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Qualitative Research And Its Uses In Health Care, Zakiya Q. Al-Busaidi

Sultan Qaboos University Medical Journal

Although relatively uncommon in health care research, qualitative research is now receiving recognition and is increasingly used in health care research with social and cultural dimensions. Unlike quantitative research, which is deductive and tends to analyze phenomena in terms of trends and frequencies, qualitative research seeks to determine the meaning of a phenomenon through description. It aims to develop concepts that aid in the understanding of natural phenomena with emphasis on the meaning, experiences and views of the participants. Differences among qualitative researchers exist on matters of ontology, epistemology, data collection methods and methods of evaluation. The aim of this …

Men Of Steel Or Plastic Cops: The Use Of Ethnography As A Transformative Agent, Christine Teague, David Leith

Research outputs pre 2011

The Perth urban rail system, like many other rail systems in Australia and overseas, is subject to crime and anti-social behaviour around the railway environs from a small minority of the travelling public. The transit officers, who form part of the security section of the Public Transport Authority, are the people employed to deal with these incidents, which can result in transit officers being injured. To fully understand the violence and antisocial behaviour that they deal with on a regular basis and develop strategies to reduce this risk of injury, it was necessary to enter their world. The researcher in …

Walden Pond And The Performative Touristic Gaze, Daniel Christopher Bono

LSU Master's Theses

This is an ethnographic study of tourism at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. I argue that Walden Pond operates as a site that creates tensions among visitors due to the ways that time has transformed the once serene landscape into an overcrowded swimming pool. These tensions, however, fall under the expectation that the State Reservation of Massachusetts (re)creates Thoreau’s Walden as suggested in his discourse, but the performance of history is enacted through the creation of meaning among visitors engaging in a dialogue that references the past, talking about a space that has cultural significance. Exploring the touristic experience and …

Encountering One Another: Feminist Relationships In Organizational Research, Kristina A. Bourne

Organization Management Journal

As a graduate student attempting to integrate feminist principles into my academic endeavors, I eagerly entered the research field to examine how women business owners who feel a conflict between feminism and capitalism enact their everyday lives. I chose participant observation, a common methodology in feminist research, with the aim of getting “inside” these women’s lives to better understand their experiences. However, as the fieldwork proceeded, my focus shifted to examining the space in which the realities of the feminist organizational researcher and of the feminist business owner encounter one another. This paper reflects upon how we made sense of …

Implementing A Critically Quasi-Ethnographic Approach, Lisa Murtagh

The Qualitative Report

This paper provides an account of the methodological approach of a study designed to address some fundamental questions relating to formative assessment. The paper reports on the use of a critically quasi- ethnographic approach and describes the practicalities of adopting such an approach. The validity of the study is also considered , reflecting on Tricoglus’ (2001) protocol for practitioner research in education.

This Sporting Life: Sports And Body Culture In Modern Japan, William W. Kelly, Atsuo Sugimoto

CEAS Occasional Publication Series

Yale CEAS Occasional Publication Series - Volume 1

Sports in Japan have long been embedded in community life, the educational system, the mass media, the corporate structures, and the nationalist sentiments of modern Japan. For over a century, they have been a crucial intersection of school pedagogy, corporate aims, media constructions, gender relations, and patriotic feelings. The chapters in this book highlight a wide range of sports, and together, they offer a significant window on to the ways that the sporting life animates the institutions of modern Japan.

Brief Note On The Origins, Evolution, And Meaning Of The Qualitative Research Concept Thick Description, Joseph G. Ponterotto

The Qualitative Report

The origins, cross-disciplinary evolution, and definition of “thick description” are reviewed. Despite its frequent use in the qualitative literature, the concept of “thick description” is often confusing to researchers at all levels. The roots of this confusion are explored and examples of “thick description” are provided. The article closes with guidelines for presenting “thick description” in written reports.

