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This paper discusses the ‘telling case’ and the manner and extent of its use in social research. The ‘telling case’, proposed by Mitchell as a counter to prevailing expectations of typicality, is an ethnographic case study, derived from analytic induction and focused on the exposure of new theoretical insights. By means of an evaluation of the available literature this paper summarises Mitchell’s construal of the ‘telling case’ before examining how it has been exploited by others. The evidence suggests that while authors acknowledge the source of the ‘telling case’ few offer any substantial acknowledgement of Mitchell’s conceptualisation, indicating that most ‘telling case’ research has employed Mitchell’s name somewhat disingenuously and contributed to the growth of a methodological myth. Moreover, despite its international spread, its origins seem located in the work of a small number of internationally recognised scholars and the mobility of their former graduate students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I introduce the notion of participative epistemology and discuss how it can contribute to make social data science more accountable. I do so by offering the case of a project where ethnographic, computational and sequence analysis methods have been used in combination. By presenting here in greater detail research design and pilot results of a project using professional networking data to understand the careers of IT industry analysts, I suggest a view on the collaboration between data science and social science as coordinated labour. The application of participative epistemology to social data science is articulated in three points: (1) a more tactical view on the partnerships with commercial data where shared value system is not a pre-requisite for coordinated knowledge production; (2) an appreciation for complementarities in perspective between phenomenological sociology, expertise in computer science associated to digitalisation and the narrative positivism linked with the use of statistics and (3) a view on social data science as contributing empirical sociology with new sensitizing concepts, taking ethnography to reflectively address its own presuppositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prompted by discovering a paper written in 1980 which described a process of ‘ethnography by proxy’, I revisit this concept in the light of two research projects: a workplace study of an electronics company conducted in the early 1990s and a later home-based study of young children’s encounters with toys and technology. The paper defines ethnography by proxy as the process of delegating some of the ethnographer’s activities to participants in the research setting. It discusses a pragmatic response to some of the challenges of conducting fieldwork and considers the implications of delegating non-academic proxies to fulfil aspects of the ethnographer’s role, the different guises that may be taken by the ethnographer and what this shift in research relationships might mean for the interpretation of data. The concept of proxy has implications for some of the tenets of ethnographic research as it requires a re-examination of our roles and the relationship between researcher and researched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a feminist approach to research focusing on the organising power of texts and language. This paper explores how to analyse texts in IE while considering the importance of reflexivity and accountability to feminist research. Based on a five year study of UK university audit processes, I developed a three-part IE text analysis approach which sits on a spectrum of closeness to the text(s) under analysis: (i) text – close analysis of one text or a small array of texts; (ii) process – mapping across a textually-mediated process and (iii) discourse – identifying a textually mediated discourse. Additionally, I make three analytic points about how texts organise: the importance of reader interpretation (researchers and users of texts); the strategic multi-layered translation work done by readers to fit into institutions and anticipate readerships; and, the importance of non-readers who can make mythologised understandings of texts material through writing future texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an academic subject of study, death has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. Yet unlike other topics in the social sciences, death occupies a rather unique status as a research topic. A universal concern that affects everyone, this paper asks whether it is therefore ever possible to achieve a scholarly 'critical distance' from studying a place or people associated with death. Drawing on the author's experience of undertaking an ethnographic study of a London cemetery, the paper reflexively recounts the ways in which the author managed their own critical distance both in and outside of the field. The paper concludes that it is somewhat unrealistic to suggest that a scholar researching death can maintain a complete sense of detachment in light of their awareness of the mortal human condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an account of an access encounter, and uses this case to reinforce the potential for access meetings to provide a rich source of ethnographic data. The paper originates from one of the authors' experience of negotiating research access in a UK local authority social services department. In response to a summary research proposal sent in advance that expressed interest in social work with men, a gatekeeper expressed his concern during an initial meeting that the author might be a ‘paedophile’ wanting to make contact with others of a similar persuasion. This encounter, and the issue of sexual abuse that it introduced, highlights a number of ethical, epistemological and gendered tensions for ethnographic work, which this paper attempts to negotiate. Some of the potential implications of this specific access meeting are discussed, and set within broader methodological and empirical contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the methods and methodology used in a nine‐month‐long empirical study, exploring the constructions of masculinity amongst 10–11‐year‐old boys in three junior schools in the UK. It considers issues arising around sampling and the principal methods of data collection used, which were small‐group interviews and semi‐participant observation. Approaches to writing fieldnotes are also discussed. The second part of the paper looks at the role of the researcher learning to carry out ethnography, and the tensions and dilemmas that occur when working with a young age group in a school setting. Some of the issues that are examined are maintaining relationships, power relations, and the multiple positionings taken by the researcher as an ex‐teacher and gendered adult with a growing awareness of his own masculine identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on the history of Esbrina, an established research group in Spain with almost 20 years’ experience and a deeply-rooted tradition of self-reflection