Ethnographic Inquiry in Psychology
نویسنده
چکیده
tive method is rapidly growing in psychology where human experiences are to be studied as situated in their socio-cultural and historical context. In this new tradition, subjectivity of both—the researcher and the researched— is given a meaningful space. The researcher is able to delineate his/her personal and academic inclinations influencing the research process and findings. In this chapter, we explore the nature and key elements of ethnography, and their relevance and application in psychology. Methodological issues in ethnography will be clarified and elaborated utilizing the experiences of the first author, Kumar Ravi Priya (KRP), during his ethnographic study of the experiences of suffering and healing of the survivors of an earthquake (Priya 2005). A brief description of the metatheoretical roots and methodology of that study is provided next. An intense earthquake measuring 6.9 on Richter scale struck Gujarat state, India, on 26 January 2001; 13,881 human lives were lost in the entire state of Gujarat, out of which, 12,221 deaths occurred in Kachchh district alone (Gupta et al. 2002). KRP adopted the bio-psycho-social model (Engel 1977; Kleinman 1988a) of health and illness to study the processes of suffering and healing among the survivors. Kleinman (ibid.) points out that suffering is the experience of the damages caused to subjectivity and intersubjective connections in the sufferer’s life. He also supports the view that empathic witnessing of or existential commitment to be with someone who is suffering may ‘facilitate his or her building of an illness narrative that will make sense of and give value to his or her experience’ (ibid.: 54; emphasis added). This process is known as remoralization or healing (ibid.; Kleinman 1988b). The study utilized constructionist grounded theory approach (Charmaz 1995, 2001) to analyse the narratives of semi-structured interviews and field notes of participant observation generated through fieldworks conducted in three phases at a rural and an urban area of Kachchh (with about one year of gap between the two consecutive phases), each of the duration of about one to two months. Detailed findings of the study can be found in Priya (2005).
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