Gearing Up - Ethnography - page 77

In another study of a teacher education program, my research team
members and I entered interview data into NVivo (previously NUDIST) and
then identified and confirmed a startling pattern—the existence of an unac-
knowledged two-tiered faculty system with significant differences in status
and financial security. In the same study, I experimented with a database
system designed to catalog, describe, and organize digital photographic
data.
CAMERAS
Cameras, particularly digital cameras, have a special role in ethnographic
research. They can function as a can opener, providing rapid entry into a
community or classroom (Collier & Collier, 1986; Fetterman, 1980). They
are a known commodity to most industrialized and many nonindustrialized
groups. I use cameras to help establish an immediate familiarity with people.
Cameras can create pictures useful in projective techniques or can be pro-
jective tools themselves. They are most useful, however, for documenting
field observations.
Cameras document people, places, events, and settings over time. They
enable the ethnographer to create a photographic record of specific behaviors.
I documented changes in student style of dress as one manifestation of an atti-
tudinal change during their tenure in the dropout program. Cameras can cap-
ture moments of understanding between friends or contrast the joy of a young
boy running in and out of the cold water pouring out of an open hydrant on a
hot, sticky day in the city with a backdrop of poverty, dilapidated tenements,
and littered streets. During the dropout study, I documented tremendous phys-
ical contrasts—evidencing considerable differences—between Manhattan and
Brooklyn, New York: The shining United Nations building, Saint Patrick's
Cathedral, Carnegie Hall, and Bloomingdale's juxtaposed with burned-out
buildings (see Figure 2.3), blocks of rubble (see Figure 2.2), graffiti, garbage,
broken glass, drug hangouts, small street corner businesses, and tiny
Pentecostal churches. As Collier & Collier (1986) explained,
Photography is a legitimate abstracting process in observation. It is one of the
first steps in evidence refinement that turns raw circumstances into data that are
manageable in research analysis. Photographs are precise records of material real-
ity. They are also documents that can be filed and cross-filed as can verbal state-
ments. Photographic evidence can be endlessly duplicated, enlarged or reduced in
visual dimension, and fitted into many schemes of diagrams, and by scientific
reading, into many statistical designs. (p. 5)