Ethnography is a method for collecting data for descriptive purposes, focusing on a particular culture or setting. The term was coined by the linguist August Ludwig Schlözer (1777) and the method was sub- sequently adopted by cultural anthropologists. Global psychologists have adapted the ethnographic method and claim their own distinct fieldwork tradition (Munroe & Munroe, 1986). Yet whichever field the researcher comes from, doing ethnography effectively is a considerable personal commitment since it involves leaving behind the comfort and security of one’s own cultural circumstances.
The fieldworker as sojourner experiences acculturation, and may also experience acculturative stress in which self-doubt, loss of motivation, depression and other problems may become great enough to hinder the work.
(Berry et al., 2002, p. 234) For the anthropologist Sir Raymond Firth, ethnographic research
attempts to understand, by close and direct contact, how a living community works and what the beliefs, norms and values by which it lives are.
(Firth, 1972, p. 10) Yet often global psychologists are less concerned with understanding entire living communities. They tend to use fieldwork as a means of gathering data about how a selected issue or variable figures in the lives of a community. Psychological research questions posed by ethno- graphic work include the following.
• Do distinct styles of remembering predominate among the Swazi of East Africa? (Bartlett, 1932)
• Do differences in cognitive style affect the problem-solving perform- ance of Central African indigenous groups? (van de Koppel, 1983)
• How does communal childrearing among the Central African Efe reflect the norms of that cultural group? (Tronick & Morelli, 1992) Doing ethnography involves actively observing and taking part in the behaviours and experiences that are being studied. Fieldwork, in short, is
participant observation. Ideally, behaviours and experiences that are studied by ethnographers barely depart from the way people routinely act and feel (Banister et al., 1997). As participants in the social transactions acted out with and around them, ethnographers don’t just observe life objectively. They interpret it with subjectivity. Indeed, the ethnographic art of writing accounts of research that combine participation, reportage and interpretation has been termed thick description (Geertz, 1973).
Researchers who opt for the ethnographic method face several practical questions. For example, the fieldworker must decide how embedded s/he wants (or is able) to become. Though involvement is central, over- involvement may lead to a situation in which the behaviours being studied
‘become soon so familiar they escape notice’ (Malinowski, cited in Stock- ing, 1983, p. 100). Here are a few more of the pressing questions faced by ethnographers in the field.
Questions of proximity
Unlike researchers who use other methods, ethnographers surrender the opportunity of retreating from the research scenario after a long day.
Individual researchers must decide about their preferred degree of spa- tial segregation. Too little can be a personal strain; too much may yield superficial data.
Questions of collaboration
Ethnographers constantly re-examine their relationships with representa- tives from the groups they are studying. They need to ask themselves who stands to benefit from this project? For emically oriented cultural psychologists, indigenous groups are involved in advising ethnographers on data collection methods and in devising research questions.
Questions of ethics
• Deception. It has been known for fieldworkers to gain entry into cul- tural groups for study purposes without fully divulging their aims. In one notorious example, allegations of deception were levelled at Napoleon Chagnon’s work with the Brazilian Yanomamo (Tierney, 2001). He is accused of covertly precipitating a measles epidemic in order to test his theory about the Yanomamo’s unique genetic resist- ance to the disease.
• Debriefing. Doing ethnography may be conditional on host popula- tions receiving reports on the findings. This may compromise the con- tent of such reports. This again relates to the question of who the project is supposed to benefit in the first place, and is less of an issue for the truly emically oriented researcher.
The following quote from Denzin and Lincoln (2000, p. 8) illustrates the compatibility between cultural psychology and qualitative, value-laden research methods.
The word qualitative implies an emphasis on . . . processes and meanings that are not experimentally examined or measured in terms of quantity. Qualitative researchers stress the socially con- structed nature of reality . . . and the situational constraints that shape inquiry. Such researchers emphasise the value-laden nature of inquiry. They seek answers to questions that stress how social experience is created and given meaning.
• Ethical codes. All psychological researchers tend to follow a preset code of conduct, laid down by their professional body. Interestingly, though, in the case of ethnography, since the idea is to gain entry into the beliefs, norms and value systems of another cultural group, the researcher may question the desirability of sticking to moral codes brought in from outside.
Fieldwork is a combination of methods (observing, interviewing, experi- menting, surveying) which yields an ongoing record of observations, events and conversations. The resulting fieldnotes typically include three broad varieties of recorded data (Munroe & Munroe, 1986).
• Census data involve building a demographic profile of the region or group being studied. They include details about the number of households, first languages spoken and occupations.
• Context data are more interpretive, less factual. They reveal the local meanings of a culture, its manners, norms, the characteristics of its key institutions. They may include insider knowledge about gender roles, kinship practices and social taboos.
• Variable-related data are the most focused of the data types. They relate directly to the variable that is the subject matter for the study.
There are, however, relatively few classic ethnographies to grace the archives of global psychology. This reminds us that the method itself remains more anthropological than psychological. Even so, for those who are keen to explore the terrain between the two disciplines, Banister et al.
(1997) argue that the ethnographies can uniquely contribute to our understanding of living cultures, as seen through the eyes of an active participant.
