Doing Ethnographies
- Mike Crang - University of Durham, UK
- Ian Cook - University of Exeter, UK
—CHOICE
Doing Ethnographies is an introductory and applied guide to ethnographic methods. It focuses on those methods - participant observation, interviewing, focus groups, and video/photographic work - that allow us to understand the lived, everyday world 'out there.'
In five chapters it presents a systematic overview of: first principles, preparing for fieldwork, constructing ethnographic information, analyzing field materials, and writing.
This is a guide to the issues and methods which have to be considered when doing an ethnography. Informed by the authors fieldwork experience, it demonstrates how methods work in the field and prepares the first-time ethnographer for the loss of control and direction often experienced. This is a practical guide to methods in the field, to the relation between theory, practice, and writing.
'a casual, easy-to-read style that will appeal to...the many undergraduate and postgraduate students across a wide range of disciplines engaging in some form of ethnographic research... [It] will provide some comfort for the perplexed and should also perplex the comfortable'
Qualitative Research
'Crang and Cook provide a well-written practical guide to doing ethnographic research in the broadest sense of the term...They begin with a useful discussion of what ethnographic research entails... and how it fits in the broader realm of social research in a post-modern context... This book would be a useful resource for students and faculty embarking on an ethnographic research project.'
Choice
'a casual, easy-to-read style that will appeal to...the many undergraduate and postgraduate students across a wide range of disciplines engaging in some form of ethnographic research... [It] will provide some comfort for the perplexed and should also perplex the comfortable'
Qualitative Research
'Crang and Cook provide a well-written practical guide to doing ethnographic research in the broadest sense of the term...They begin with a useful discussion of what ethnographic research entails... and how it fits in the broader realm of social research in a post-modern context... This book would be a useful resource for students and faculty embarking on an ethnographic research project.'
Choice
I really like to informal tone of this book which, along with the applied nature of it, makes it entirely credible. I will recommend it to nursing colleagues and students interested in understanding and creating ethnographic research, and have used it myself to help shape a grant application.
Simply essential for courses of qualitative methods in human geography. It doesn't work without ethnography, and that's the book for geographers to gain the insights.
An excellent introduction into the strenghts and challenges of ethnographic research
Crang and Cook have produced an excellent text for anyone interested in or undertaking ethnographic study. The book does well to balance an awareness of theory and its relationship to practice. The work is particularly relevant for researchers or postgraduates, as it offers an alternative process orientated model to traditional linear ways of researching.
This is a very good text book focussing on the ethnographic method in geography.