Time And The Tsunami, Stefan Helmreich

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In this article, Stefan Helmreich delivers an ethnographic report on an international academic conference of physical and biological oceanographers held in Goa, India, shortly after the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 26, 2004. Juxtaposing scientific discussions of the tsunami with novelist and anthropologist Amitav Ghosh's early 2005 visit to the hard-hit Andaman Islands, Helmreich examines various styles of narrating time in circulation in the wake of the disaster. Centering his attention on marine scientists, Helmreich discusses a tension between geological time and what he calls oscillating ocean time, a genre of time that takes in such long durée processes …

Not Only A Consequence Of Power, But Also One Of Its Strategies: An Interview With Lorna Rhodes, Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Lorna Rhodes

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Introduction]

In 2004 Lorna Rhodes published Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison as part of the University of California Press’s Public Anthropology series. This ethnographic manuscript – supplemented by a number of articles – took as its object of anthropological analysis the supermax prison system in Washington State. In so doing, Rhodes brought to the fore questions of power and agency as they are shaped by prison officials, prisoners, psychiatrists, and other stakeholders in the state-run prison system. In the following, Rhodes discusses her current research, American culture, and her views on academia and ethnography with …

Displaced Self And Sense Of Belonging: A Chinese Researcher Studying Chinese Expatriates Working In The United States, Zhong (June) Wang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I tell the story of the ethnographic fieldwork I conducted between 1997 and 2005 in which I focused on a group of expatriates sent by one of China's largest multinational corporations to work in the U.S. for extended years. My initial interest was to investigate how this Chinese state-owned multinational company operated its overseas subsidiaries in the U.S. However, as my fieldwork progressed, I became increasingly interested in how the expatriates' and their family members' careers and lives were impacted by globalization, how these Chinese expatriates and family members adjusted, adapted, understood, and tolerated cultural differences inside …

The (No) Work And (No) Leisure World Of Women In Assi, Banaras, Nita Kumar

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

In the riverside neighborhood (mohalla) of Assi, in the south of Banaras, families of the following professions are to be found: the preparation and retail of foods such as: milk, sweets, tea, paan, peanuts and snacks; clerical work in offices or shops; private professional work, such as priesthood, teaching, boating, cleaning toilets; and crafts, such as masonry, weaving, making and maintaining jacquard machines, carpentry, and goldsmithy. All this work is done by men in the public sphere. In Banaras, the observable and articulated sphere of activity called "work" (kam) largely exists for men only. Men are …

Comment On James M. Wilce, "Magical Laments And Anthropological Reflections", Claudia Strauss

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Wilce draws our attention to the formulaic nature of anthropologists ethnographies, both considered as a distinctive genre and as inflected by larger modernist discourses of destruction and loss (which he terms neolament). His intriguing discussion of the laments that end many anthropological texts helped me to recognize similar laments that I heard when I conducted interviews in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. The latter examples raise issues about the politics of lamenting modernity and questions about what makes a lament effective.

Finding Meaning In Sustainability And A Livelihood Based On Tourism: An Ethnographic Case Study Of Rural Citizens In The Aysen Region Of Chile., Trace E. Gale

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Development. Livelihood. Sustainability. Tourism. The post-positivistic approach of this study helped to illuminate the complexity that underscores these four simple words. It helped to fill knowledge gaps through exploration of the lived experience of tourism-based livelihoods within the Aysen region of southern Chile. With an understanding of this lived experience, the identification of more feasible and meaningful development interventions and policies becomes more likely. Results were organized around seven key areas of focus: (1) shaping factors for tourism-based livelihoods, (2) how tourism-based livelihood strategies added meaning, (3) the role that alternative forms of tourism played, (4) tourism livelihood tactics, (5) …

New Programs In The Old Asylum: The Deinstitutionalization Of Long-Term Psychiatric Hospital Patients In Argentina, Erica Dillon

LSU Master's Theses

Large psychiatric hospitals with inpatients interned for decades are still the norm in Argentina, where deinstitutionalization and community-based mental health care is almost inexistent. This thesis focuses on some changes taking place in a centenary psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires province: the externación of long-term psychiatric patients through new programs planned and run from inside the institution by health professionals compromised in making a change in the old asylum. Can long-term inpatients with serious mental illness such as schizophrenia leave the asylum and integrate in the society having a recovered life? Do the new externación programs make this possible? What …

Changes In The Perception And Sense Of Self Of Individuals With Aphasia: An Ethnographic Study, Erline Vieira Nakano

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Little is known about the perceived changes in identity and sense of self in individuals with aphasia. Seminal research using qualitative methods and personal narratives has been conducted in England regarding the experience of living with aphasia (see for instance Parr, Byng, Gilpin & Ireland, 1999; Parr, Duchan & Pound, 2003; Byng, Pound & Hewitt, 2004), but the use of such methodologies is still emergent in the United States. In addition, despite the great achievements of the disabilities movement in countries such as the U.S. and the U.K., individuals with aphasia have remained largely at the margins due to the …

