Wayne Fife - Counting as a Qualitative Method: Grappling with the Reliability Issue in Ethnographic Research

A key concern for any kind of ethnographic research is the question of reliability. How can we know when the information we gather through participant -observation, interviews , self-reporting, and other ethnographic research methods is reliable enough to form the basis for a well-tempered portrait of a group of people? How do we take care not to create caricatures out of human beings, or skew our results by relying too heavily on either the words of a few insiders or on our own preconceived notions?

Over the years, a number of qualitative checks have been developed. This is not the place to review them, but I will mention a few for illustrative purposes. One way is to make sure that each important interpretation (e.g. about a marriage pattern, economic practice, or cosmological point of view) has made use of two or more specific methods for gathering information for analysis . That is, we can ask ourselves whether or not the information gathered from interviews aligns with that from observations, researcher participation with self-reporting ? The assumption is that analysis based on two or more sets of data at the same time has a better chance of being reliable than something that is based solely on one method of information gathering. This is often referred to as triangulation (e.g. Fetterman : 113).

An alternative to this is the saturation approach (e.g. Glaser and Strauss : 270). Saturation is reached by building up the bits and pieces of information for a given topic (e.g. naming practices, joking behavior, or a particular religious ritual) until no new information about that practice or belief is forthcoming. Saturation is an ideal and is never fully achieved, but there will be a moment when diminishing returns inform the researcher that it is time to move on to a new topic.

When using either saturation or methodological comparison we have to be sure to include notes about the contradictions and disagreements we find among the various members of a group. Only in this fashion can we properly construct nuanced depictions of disparate ways of lifeeven as they occur within more or less common economic, social, and cultural patterns (e.g. Fetterman : 35).