The Promise and Pitfalls of Going Into the Field

her 50s, spent a year working low-wage jobs as a waitress in Florida, a housecleaner in Maine and a Wal-Mart sales clerk in Minnesota. Her detailed ethnography, the best-selling Nickel and Dimed, reveals how physically demanding and personally demeaning these jobs are, and how workers are trapped in them. Ehrenreich’s book has received wide critical acclaim, a typical book review in the Minneapolis Star Tribune calling it “piercing social criticism backed by first-rate reporting.” Some ethnographies are, however, more controversial, William Foote Whyte, then a young, Protestant graduate student at Harvard, wrote a classic ethnography of Italian-American youth in the early 1940s, Street Corner Society, describing the “corner boys” who hung around the neighborhood and participated in illegal activities. He described them as a “gang.” Yet Marianne Boelen, an Italian immigrant to America who years later revisited his setting and re-interviewed his subjects, asserted that Whyte had made methodological and substantive errors in his work. These boys were not a gang, she claimed, but rather followed a typical Italian pattern: women occupied indoor space and men claimed the outdoors. He might have realized this had he paid greater attention to gender. His errors also resulted, she alleged, from relying too closely on one key informant, “Doc,” whose role he exaggerated. That two important ethnographies can produce such different reactions, from critical acclaim to academic controversy, raises several questions about ethnographic methods. How can readers know if researchers have gotten the evidence and its interpretation right? What kinds of stories should we believe? We need to be able to assess the validity and value of ethnographic work, just as we do with other methods. Herbert Gans, in The Urban Villagers, notes that “every social research method is a mixture of art and science,” but that participant observation is the best empirical research method available because it allows us to study, firsthand, what people do, think, and believe, in their own groups. While all methods may be subject to problems such as shaping findings to fit preconceptions, Gans continues, “ethnography is most successful when it becomes an all encompassing 14to 16hours a day experience, with at least a year’s fulltime fieldwork, and a good deal of additional time to analyze and think about the data.” Ethnography, as we defined it when we edited the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, includes observing social activities as an outsider, observing while participating in the activities, and conducting intensive interviews. Considered the most accessible to readers of all the social scientific methods, ethnography draws on the language and perspective of everyday members of society, and is often written like investigative journalism. A successful ethnography captures readers’ fancies, bringing them closer to the lives of others, and, like a good movie or book, offers insight into people’s ordinary worlds. Literally translated as a “portrait of the people,” ethnography describes and analyzes the beliefs, motivations, and rationales of a people in a particular setting or subculture. It makes the familiar distant and the distant familiar, Although ethnography resembles journalism, it differs by requiring the systematic long-term gathering of data and by engaging general theories of human behavior rather than simply reporting the news. Ethnography resembles literature as well, but differs in focusing on social trends and patterns rather than character development. Finally, ethnography differs from common sense interpretations by