Professional Wrestling, Embodied Morality, And Altered States Of Consciousness, Lawrence B. Mcbride

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Much of the scholarly work on professional wrestling is based on the assumption that beyond a simple mimicking of sporting combat, the wrestling show is a spectacle that constructs and interrelates socially situated, morally significant categories. In this thesis, I focus on wrestlers themselves, and treat wrestling as a traditional practice that guides how wrestlers relate to their bodies and how they interact with their audience. This project was carried out using ethnographic methods of observation and interviewing. While participant-observation of three independent wrestling promotions provided context, twelve semi-structured interviews carried out with wrestlers at the Florida Wrestleplex in St. …

Developing An Anthropology Curriculum For High School: A Case Study From Durant High School, Hillsborough County, Florida, Kory Mcneil Bennett

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

It has become increasingly apparent that anthropology has much to offer when it comes to educating our youth. This is true for all grade levels, kindergarten through senior level studies in high school. Here, this idea will be explored further by focusing on the students of Durant High School (DHS) of Plant City, Florida.

This project was designed to explore the idea of combining widely accepted pedagogical theories (Gardner 1983, 1993, 1999; Geraci 2000; Silver, Strong and Perini 1997) with anthropological theory and methods in order to devise effective curricula for high school archaeology and other anthropology courses. More essentially, …

Exchanging Identities, James R. Allison

Faculty Publications

In many societies, economic activities are an important means through which individuals create their social identity. This is particularly evident in, for example, some Melanesian societies where successful participation in exchange systems is an important determinant of an individual‘s social status. These processes are difficult to see in the ethnographic or prehistoric Southwest, where status differences are understated, but some principles apply cross-culturally. This paper focuses on ethnographic examples showing how differential participation in institutionalized, inter-community exchange systems affects the negotiation of identity within communities. Examples from the prehistoric Puebloan Southwest are then examined in light of the ethnographic insights.

'Listen, Rama’S Wife!’: Maithil Women’S Perspectives And Practices In The Festival Of Sāmā-Cakevā, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

As a female-only festival in a significantly gender-segregated society, sāmā cakevā provides a window into Maithil women’s understandings of their society and the sacred, cultural subjectivities, moral frameworks, and projects of self-construction. The festival reminds us that to read male-female relations under patriarchal social formations as a dichotomy between the empowered and the disempowered ignores the porous boundaries between the two in which negotiations and tradeoffs create a symbiotic reliance. Specifically, the festival names two oppositional camps—the male world of law and the female world of relationships—and then creates a male character, the brother, who moves between the two, loyal …

Promotoras Of The U.S.-Mexico Border: An Ethnographic Study Of Culture Brokerage, Agency, And Community Development, Ricardo B. Contreras

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines promotoras from the U.S.-Mexico border. Promotoras are women who live in colonias throughout the border area and who are employed by service provider and community development organizations to do health-related outreach and education with colonia residents. The role of promotoras can be seen from the perspective of culture brokerage; that is, they are mediators between local communities and external actors such as service providers and agencies of the government. As culture brokers, promotoras facilitate the relationship among the local communities, and the system of services and outside resources. The study proposes a conceptual framework through which programs …

"No, We Don't Have Any T-Shirts": Identity In A (Self-Consciously) Consumerist Punk Subculture, William Force

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an ethnographic examination of a local punk subculture. Its focus is the processes of meaning construction and subcultural identity formation and maintenance. Through in-depth interviews and on-site observations, the meanings of punk emerge in acts of social co-construction. An empirical analysis of the ways by which individuals define and explore what is involved and valued in a punk identity provides insight into this subculture. The concept of punk as a social practice is investigated discursively through interviews and documented discussions. My goal is to uncover thematic ideas, beliefs, and values in these interactions that form a matrix …

"We Didn't Think You Was Comin' Back": Art, Fieldwork, And History In The East Kimberley, Western Australia, Eric Kjellgren

Pacific Studies

Heracleitus observed that it is impossible to step into the same river, yet the river remains over time. This paradox summarizes the relationship between anthropological fieldwork and ethnography. Entering the field is to experience a culture at one point in time. To write ethnography is to create a general analysis of that culture. Just as one can better understand a river's nature by observing it over time, one gains a more nuanced understanding of a culture through repeated episodes of fieldwork. Using examples from my research in the East Kimberley, Western Australia, I explore how the ongoing history of cultural …