and learning. We start by analysing the academic and social contexts in which the group was created and recognised. We make explicit team members’ backgrounds, dispositions and positionalities, to provide insight into the tensions aroused in deciding research topics, methodological approaches and research methods. Then we focus on two specific projects and explore the learning processes of those engaged in them: the first involves micro-ethnography, for which we examine our apprenticeship process through interviews, observation, inferential analysis and visual documentation. The second involves collaborative ethnography, for which we give an analytical account of how we created different ways of learning through collaborating and narrating. Throughout the paper, we reflect on our determination to create a methods-learning environment in which we constantly challenge our comfort zone by trying to do research on topics involving authentic learning. The most innovative aspect of the process is that senior and junior researchers, including group directors, play both the role of teachers and learners. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we argue for a view of analysis as an embodied practice and review others' testimonies of carrying out multimodal ethnography. This review suggests that metaphors are key for communicating what happens to us in the course of the research and our subsequent sense-making practices. We identify four metaphors for communicating data collection and analytic practices: composing, meandering, plundering and time travel. We then turn to our own multimodal fieldwork with children in middle childhood, to think about the experiences and emergent metaphors that shaped our practice on an international study looking at the relationship between childhood and public life. Children's play was instructive in our own formation as multimodal ethnographers. We provide examples of the ways in which children recruited us into their play, the ways in which play taught us about what matters to children, and finally, how we took play into our own analytical practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualitative researchers struggle to study the transient fields of social network sites like Twitter through conventional ethnographic approaches. This paper suggests that, in order to step further, we should distinguish between the relatively stable ‘contextual’ fields of bounded online communities and the fluid, ‘meta-fields’ resulting from the aggregation of scattered communicative contents based on their metadata. Both these two intertwined layers of the digital environment interplay with users’ online social practices - which are embedded within offline everyday life and vice versa. While Internet ethnography largely dealt with contextual digital fields, recent developments in the realm of online research allow the ethnographic exploration of digital meta-fields and their publics. This shift recalls Marcus’ appeal for a multi-sited ethnography but, in fact, goes further beyond, towards a truly ‘un-sited’ ethnography. I highlight and discuss the main methodological implications of meta- and contextual fieldworks by presenting an exploratory study of European exchange students’ Facebook identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the nature of layering noisy and moving features in video to better understand how the movement of people, their ideas, and their texts are shifting functions of design and circulation within digital contexts. Drawing from video collected as part of an ethnography of digital literacies in urban contexts, features of textual design in a music video will be examined to demonstrate how youth today produce and circulate digital products as an expression of their diverse social identities. I sketch an approach for analyzing design as embedded in the layering of image, language, gesture, color, visual, and sound effects in a participant's music video. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increasing use of video recording in social research methodological questions about multimodal transcription are more timely than ever before. How do researchers transcribe gesture, for instance, or gaze, and how can they show to readers of their transcripts how such modes operate in social interaction alongside speech? Should researchers bother transcribing these modes of communication at all? How do they define a 'good' transcript? In this paper we begin to develop a social semiotic framework to account for transcripts as artefacts, treating them as empirical material through which transcription as a social, meaning making practice can be reconstructed. We look at some multimodal transcripts produced in conversation analysis, discourse analysis, social semiotics and micro-ethnography, drawing attention to the meaning-making principles applied by the transcribers. We argue that there are significant representational differences between multimodal transcripts, reflecting differences in the professional practices and the rhetorical and analytical purposes of their makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographies of policing have referred to the difficulties that researchers face as they encounter corruption, malpractice and police deviance. This paper reflects on the author’s ethnographical work with a British police force and suggests that while only relatively minor instances of misbehaviour were witnessed, these nonetheless raised challenging ethical issues. In addition to exploring the practicalities of negotiating access to the field and the difficulties of securing informed consent, the paper highlights the importance of anticipating the ethical dimensions of the mundane realities encountered during fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses possibilities of designing ethical research practice in relation to people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD). We will argue that in the case of this group of people, research ethics is about ethically justifiable research aims, design, methods, and practices that are based on the recognition of their equal worth as humans. We argue that the turn to emancipatory methods in disability studies has effectively excluded persons with PIMD as they implicitly assume that research participants have the kind of cognitive and communicative capacities that persons with PIMD lack. Their exclusion from disability studies is further reinforced by the theoretical tradition of the field that has emphasised the material arrangements of society, as well as the ableist cultural ideologies as key factors contributing to disabled people’s social exclusion. It is problematic to apply these approaches to individuals whose lives are marked by insurmountable impairment effects. Research ethics should take into account potential disparities of cognitive ability and power between researchers and research participants. Using an ongoing ethnographic study about the lives of persons with PIMD as an example, we describe in detail what positioning research participants as moral subjects could mean in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses a