Using Methods in the Field: A Practical Introduction and Casebook

Methods textbooks generally offer prescriptive advice on how to perform certain techniques, how to develop specific strategies, how to analyze your results. But, as all experienced ethnographers know, this fine-sounding advice rarely provides ample guidance in dealing with real people in real field settings. That is where this casebook differs. Selecting many key methods regularly used by anthropologists ? participant observation, consensus analysis, simple surveys, scaling, freelisting and triads, networks, decision modeling? the editors commissioned scholars who have completed studies using these techniques to describe them in the context of real field work. Using cases from health, community politics, family relations, and child development (among others) in settings as diverse as an Arkansas college campus, a Mexican barrio, a Thai village, and a Scottish business, the student is given a clear understanding of the diversity of methods used by anthropologists and the complexities surrounding their use.

H. Russell Bernard is Director of the Institute for Social Science Research at Arizona State University and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Florida. He is the author of Social Research Methods, third edition, Analyzing Qualitative Data: Systematic Approaches, second edition, and Native Ethnography.

VICTOR C. de MUNCK is an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at the State University of New York at New Paltz.