Living A "Convenient Fiction", Anne Chambers, Keith S. Chambers

Pacific Studies

Long-term fieldwork offers a unique perspective on the complex, interactive process of interpretation on which ethnography depends. Through shared experiences, the ethnographer(s) and host community collaborate in constructing reciprocal identities tailored to their respective needs and the local situation. The mutual expectations and assumptions grounding this relationship become more visible as they are defined by subsequent events and encounters over the years. Our article analyzes some significant and turns in our thirty-year relationship with the Tuvaluan atoll community of Nanumea. In initially defining us as "of the island," the community established us in a local category' resonant with key emic …

Real Time: Unwinding Technocratic And Anthropological Knowledge, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

“The Bank of Japan is our mother,” bankers in Tokyo sometimes said of Japan's central bank. Drawing on this metaphor as an ethnographic resource, and on the example of central bankers who sought to unwind their own technocratic knowledge by replacing it with a real-time machine, I retrace the ethnographic task of unwinding technocratic knowledge from those anthropological knowledge practices that critique technocracy. In so doing, I draw attention to special methodological problems—involving the relationship between ethnography, analysis, and reception—in the representation and critique of contemporary knowledge practices.

The "No Property" Problem: Understanding Poverty By Understanding Wealth, Jane B. Baron

Michigan Law Review

Could it be that understanding homelessness and poverty is less a function of understanding the homeless and the poor than of understanding how the wealthy come to ignore and tolerate them? This is one of the more intriguing suggestions of anthropologist Kim Hopper's Reckoning with Homelessness, and it echoes claims made by lawyers who, like Hopper, have spent much of their careers advocating on behalf of the homeless. While Hopper's new book is first and foremost a work of anthropology, its structure strongly parallels recent work by legal scholars who have sought to assess the effects of litigation and lobbying …

Mapping A Generation: Oral History Research In Sulphur Springs, Fl, Connie J. Brown

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an analysis of the pros and cons of doing ethnographic and oral history research with elders. The subjects are women born before 1933 and residing in Sulphur Springs, Florida for most of their adolescence and adult lives. They were selected from attendees of the semiannual reunion of students who attended the Sulphur Springs School during the years it served both elementary and junior high.

This method of research, with an elder population presents specific challenges and rewards. The pros and cons of such research are discussed within the context of doing ethnography of Sulphur Springs from the …

Cross Burning, Cockfighting, And Symbolic Meaning: Toward A First Amendment Ethnography, Timothy Zick

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Gender And Empowerment: Contemporary Lakota Women Of Rosebud, Christina G. Mello

McNair Scholars Journal

Western-European stereotypes still permeate Plains Indian culture suggesting that women were passive and subjugated while men were dominant warriors. This research challenges those stereotypes through exploration of origin and spirituality accounts, kinship organization, historical impact, contemporary and traditional issues, and through first hand ethnographic research of the Sicangu Nation of Lakota people in regards to gender roles. Using feminist critique and reflexive theoretical approaches, information was collected through participant observation and interviews with Sicangu people in 2004. By focusing on how Lakota women have empowered themselves, this research illustrates how women were and continue to be respected, influential members of …

"Walking The Queen's Highway": Ideology And Cultural Landscape In Nothern Ireland, Deborah J. Miller

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The use of public art and ritual in Northern Ireland leads to the creation of cultural landscapes heavy with symbolism – ideological landscapes – that maintain social divisions and incite conflict. Mural and curbstone painting, flag bearing, the construction of memorials, and parading are activities that inscribe messages in the landscape. This study documents the types of symbolism prevalent in Northern Irish landscapes, the meanings attributed to them, and the reactions and subsequent cultural landscape re-creations that result. Loyalist and nationalist marches that incite riots and civil disorder have disrupted and delayed peace efforts in Northern Ireland for decades. Both …

Power Games Between The Researcher And The Participant In The Social Inquiry, Ana Bravo-Moreno

The Qualitative Report

This article will deal with the different power relationships that are in play during the interview process in ethnographic research. It explores how interviewees are agents in the creation of their own positions during the interview process and how they shift positions in interaction with the researcher and with the questions posed to them.