Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
compare the two patterns. In practice, the ethnographer works simultaneously on
many patterns. The level of understanding increases geometrically as the ethnog-
rapher moves up the conceptual ladder—mixing and matching patterns and
building theory from the ground up. (See Glaser, 1992; Glaser & Strauss, 1967,
for a discussion of grounded theory.)
Observation of the daily activity of a middle-class family might reveal sev-
eral patterns. The couple drops off their child at the day care facility and goes
to work every day. They receive their paychecks every other week. Rituals such
as grocery shopping and doing laundry occur every weekend. Combining
these preliminary patterns into a meaningful whole makes other patterns
apparent. The stresses and strains of a family in which both husband and wife
must hold down full-time jobs and bring up a family; the emphasis on organi-
zation and planning, even of usually spontaneous activities; and a variety of
other behaviors and practices become more meaningful and understandable in
this context. The observer can make preliminary inferences about the entire
economic systems by analyzing the behavior that is subsumed within the pat-
tern, as well as the patterns themselves. Ethnographers acquire a deeper under-
standing of and appreciation for a culture as they weave each part of the ornate
human tapestry together, by observing and analyzing the patterns of everyday
life (see Davies, 2007, p. 146; Wolcott, 2008b).
The process of identifying and matching patterns and building theory is
facilitated by the database programs discussed in Chapter 4, such as
ATLAS.ti, HyperRESEARCH, NVivo, AnSWR, and EZ-Text. For example,
I have used ATLAS.ti, NVivo, and HyperRESEARCH software to organize
raw field notes and search for patterns. With each of them, I could search for
key words or strings of words in all field notes. All the examples (within the
context of the paragraph within which each is found) were consolidated into
one document for review and discussion to determine whether each was an
appropriate example or if the contexts of the various examples were similar.
Another approach is to label specific paragraphs in field notes based on their
meaning. This is typically referred to as coding chunks of data. It is more
time-consuming than a word search, but it is more precise and powerful.
Searching for and sorting these labeled paragraphs generates a more precise
list of similar examples. Reliability is improved because the ethnographer can
quantify the number of times a topic is found in the field notes. For example,
in one study of a teacher education program, the ethnographic team searched
for the code “gang” and found many references to gangs in the field notes that
established a clear pattern in our data. The software generated a “report” list-
ing all the examples. It also enabled us to create subcategories. The software
facilitated the creation of gang subcategories as well. The qualitative
data analysis software also organized the data in a hierarchical tree format,
