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The Essence Of Ethnographic Methods

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The Essence Of Ethnographic Methods
Midterm Paper Urban Semester Summer 2013

The Essence of Ethnographic Methods

The Essence of Ethnographic Methods

Ethnography focuses on observed and experienced participation in the socio-cultural system. This includes research carried out in various communities and cultural groups, where main observations are made about social conditions of the members of these groups and how these conditions are expressed in their daily living. There are some essential central points and aspects of ethnographic methods, and these include fieldwork, communicative processes, and reflection, where each have smaller aspects that comprise the essence of ethnographic methods.

In fieldwork, there are many factors to consider when defining the essence of ethnographic methods. Fieldwork is basically used to gather and collect information about a certain community, and this usually involves going out there and participating in the community in some form or manner. Fieldwork is basically made up of observations, participation, and interviewing. Observations are made through the popular participant-observation system. This is where the researcher takes a place in the daily activities carried by with the community members. This allows researchers to directly experience the explicit culture, which is the culture we can directly see and identify with our eyes. Most importantly, participating in the community allows researchers to see the implicit culture, which is not directly shown and can be observed through the interactions between community members. Being immersed in a community will allow for far greater knowledge acquisition than if you were reading about the community online on a website or article. It takes time and patience to get comfortable enough in an unfamiliar environment, but eventually someone reaches a breakthrough. This breakthrough is defined as a moment where the researcher is invited to certain events that are actually

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