Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Quiz Results: Social Research Going Deep and Wide

This is another of the series of posts meant to clear up some confusion that seemed to characterize the last quiz.

Out of all the multiple choice questions, those that were most frequently selected incorrectly, had to do with ethnography.  Ethnography is the most in-depth of the social research methods. It involves immersion within a group of people.  For ethnography, it's essential to "be there," to "walk in the shoes" of other people.  This helps untangle how other people see the world, their cultural lens, and to encounter aspects of human social life you didn't even know your were looking for.  Subsequently, ethnography gets you the most detail, but at a cost.  That detail means you're getting a narrow slice of the total human experience.

On the other hand, surveys can potentially uncover social data from vast numbers of people.  For example, the US Census can really be considered a massive sociological research project.  It's collecting data on hundreds of millions of US citizens. That's a lot of important information, however, that data is shallow in an ethnographic sense.

Surveys go wide and ethnography goes deep.  Both are critical for a comprehensive understanding of human social behavior.


Compare this brief description by Ashley Mears of her ethnographic research....



...to Joel Best and his work into the reality of assumed deviant behavior.

 

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