Pros And Cons Of Ethnography

The first step of the scientific method is to identify a problem or question that the researcher wishes to answer. The next step is to perform a literature review to familiarize oneself with the source material regarding the problem or question. This ensures that the researcher does not reproduce others' findings while also providing a basis for new research. The third step is to form a hypothesis, which is a theoretical statement that explains the relationship between two events. It is imperative that the researcher assigns operational definitions for their variables or phenomena to ensure that their research is specific. After forming the hypothesis, the researcher must choose an appropriate research design to test it.

Ethnographic methods are particularly effective in expressing narratives about these groups, and over the past few decades, ethnography has provided us with new procedural innovations with regard to reflexivity. Some disadvantages are that replicating results to test validity cannot be done with ethnographic methods. This is significant because researchers must perform tests to ensure that the results coordinate with one another to prove their validity. Bias is also a con of ethnography, as researchers may approach their tasks depending on their hidden agendas. When researchers use specific types of questions in interviews or surveys to gather data, there are both advantages and disadvantages. One disadvantage is that the researcher may limit the questions being asked, leading to skewed data depending on the circumstances. Respondents may also not answer truthfully, and the questions may not be representative of the population as a whole when comparing results. To avoid bias, questions in ethnographic research must be unbiased.

This should be a major responsibility that researchers uphold when performing human experiments, interviews, surveys, and so on.