Chapter 5

Question 1

What is ethnographic fieldwork?

Answer 1

The practice whereby an anthropologist is immersed in the daily life of a culture to collect data.

Question 2

What is participatory action research (PAR)?

Answer 2

Anthropologist and the community work together to understand the conditions that produce the communities problems and find solutions to those problems.

Question 3

What is community based participatory research? (CBPR)

Answer 3

A collaboration involving partners from within a community in all aspects of the research process. Most importanty, CBPR begins with a research topic of importance to the community and works towards achieving social change equitably.

Question 4

What is community-based monitoring?

Answer 4

A process where concerned agencies, industry, academia, community groups and local institutions collaborate to monitor, track and respond to issues of common community concern.

Question 5

What are the stages of field research?

Answer 5

Selecting a research problem, formulating a research design, collecting the data, analyzing the data, interpreting the data, writing up and presenting the results.

Question 6

How do anthropologists select a research problem?

Answer 6

Use a problem-oriented approach, ask how and why a particular issue came to be and then seek what can be done about that issue.

Question 7

How do you formulate a research design?

Answer 7

Find out how to identify who to talk to, methods of data collection to be used, and length of time for research. Also write funding and ethics proposals.

Question 8

What are the 2 primary data-collecting techniques?

Answer 8

Participant observation and semi-structured interviews.

Question 9

How do you analyze the data?

Answer 9

Transcribe recordings of interviews, responses to surveys get organized into a spreadsheet for coding, software (ATLAS.ti and Nvivo) help with identifying qualitative patterns. For quantitative analysis, SPSS is the most used software.

Question 10

What are some questions asked when interpreting data? Is this stage easy?

Answer 10

Have the research questions been answered, what patterns/trends emerge from the analysis and what do they mean, how can you explain the findings, how do findings compare to similar studies, how generalizable are the findings, has this resulted in methodological or theoretical issues? This stage is one of the most difficult.

Question 11

What is participant observation and what are the advantages and disadvantages?

Answer 11

Involves living with and observing the people under study.
Advantages- Generally enhances rapport, distinguish actual from expected behaviour, observation of nonverbal behaviour, experience of behaviours being observed
Disadvantages- Practical only for small sample size, difficult to obtain standardized, comparable data, problems recording information=incomplete data, obtrusive effect on subject matter.

Question 12

What are interviews used for?

Answer 12

To obtain information on how people think or feel

Question 13

What are the different types of interviews?

Answer 13

Unstructured- Broad, open-ended questions are asked
Semi-structured- Interview guide covers topics or themes that are needed to be addressed
Interview guide-List of questions and topics that anthropologist uses to guide interviews
Structured interviews- Ethnographic data gathering technique in which large numbers of respondents are asked a set of questions.

Question 14

What is census taking?

Answer 14

The collection of demographic data about the culture being studied.

Question 15

What is ethnographic mapping?

Answer 15

Data-gathering tool that locates where the people being studied live, where they keep their livestock, where public buildings are located etc, to determine how that culture interacts with its environment.

Question 16

What is document analysis?

Answer 16

Examination of data such as personal diaries, newspapers, colonial records etc.

Question 17

What is ethnohistory?

Answer 17

The use of historical documents, oral traditions, as well as other archaeological and ethnographic methods to understand the history of ethnic groups, both past and present.

Question 18

What are the reflexive methods of research?

Answer 18

Narrative ethnography, situated knowledge.

Question 19

What is narrative ethnography?

Answer 19

Ethnographer discusses the influence of his or her own personal and cultural context on the ethnography, which are co-produced and focus on the interaction between themselves and their collaborators.

Question 20

What is situated knowledge?

Answer 20

Anthropological knowledge that is influenced by the anthropologist’s age, gender, religion, socio-economic status, ethnicity, education, sexual orientation, and historical and cultural context.

Question 21

What is autoethnography?

Answer 21

Ethnographer attempts to understand another culture through a description and analysis of their own fieldwork experience.

Question 22

What is a life history?

