Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Putting Ethnography On The Witness Stand: Review Of Interrogating Ethnography: Why Evidence Matters, Janet K. Keeler

The Qualitative Report

Lawyer, historian and author Steven Lubet’s Interrogating Ethnography: Why Evidence Matters puts several well-known urban ethnographies on the figurative witness stand and finds that some don’t hold up to legal (and journalistic) scrutiny. The author encourages social science researchers to employ fact-checking techniques to increase the veracity of their work. While Lubet praises social science researchers for their altruistic missions and painstaking data collection in the field he finds follow-up research often lacking. He recognizes that ethnographers do not want to be the adversaries of marginalized subjects but believes that more rigorous vetting of data is crucial to the survival …