Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
5
Finding Your Way Through the Forest
Analysis
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only
the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.
—Henry David Thoreau
Analysis is one of the most engaging features of ethnography. It begins at the
moment a fieldworker selects a problem to study and ends with the last word in
the report or ethnography. Ethnography involves many levels of analysis. Some are
simple and informal; others require some statistical sophistication. Ethnographic
analysis is iterative, building on ideas throughout the study. Analyzing data in the
field enables the ethnographer to know precisely which methods to use next,
as well as when and how to use them. Through analysis, the ethnographer tests
hypotheses and perceptions to construct an accurate conceptual framework about
what is happening in the social group under study. Analysis in ethnography is as
much a test of the ethnographer as it is a test of the data.
The fieldworker must find a way through a forest of data, theory, observa-
tion, and distortion. Throughout the analytic trek, the fieldworker must make
choices—between logical and enticing paths, between valid and invalid but
fascinating data, and between genuine patterns of behavior and series of appar-
ently similar but distinct reactions. Choosing the right path requires discrimi-
nation, experience, attention to both detail and the larger context, and intuition.
The best guide through the thickets of analysis is at once the most obvious and
most complex of strategies: clear thinking.
THINKING
First and foremost, analysis is a test of the ethnographer's ability to think—to
process information in a meaningful and useful manner. The ethnographer
confronts a vast array of complex information and needs to make some sense
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