Understanding Ethnographic Texts (Qualitative Research Methods) - Softcover

Atkinson, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080393937X ISBN 13: 9780803939370

Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc, 1992

Synopsis

Back to the basics. This is precisely what Paul Atkinson does for his readers in Understanding Ethnographic Texts, the first "how to" book of its kind. He provides basic, yet significant, lessons for ethnographers going about the business of writing up their findings. He uses the postmodernist premise that ethnography is not an unbiased, scientific view of "the field setting," but rather a construction of the ethnographer. From this, Atkinson offers useful advice on how to read, and then how to write ethnography. He explains the importance of self-consciousness in understanding how to present the material, how to develop story lines and use metaphor, how to organize material and create a voice, how to balance analysis with description, and how to use one′s own work in conjunction with others. He also outlines various literary conventions through recent experiments that have departed from traditional ethnographic style. He links these studies to an analysis of the contributions of postmodernist theory to ethnographic work, and then argues for the "authority" of the researcher, which contrasts the viewpoint of many postmodernist ethnographers. This highly accessible, "how to" book is readable, thoughtful, and instructive, and will prove invaluable to qualitative researchers, writing scholars, and text analysts, and to ethnographers in sociology and anthropology.

About this title

About the Author

Paul Atkinson is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Cardiff University. Recent publications include For Ethnography (SAGE 2014) and Thinking Ethnographically (SAGE 2017). The fourth book in his quartet will be Crafting Ethnography, also for SAGE. The fourth edition of Hammersley and Atkinson Ethnography: Principles in Practice was published by Routledge in 2019. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Learned Society of Wales.

Edition details

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080393937X
• ISBN 13: 9780803939370
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 58