longitudinal, interview-based study of Australian secondary school students that explores the interaction between school ethos and forms of subjectivity. The study was designed to enable prospective and retrospective understandings of identity over time. It is suggested that this methodology encourages a reflexive self-positioning for both participants and researchers and, in the accumulation of an archive of perspectives, responds to poststructuralist critiques of contingency and construction in research interviews. Second, it is argued that the richness of longitudinal research invites more than one kind of analysis, and that working with and across conventionally divergent theoretical approaches can be fruitful. This is discussed with reference to Bourdieu's account of social field and habitus, and Hollway and Jefferson's notion of the 'defended subject'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore the implications of conducting a longitudinal transitions study based on ethnographic research in secondary schools. The main issue we address is how the ethnographic starting point materialized into a longitudinal exploration of young people's transitions to adulthood. We discuss the process of the research and how the ethnographic study contextualizes the life history research, focusing on 'remembering' and 'imagining'. In our conclusions we address representations, in particular ethics and politics of writing. The article draws from a project Tracing Transitions--Follow-up Study of Post-16 Students in which we trace young people's transitions into further and higher education and the labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with two related methodological problems. First, presented with a complex social scenario of a meeting between the representatives of different social welfare agencies, how should we make sense of this meeting? Second, in the context of the potential insights that the complexity sciences offer for understanding the social world, how can we translate those models to make sense of complex social dynamics? The example of the meeting, taken from an ethnographic study of collaboration in social welfare, is used to situate debates about the use of complexity science in knowing the social world. Drawing upon the work of Luhmann, I argue that we need to re-think the insights complexity sciences in order to situate the problem of complexity in the social world itself. Doing so locates the problem of knowing the social world in the social world itself, and highlights the necessary role of ignorance both in social life itself, and in knowing the social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers ethnographic investigation 'at home' in reference, in part, to research carried out into youth homelessness in Britain. Relations of distance and familiarity in the field, and the notion of the ethnographer as stranger, are discussed so as to advance an understanding of the purpose and practice of participant observation. The paper explores fieldwork relations in the context of urban and social exploration, and also with reference to ethnographic research with young people and/or children. In conclusion, the paper argues for a recognition of difference and distance in fieldwork, not simply as obstacles to be somehow overcome but as something inevitable and necessary to the insights that fieldwork affords. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an account based upon the author's ethnographic study involving two major companies within the chemical industry sector. Using examples from personal research experience, and drawing upon organizational ethnographies in the management domain, the processes of impression management which enable research access are explored. Through analysis of narrative voice within predominantly realist accounts, it is argued that ‘confessional’ declaration of fieldwork experience provides a more reflexive textual account. Using culture as a theory within which to locate organizational ethnography, the implications of insider/outsider distinctions in fieldwork are considered. It is suggested that, particularly in management research, consultancy type ‘working roles’ are generated by researchers in order to gain credibility. Male-dominated research settings present particular issues for the female researcher, whose access to certain backstage regions and masculine discourse will almost certainly be limited. It is argued that gender, as a methodological issue which defines narrator perspective, needs to be taken into account by both men and women in the field and made more explicit. Gender dynamics within fieldwork can be modelled according to the dominant composition of the cultural setting. The paper argues for increased diversity in management research in order to appreciate the gender-situated nature of our understanding of organizational culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of social action has increasingly considered the place of 'things' in recent years, including seeing objects (both physical and digital) as co-participants in social interaction, systems, and the research process. This article argues that video ethnography is well positioned to address such considerations including, with some methodological shifts, digital activity. Drawing on the methodology and findings of an 8-month video ethnography in a US classroom, I discuss a material semiotic approach to examining digital practices, including methods that followed interaction across the online and offline, approached laptops themselves as interlocutors, and examined participant interaction with research instruments as part of student meaning-making practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pedagogy of teaching research methods, let alone research ethics, is an under-researched field. In this article a sociology lecturer connects five postgraduate students in a qualitative research ethics course with two novice ethnographers’ candid empirical studies. While it is common for students to read articles and books on the topic, what was unusual in this ethics course was assigning the readings without priming the students of the ethical concepts of autonomy, do no harm, respect for persons or beneficence. The article documents how these students drew on their prior tacit knowledge of ethics to critique these two empirical studies both in classroom discussions and later in their written assignments. Each student wrote an account of the two texts before joining forces to construct a joint auto ethnographic account based on their reflective journals and on transcriptions of their classroom discussions. Invariably the students’ tacit knowledge allowed them to successfully locate core ethical issues within these two texts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Virtual worlds, such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, have seen remarkable mainstream uptake in the last decade. Such environments have grown from hosting niche interest groups to providing sites for leisure, business and education for tens of millions of Internet users. Concurrently, a multi-disciplinary research field exploring the application of such spaces has emerged. This article examines in detail one data collection practice – observation in virtual worlds – that has been applied extensively, but without extensive methodological discussion. By revisiting and extending earlier work on this topic, the article presents four key considerations for those conducting observational research in virtual worlds: defining and delimiting field sites, discerning attention, charting actions and attributing intention. It is concluded that researchers must both ward against flawed assumptions about virtual world observation and consider multi-method strategies to overcome limitations in observational data. