A Shot of Ethnography

March 17, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

(Although this post is partly about drunkenness, its appearing on St. Patrick’s Day is purely coincidental and should not be construed in any way as related to ethnic stereotypes.)

I miss ethnography, an idle pursuit in my academic youth. Survey research results are more frequently cited, in the journals and even in the newspapers (as Contexts Crawler faithfully documents), maybe even a little snazzy graph in USA Today or elsewhere. Ethnographers less so it seems, though they might occasionally turn up on TV.* Or in a New York Times column.

Contexts Crawler missed it, but on Monday, “Our Towns,” by Peter Applebome reported on the ethnographic fieldwork of James Roberts (Sociology and Criminal Justice department, University of Scranton).

The field for his fieldwork was the bars of Hoboken. Dr. Roberts is a Jersey boy – degrees from Stockton and Rutgers – and he has tended bar down the shore. I haven’t read his work, but from the Times column I gather that it focuses on questions of how bar patrons become excessively drunk and violent. Who is responsible for feeding even more drinks to people who are far beyond three sheets to the wind? Not the bartenders, it turns out. I would also guess that Roberts is watching to see how some interactions escalate to violence, perhaps along lines of Luckenbill’s old research on scenarios that end in homicide.

Survey research shows the relation between variables. Ethnography tells you how things work. Ethnography is about knowing who the players are and how they think. I remember Robert Weiss saying that if you’re a survey researcher and you want to know about cars, you get a sample of cars, and you discover that a car has an average of 5.38 cylinders, 164.7 horsepower, etc. (this was so long ago that he also included something about carburetors). But if you’re an ethnographer, you get a car, you open the hood, and you try to figure out how all those parts fit together.

There are other differences, notably control of the data and the demands that the data make on the researcher. You can’t do ethnography on your own terms. If you want to do research on drunkenness in Hoboken bars, you have to go to Hoboken, even if you live in Scranton. And you have to do your research when people are going to be getting drunk, even if you usually go to bed after the 11:00 news.

*I myself was once on a morning show called “For Women Only” or maybe its later incarnation “Not For Women Only,” both distant ancestors of The View.