Plain-language explanation.
Ethnography is the main research method of anthropology — spending extended time living with a community to understand how they see the world and organise their lives. It involves participant observation (taking part in daily activities while observing), interviewing, collecting documents, and writing detailed notes. Good ethnography requires trust, patience, and reflexivity about the researcher's own assumptions.
Core concepts and standard treatment.
Ethnographic research design: site selection and access negotiation, positionality and researcher reflexivity (how the researcher's identity shapes what they can observe and how people respond to them), informed consent in field settings, and the long-term nature of fieldwork (from months to years — Malinowski's two years in the Trobriand Islands; Evans-Pritchard among the Nuer). Data collection: participant observation (field notes — thick description of what is observed, experienced, and heard), semi-structured and unstructured interviews, focus groups, life histories, visual methods (photography, video ethnography), and material culture analysis.
Deeper theory, debates and edge cases.
Analysis and writing: grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss: theory emerges from systematic coding of data, not imposed a priori); thematic analysis; discourse analysis; and narrative analysis. Ethnographic writing (Clifford and Marcus's Writing Culture — the crisis of representation: who speaks for whom, authority of the ethnographic voice, politics of representation). Multi-sited ethnography (Marcus: following objects, people, or stories across multiple field sites — globalisation and transnational phenomena require moving beyond single community fieldwork). Virtual ethnography (Hine, Kozinets' netnography): applying ethnographic methods to online communities, social media, and digital cultures.
How it is applied in practice.
Applied ethnography in professional settings: user experience (UX) research uses ethnographic methods (contextual inquiry, diary studies, shadowing) to understand how people interact with products and services in their natural contexts. Corporate ethnography: organisations hire anthropologists to study workplace culture, customer experience, and product-market fit. Rapid Ethnographic Assessment (REA) and focused ethnography adapt fieldwork for time-constrained applied contexts. Healthcare: ethnographic methods are used to understand patient journeys, clinical decision-making, hospital culture, and barriers to care access. Development and humanitarian work: participatory action research (PAR), participatory rural appraisal (PRA), and community-based research involve communities as co-researchers in identifying problems and solutions.