One form of ethnography is positivism, which has a long history and reached its peak in the 1930s and 1940s. Positivism promotes the status of experimental and survey research and the quantitative forms of analysis. Positivism treats quantitative and qualitative data as complementary. For positivists, the most important feature of scientific theories is the ability to subject them to tests, allowing them to either be confirmed or falsified. Now, positivism has become a term of abuse among social scientists, causing its meaning to become obscured.

 

Another form is naturalism, which believes that as far as possible, the social world should be studied in its ‘natural’ state, and should be undisturbed by the researcher. All research carried out must be sensitive to the nature of the setting and also the event being studied. Naturalism draws on a range of philosophical and sociological ideas, especially symbolic interactionism, phenomenology and hermeneutics, which basically all argue that the social world cannot be understood in though assumptions of social events under universal laws, because, human actions are influenced by social or cultural meanings. However, like positivism, many aspects of naturalism came under attack from qualitative researchers, because naturalism assumes that the task of social research is to represent social phenomena in a literal fashion through documenting their features and explaining their occurrence.

 

It is argued that both positivism and naturalism fail to consider that social researchers are a part of the social world that they are studying. For positivism, the solution to this is standardisation of research procedures, for naturalism, it is getting into direct contact with the social world. However, reflexivity acknowledges that the orientations of researchers are shaped by their socio-historical locations, also the values and interests that these locations put upon them. Reflexivity suggests that elements of positivism and naturalism should be abandoned, but it does not require the rejection of all ideas linked to these two lines of thinking. Also it must be considered that researchers are likely to have an effect on the people that they are studying.

 

Overall, I found the most important information I took from this reading was that an individual’s background and social beliefs can easily influence and affect research and therefore when I am conducting my own ethnographic research I must remember to take into consideration how my personal beliefs may be affecting the results. Also when looking into other studies linked to ethnography I must remember that these influences can cause researchers to obtain completely different results from one another if they are viewing the same situation from different perspectives. For example, Mead’s research into the ‘truth’ about Samoa was later disagreed with by Freedman when he went there and perceived a different situation from Mead due to their different social backgrounds.

 

Reading about ethnography has opened my eyes to many different issues to consider and has begun teaching me the basics of how to conduct ethnographic research. This reading has not only been useful in relation to the rest of this module, especially when I need to conduct my own ethnographic research, but also in my future practice, with any other research I do and when analysing or discussing someone else’s research.