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multi-sited ethnography has been extensively applied to migrants’ transnational family life and to the underlying care practices. Its methodological underpinnings and dilemmas, though, are relatively under-reflected. How can the relational and affective spaces between migrants and left-behind kin be ethnographically appreciated? Against this question, I revisit my fieldwork on a migration flow between Ecuador and Italy. This is an instance of the development of transnational social relationships, based on the circulation of material, cognitive and emotional resources, whereby people living ‘here’ and ‘there’ negotiate mutual affections, concerns and expectations. The challenge for ethnographers, under similar circumstances, lies less in staying in more sites than in sensing and understanding the relationships between them and the social practices on which this connectedness relies. The attendant methodological implications are discussed, ultimately pointing to the significance of relationality and in-betweenness for ethnographies of migration, transnationalism and mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Acts of counter-subjectification in qualitative research are always present but are often submerged in accounts that seek to locate the power of subjectification entirely with the researcher. This is particularly so when talking to people about sensitive issues. Based on an interview-based study of infertility and reproductive disruption among British Pakistanis in Northeast England, we explore how we, as researchers, sought and were drawn into various kinds of connections with the study participants; connections that were actively and performatively constructed through time. The three of us that conducted interviews are all female academics with Ph.Ds in anthropology, but thereafter our backgrounds, life stories and experiences diverge in ways that intersected with those of our informants in complex and shifting ways. We describe how these processes shaped the production of narrative accounts and consider some of the associated analytical and ethical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colonialism does not end with the withdrawal of colony from occupied territories but it exists across time. There is a constant dialogue between colonial domination and post-colonial transformation both in principle and practice. Doing ethnographic fieldwork therefore involves justifiable positioning of researcher in the interface between subjectivity and objectivity whilst ethnography itself is struggling with the question of representation in connection with the colonial tradition of imaging anthropological object as ‘uncivilised others’. There is an overdue need of decolonising ethnography since Malinowski’s field dairy was published. However, an ethnographer still encounters colonial ideology in the field in making meaning of ethnographic data. How does an ethnographer encounter colonial inheritance in the field? How does s/he position herself/himself in the context of ethnographer’s supremacy in object’s world? These are the questions the article explores with the personal experience of doing ethnographic fieldwork in the borderland of Bangladesh and Myanmar during 2005–2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I describe multi-context engaged learning - a research methodology that I developed in response to the challenge of conducting intimate and engaged fieldwork within a highly complex and shifting milieu typical of those faced by many researchers today. Moreover, I argue that it is the ethnographer's 'presence' in terms of her accountability and membership within a shared context that should ideally constitute the site of research, and that this in turn demands an honest and forthright approach to the issues of exchange that are at the heart of most field research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a list of ethnographic resources available on the World Wide Web.

Studies on Muslim communities in Britain have flourished in the 1990s and early 2000 mainly in the form of ethno-anthropological accounts. In what is a critical moment for multicultural relations in Britain after September 11th and July 2005 bombings in London, however, social researchers are allegedly struggling in gaining access. The article explores this research scenario through reflection on doctoral fieldwork in the Pakistani community of Bradford, Northern England. Here, it will be argued that access can still be gained through traditional ethnographic methods, classic 'research bargaining' and what will be called 'reciprocal exposure', or more simply the researcher's will to be questioned by the potential respondents. In the conclusion it will be argued first, that the reliability of the research is improved through the personal rapport between researcher and respondents. Secondly, participant observation seems to offer an alternative to formal interviews. Respondents in fact tend to be influenced by the burden they feel is imposed onto them as representative of Islam. In the current public value discourses faith is never disenfranchised from political pressures and researchers and funding bodies should acknowledge it to enhance the quality of their data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The challenges in sampling older people from minority ethnic backgrounds are considerable. This article assesses critically an approach that involves ‘piggy-backing’ on an existing national survey in order to generate a sample. It reflects on the experience of a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council under its Growing Older programme that required a representative sample of older people from different ethnic groups, including a control group of ‘white’ majority respondents. The General Household Survey, the British Household Panel Survey, the Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities and the Family Resources Survey (FRS) were assessed for their suitability as ‘host’ surveys. The FRS was eventually selected and further efforts were made to assess its suitability by observing an FRS briefing session for field workers, as well as observing a field worker in action. The process of securing a sample is outlined. The lessons learnt from the experience have wider applicability and raise issues surrounding informed consent, response and attrition rates, as well as time and resource implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]