RESEARCH AND LIFE HISTORY: FACING THE CHALLENGES OF NEW ETHNOGRAPHY
The present paper attempts to shed light on the recent onslaught of post-modern critiques concerning the inadequacies of existing research methodology to provide powerful insights into the problem fields that the social scientists intend to explore. Proponents of postmodernism, while perceiving methodology as an ideological construction, intend to reveal the veiled ways through which various research methods adopted by the positivists reinforce dominant ideology in constructing the system of domination and leave the minor 'others' unheard prior to disapproving their voices in public discourses.
Encountering the postmodernists' claim this paper addresses the need to pay a renewed attention to issues of narrative style and therefore makes an effort to offer a philosophical and methodological argument for the use of life history as a humanistic approach to research. In this way to face the fallacy of achieving absolute objectivity it discuss the usefulness of in-depth life history method to illustrate the role of social structure and human agency. In epilogue it hold the conviction that once recognize our incapability to know reality apart from our subjective existence it can make a step ahead to overcome the subjective biases while conducting research and hence can develop a notion of conscious subjectivity.
Ethnography presents the results of a holistic research method founded on the idea that a system's properties cannot necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other. The genre has both formal and historical connections to travel writing and colonial office reports. Several academic traditions, in particular the constructivist and relativist paradigms employ ethnographic research as a crucial research method. Many cultural anthropologists consider ethnography the essence of the discipline.
Psychology, economics, sociology and cultural studies also produce ethnography. Urban sociology and the Chicago School in particular are associated with ethnographic research, although some of the most well-known examples (including Street Corner Society by William Foote Whyte and Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Caton) were influenced by an anthropologist, Lloyd Warner, who happened to be in the sociology department at Chicago, and by sociologist Robert Park whose earlier career had included journalism.
Symbolic interactionism developed from the same tradition and yielded several excellent sociological ethnographies, including Shared Fantasy by Gary Alan Fine, which documents the early history of fantasy role-playing games. But even though many sub-fields and theoretical perspectives within sociology use ethnographic methods, ethnography is not the sine of the discipline, as it is in cultural anthropology.
Techniques:
1. Direct, first-hand observation of daily behavior. This can include participant observation.
2. Conversation with different levels of formality. This can involve small talk to long interviews.
3. The genealogical method. This is a set of procedures by which ethnographers discover and record connections of kinship, descent and marriage using diagrams and symbols.
4. Detailed work with key consultants about particular areas of community life.
5. In-depth interviewing.
6. Discovery of local beliefs and perceptions.
7. Problem-oriented research.
8. Longitudinal research. This is continuous long-term study of an area or site.
9. Team research.
10. Case studies.
Not all of these techniques are used by ethnographers, but interviews and participant observation are the most widely used.
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