Research modelled on everyday practice
When collecting naturalistic, qualitative data, researchers are effect- ively ‘out of control’. In other words, they relinquish overall control of their research. Studies arise from the everyday activities of partici- pants, not the researcher’s theoretical interests or data collection pref- erences (Cole, 1998). They are moulded to the immediate environment of the participants, very much in the emic tradition (Stevens & Gielen, 2007). For example, if you are investigating problem-solving among waitresses in a short-order restaurant, you aim to situate your research in the waitresses’ life space (Stevens, 1990). In short, you take your research to the restaurant rather than lifting the participants out of context and into a laboratory. Here are some more research questions that have been tackled in the situated style of the cultural psychologist.
• Are traditional Papuan body-counting techniques threatened by technological developments in the local economy? (Saxe, 1982)
• Do the everyday mathematical abilities of Brazilian coconut vendors enhance school performance? (Carraher et al., 1985)
• Can culture-bound syndromes only be understood within the meaning systems of host cultures? (Ritenbaugh, 1986)
Methodologically, situated research can take a variety of emically oriented forms. Methods enabling the researcher to embed themselves in the life space of the people being studied are the instruments of choice for the cultural psychologist. They favour qualitative methods that barely disturb the life space and tune in to participants’ interpret- ations of their world. Favoured options include ethnographies (see key concept), open-ended interviews and longitudinal case studies.
Another innovative research method associated with cultural psych- ology is the located experiment (Cole, 1998; Lave, 1977). This is an experimental method in which research questions and testing pro- cedures are modelled on participants’ everyday practices. This is an emic manifestation of the mainstream psychology experiment. Located experiments feature psychological testing, analyses of performance on prescribed tasks – all the trappings of mainstream experimental research, yet with the key difference that they are derived following efforts to understand the everyday practice of the participants. They are designed with local knowledge about the attitudes, abilities and beliefs of participants about their own universe. As participants are studied in situ, the researcher can claim to be investigating the mind in its everyday context (a central philosophical tenet of cultural
KEY TERM
Located experiment. An experimental method in which research questions and testing procedures are modelled on participants’
everyday practices.
psychology, remember). The following example displays the theoretical and methodological principles that typify located experiments.
Do we learn to communicate by writing letters?
Scribner and Cole (1981) studied the acquisition of literacy among children from the Liberian Vai culture. They distinguished between school literacy and Vai literacy, which has its own written form and is largely acquired outside school. Combining experimental and ethnographic methods Scribner and Cole compared the role of these two systems of literacy in hastening cognitive development.
They modelled their research on key aspects of everyday Vai life, such as letter writing, which is central to daily Vai communication. In one scenario a popular Vai board game was used to test the effectiveness of Vai literacy in aiding communication and problem- solving. Participants who were Vai-literate – and those who were not – had to learn the game’s rules, then explain them to someone else, either face to face or by letter. Vai literates fared especially well on this task. Scribner and Cole ascribed this partly to the way the prac- tice of letter writing had prepared them for communicating difficult ideas.
Research with a cultural psychology orientation demands to be seen in the contexts inhabited by participants. As an approach to research it is grounded in everyday practice, so no two research designs are the same. This is a far cry from the cross-cultural idea of replicating pre- designed studies to test established theories in numerous cultural set- tings. Yet it has been argued that cultural psychology and cross-cultural psychology can form a complementary axis for researching global psychology (Berry et al., 2002). In this ideal case an emic, qualitative approach would coexist with an etic, quantitative orientation. Others have downplayed the contribution of cultural psychology, stressing instead its limitations.
Limitations of cultural psychology
1 Unhelpful relativism. Perhaps the most common criticism of cultural psychology highlights the relativism that forms its basis. Since this is a paradigm that strives towards a detailed understanding of the meanings of events within particular cultures, little hope is offered for establishing culturally universal knowledge about human behaviour and experience. Rather, a series of seemingly disparate
culturally relative findings will inevit- ably emerge. From a cross-cultural, universalist viewpoint, all of this undermines the gathering of data that can be generalised or compared across cultural groups (Berry et al., 2002).
2 Interpretive validity. Cultural psy- chology’s roots in ecological psych- ology bolster its claims to a level of ecological validity that cannot necessarily be matched by cross- cultural research. However, ques- tions remain about the paradigm’s interpretive validity (Greenfield, 1997). In other words, since the sub-
jective meanings of researchers are acknowledged as part and par- cel of the data, assurances as to their verifiability cannot be given.
After all, a constructivist approach does not allow for the acknow- ledgement of data as verifiably true. Nevertheless, in such circum- stances the cross-checking of researchers’ interpretations (with each other and with participants who have contributed to the study) can improve interpretive validity (Lincoln & Guba, 2000).
3 Gaining entry. Research undertaken from the cultural psychology orientation aspires to being devised in the light of local knowledge.
To become well-informed a researcher might consult secondary sources (books and other resources that have already been written) about a cultural group, carry out preliminary ethnographies, or con- sult with representatives of the participant group. Yet however meticulous their groundwork, there is no guarantee that it will bear fruit and provide reliable grounds for claiming entry into a com- munity. After all, secondary sources may be unreliable and collabor- ators may be unrepresentative of their group.
Critical psychology: Global research for action
Besides cultural psychology, a second challenge to the cross-cultural mainstream in global psychology comes from critical psychology. If cultural psychology is distinct because of its ideas about the culture–
mind relationship, critical psychology distinguishes itself by its ideo- logical stance regarding the aims and nature of psychological enquiry.
It can be defined as a paradigm in global psychology that conducts