For this coursework you must undertake a small-scale ethnographic research study of a setting or activity of your own choice.
There aims of this exercise are to assess your abilities to:

1. Undertake a qualitative study using ethnographic techniques;
2. To collect qualitative materials and develop an analysis of these;
3. To develop implications from the qualitative research you have undertaken.

To successfully accomplish the coursework you must:

• select an interesting research domain;

• undertake at least two separate periods of observational data collection (and where relevant supplementary data from informal interviews);

• make detailed field notes on the domain and the activities you observe;

• identify two or three key themes or issues;

• organise your observations or findings with respect to these themes or issues;

• support the observations or findings with evidence from your field notes (and where relevant interviews);

• discuss the implications of your findings for example for future research or practice

We do not wish to restrict the kinds of activity you may study. Therefore, you can chose to observe any organisation or social setting. This may be one with which you are familiar or one you are interested in.

In previous years students have undertaken studies in a diverse range of settings including public spaces, museums, street performances, shopping malls, exhibitions, stations, on busses, cafes, show rooms, offices, hairdressers, queues etc. It is also up to the student to identify an aspect of social behaviour on which to focus.

In the past students have focussed on the ways in which performers draw in and maintain an audience, how people in a queue take their turn when they are not standing in line, how customers manage to take free samples in stores without having to make a purchase and how people co-ordinate the order in which they go through revolving doors.

Note that the analysis should be based primarily on direct observation, but you are allowed to augment these observations with informal interview materials where relevant.

Tools to use
• notes
• recordings
• transcription
Do not forget:
• Analysis (most of the marks)
• Systematic and Rigorous
• Originality, Imagination
• Consequences, implications (literature)
Next Steps

• identify an activity in setting

• first negotiation of access

• practice making observations

• observe in public setting

• what do you find curious?

• making the ordinary strange

• are there ways people get others to understand what they are doing? (implicitly, without speaking)

• where are the hidden skills?

 
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