traditions that have been passed down over the years as that culture has evolved. As I looked into dissertations in ProQuest about ethnographic research, I wanted to find out what areas they were in. And so you can see here that of the 87,000 plus dissertations in ProQuest that some of them were related to nursing and nurses, educators, business people, students, patients in hospitals and this is different types of patients and prisoners and pregnant women. Now there are many others as well but these are the common ones that I found so you can get a sense for where ethnographic research might be applicable for you if you're considering this or if you happen to be a doctoral dissertation chair, a faculty member. Help people to better understand that it's not only about a culture of people but any kind of culture that exists whether that be in an organization or of a population.