Answer 22

The story of a collaborators life experience in a culture that provides insight into their culture.

Question 23

Anthropological fieldwork is primarily…

Answer 23

Experiential.

Question 24

What is qualitative data?

Answer 24

Gathered from personal interviews, oral histories, observations, and interactions with community members.

Question 25

What is quantitative data?

Answer 25

Numerical data such as population trends, morbidity and mortality rates, household and community size, number of births and marriages, income, education etc. Good for telling us how many, bad for telling us why.

Question 26

What are the 5 priority funding areas of the SSHRC? (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada)

Answer 26

1) Aboriginal Research 2) Canadian Environmental Issues 3) Digital Economy 4) Innovation, Leadership, and Prosperity 5) Northern Communities: Towards Social and Economic Prosperity.

Question 27

What are OCAP principles?

Answer 27

Principles of ownership, possession, and access that ensure First Nation communities actively participate in ethnographic research-Canadian anthropologists must respect this.

Question 28

What are some things to remember when conducting participant observation research?

Answer 28

Overcome apprehension from the locals, introduce oneself in a way that the locals understand, go slow, communicate to locals genuinely witha want to learn from their expertise.

Question 29

What is unique about the ethnographic interview?

Answer 29

Interviewer and participant often speak different languages, broad in scope, cannot be used alone and must be used in conjunction with other data gathering techniques.

Question 30

How does one measure validity of data?

Answer 30

1) Ask a number of different people the same question-if they all answer the same way independently of another, the data can be assumed to be valid. 2) Ask the same person the same question over a period of time. If a person answers them differently, then you can assume that the responses may not be truthful. 3) compare responses with people's actual behaviour.

Question 31

What is an example in the textbook of ethnohistory?

Answer 31

Ingeborg Marshall's study of the Beothuk- they were the first group of native North Americans to be contacted by Europeans, and disappeared in 1829.

Question 32

What is the genealogical method of data collection?

Answer 32

A technique of data collecting in which the anthropologist writes down all the kin of a research collaborator. Can deduce how family members relate, what the gender roles in the community are, whom marries whom etc.

Question 33

What is one example of the use of the genealogical method?

Answer 33

When anthropologists discovered the cause of Kuru, a fatal neurodegenerative disease among the Fore of New Guinea-caused by women eating their deceased kin and contracting the disease. Disease found to not be hereditary, but cultural in nature.

Question 34

What is proxemic analysis?

Answer 34

The study of how people in different cultures distance themselves from one another in normal interactions.

Question 35

What is event analysis?

Answer 35

Documentation of who participates in events such as circumcision ceremonies, marriages, and funerals.

Question 36

What is the Human Relations Area Files? (HRAF)

Answer 36

Developed by George Peter Murdock at Yale University, helps to develop statistical, cross cultural comparative studies.

Question 37

What is intersubjectivity?

Answer 37

Shared meanings constructed through the interactions of people from different perspectives- idea that collaborators are as equally situated as the ethnographer.

Question 38

What is systematic sociological introspection?

Answer 38

An examination of the ethnographers' emotions, thoughts, and behaviours during fieldwork and how they impact data collection.

Question 39

What is one of the best known life stories?

Answer 39

The one if Nisa, 50 something !Kung woman living in Northeastern Botswana, who told her story about her relationships and life, and helped researchers gain a better understanding of what a females life was like in the !Kung tribe.

Question 40

What is multi-sited fieldwork?

Answer 40

Looks at how forces of globalization influence local communities. Conducted in more than one location, united by a common research topic or theme.

Question 41

What are some ways that culture shock manifests itself?

Answer 41

1) Sense of confusion over how to behave 2) Sense of surprise/disgust after realizing some of the features of a new culture 3) A sense of loss of old familiar surroundings 4) A sense of being rejected/not accepted 5) A loss of self-esteem because the person does not seem to be functioning effectively 6) A feeling of impotence at having so little control over the situation 7) A sense of doubt when the persons own cultural values are brought into question.