For the ethnography assignment, you will choose a setting for field research that arises from your own personal interests and/or experiences. Your proposed ethnography must be approved by the professor before you begin this assignment. You must follow all COVID-19 safety protocols when doing your research. Your final assignment will be approximately 8-10 pages in length (some may be longer because of lengthier field notes), double-spaced (remove automatic spacing that is in excess of double-spacing, please), in Times New Roman Font, with one-inch margins. Ensure that you retain all rough copies of your work on this assignment – you may be asked for these. Use the following subheadings (that are in italics) to distinguish sections and to organize themes within the coding section.
CONCEPTUAL BAGGAGE
If you have previous experience in the setting, you are encouraged to do conceptual baggage (approximately .5 page) prior to making your field notes. In this regard, write in an open-ended, stream of consciousness way, as if you were journaling in a personal diary. As noted by Kirby & McKenna the concept of “conceptual baggage” refers to:
“a record of your thoughts and ideas about the research question at the beginning and throughout the research process. It is a process by which you can state your personal assumptions about the topic and the research process. Recording your conceptual baggage will add another dimension to the data, one that is always present, but rarely acknowledged. By making your thoughts and experience explicit, another layer of data is revealed for investigation….” (1989, 32).
JOTTINGS
Record your observations of, and memos about, the field setting (that has been approved) first in the form of jottings during your visit to the research site, and subsequently in the form of field notes following each visit to the research site(s). You are required to do jottings for a minimum of three times observing for a total of 2 hours, or if you visit a setting more than three times, for no less than 2 hours in total. Try to visit the field when you think it will be the busiest. While observing, you will most likely be able to make only jottings of your observations and memos as you will busy watching; be sure to separate these by using the template provided in Lesson Four. If you have hand-written your jottings, you may scan or take a photo of these and submit them as “Jottings” separately in the “Ethnography Assignment” Dropbox as a jpg. If you have typed your jottings using Word, include these under the subheading “Jottings” as part of your Ethnography Assignment.
FIELD NOTES
As soon as possible after you leave the field you will use your jottings to inform your writing of full field notes in the form of sentences. When writing up your full field notes, use parentheses around the memos in the field notes to indicate where the memos are being included. Be sure to indicate, at the beginning of each day of field notes, the setting, the date, and the time period during which you were making the observations and memos.
TENTATIVE RESEARCH QUESTION
Articulate one qualitative research question that could guide your continued field research in this setting. The question may be inspired by your coded field notes. Ensure that you follow the instructions on how to develop a research question that were outlined in Lesson Five.
CODING
Code your jottings using the line-by-line coding method as per the instructions in Lesson Five, and include your work as APPENDIX A. Then, create a code book that brings together the line-by-line coding (as was done in Lesson Five), and include this code book as APPENDIX B.
FINDINGS
For your Findings, write a couple, or a few paragraphs that summarize what you found when you coded your data (as was done in Lesson Six). That is, what patterns have you identified in the data (for example, think about the types of actors in the setting, the types of things that they are doing, the ways in which they are interacting, etc.) Make sure that your Findings reflect the patterns in the data that became evident when you created the code book.
SCHOLARLY JOURNAL ARTICLES AND ANALYSES*
Identify 3 scholarly qualitative research journal articles that relate to your setting and/or field observations. Consider the analyses that each study produced. Provide a brief summary of these analyses and the relevant concepts from these analyses that have helped to inform your thinking about your field research setting (approximately 2 pages).
*Use in text-citations to reference each article (author, year, page) and provide a list of these 3 citations at the end of the assignment (the References or Works Cited page does not count toward the total number of pages).
*Save your final literature search and email it to yourself; you may be asked to forward this email to your instructor as evidence of your search. If you are unsure about how to search the scholarly literature, contact the criminology librarian for assistance.
ANALYSIS
Consider the analyses from the scholarly articles together with the Findings that you have written. Use relevant concepts from the scholarly articles to theorize, or describe, or analyze the Findings (as was done in Lesson Six).
NEW RESEARCH QUESTION
Think about the analyses in the relevant scholarly journal articles that you have identified, and articulate a second research question that you think would be interesting to pursue in this setting. In developing this second research question, you can imagine that you would be able to do more than be just a complete observer (i.e., you might want to use a different data gathering method).
REFLECTING
Reflect upon your experience as a researcher for this assignment, and write about whether there is anything you might do differently next time in the field or in preparation for the assignment, whether you would like to use a different research method, whether you were observing what you expected to see, whether there were any surprises, and other insights that you may have had while doing the ethnography assignment (half page maximum).
