Paul Atkinson - Thinking Ethnographically

I am grateful to many colleagues and friends for their advice and support over the years. I have learned much from our collaborations. The Ethnography Research Group at Cardiff University has been running for over forty years, and the many colleagues and students who have participated over that time have been a constant source of inspiration. Martyn Hammersley has been a staunch friend and co-author, as has William Housley; I have learned much from them, though we also harbour different enthusiasms. My greatest debt is to Sara Delamont, whose companionship and advice have been invaluable. She is my best friend and my best critic. She is also my best source for ideas and references. For comments on a draft of the book, I am very grateful to Sam Hillyard, who is also owed an apology for the typos and missing references. I am fortunate in having Mila Steele as my editor at SAGE. Her enthusiasm and prompting are always a source of inspiration. Her gentle goading always helps in bringing things to an end.

Ethnographic research is not just about the conduct of fieldwork. It also depends on appropriate frames of analysis, and of ideas. This book, therefore, outlines a number of key themes and ideas that ethnographic researchers in sociology, geography, health studies, educational research and other disciplines, might do well to think with. It derives from many years of teaching students, from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, how to work with qualitative data of different sorts, how to relate their own data to ideas, and vice versa. Finding productive exchanges between data and ideas is one of the most difficult aspects of research and of teaching research methods. It is perfectly possible to find highly able researchers who have collected vast amounts of data and have little or no idea of what to do with them. Or who think that what to do with data consists of a set of mechanistic procedures based on coding their data thematically, with or without the use of qualitative analysis software. This is compounded when such students (or indeed postdoctoral researchers) have been inculcated with a vulgar version of analysis based on grounded theory, that is (wrongly) interpreted as a purely inductive approach to research, by which theory emerges from repeated close readings of the data. That is, I repeat, a vulgar misrepresentation of the original inspiration of grounded theory, but it seems to be widespread. Students can then be disappointed. No matter how hard they stare at the texts of their data (fieldnotes, interview transcripts, narratives, documentary sources) nothing seems to happen. They find themselves just recapitulating some of the most obvious themes in a way that approximates to a rather nave form of content-analysis. As a consequence, we find doctoral theses and published works that just stitch together some more-or-less interesting snippets of interview transcripts or (more rarely) field observations and transcripts of naturally occurring data. And so those data remain horribly under-analysed. The resulting papers or theses are jejune at best. Brilliant fieldwork can, in consequence, give rise to publications that are flat and lack analytic bite. Too often apparently random gobbets of data sprinkle the text, undigested. Sometimes we are told that such fragments can speak for themselves, when they do not. In the absence of clear and sustained analysis, informed by the disciplines of the social sciences, nothing can speak for itself. In the absence of ideas, research is pointless. Again, qualitative research is sometimes portrayed as if it were self-justifying: more humane, more liberal, more responsive than other kinds of social investigation (for which positivist or scientistic are used as derogatory terms). But there is nothing inherently superior about a particular research strategy unless it is accompanied by appropriate ways of thinking. Ethnographic fieldwork can be especially illuminating, and it can be especially ethical. It can be the research approach of choice (Atkinson 2014). But in and of itself it is no guarantee of anything. Being qualitative does not ensure quality of outcome. In the absence of theory it has no intrinsic value. Now theory can seem a bit daunting, and is readily interpreted to mean some grandiose, impenetrable rhetoric that derives from elsewhere (often Paris). But theory means ideas. We need generic thinking that encapsulates ideas about how social life is ordered, structured and patterned; how social actors are formed and how they interact with one another.