{"id":290,"date":"2015-10-21T21:55:21","date_gmt":"2015-10-21T21:55:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/?p=290"},"modified":"2015-10-25T19:05:22","modified_gmt":"2015-10-25T19:05:22","slug":"the-ethics-of-ethnography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/2015\/10\/21\/the-ethics-of-ethnography\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ethics of Ethnography"},"content":{"rendered":"

In class several of you raised important queries and critiques of Goffman’s methodology in particular and ethnography as a methodological tool in particular.<\/p>\n

Quinn raised an important point, which the following article addresses: is it that Goffman’s methodology is especially suspect or is the nature of her field site, as well as the IRB protocols of ethnographic research with human subjects, partly responsible for what seems like inaccuracies and flaws?<\/em><\/p>\n

Here are some excerpts from the article on Slate, \u00a0you can read the full article here:<\/em><\/p>\n

The Ethics of Ethnography <\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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“Alice Goffman\u2019s heralded book about inner-city life has come under fire for inconsistencies and inaccuracies. Is the author to blame\u2014or does the fault lie with her field?”<\/h2>\n

“Ethnography can look like an uncomfortable hybrid of impressionistic data gathering, soft-focus journalism, and even a dash of creative writing.”<\/p>\n

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“The frustration is not merely a matter of academics resenting oversight out of principle. Many researchers think the uncompromising demand for total privacy has a detrimental effect on the quality of scholarship that comes out of the social sciences\u2014in part because anonymization makes it impossible to fact-check the work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cIt makes it really hard to verify\u2014you don\u2019t even know if the people exist,\u201d said Christopher Winship, a sociologist at Harvard University. He added, \u201cThe discipline thinks it\u2019s fine and that\u2019s probably totally wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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University of Chicago sociologist Richard Taub doesn\u2019t think it\u2019s fine and explained why: \u201cYour honor\u2014your word\u2014is the only thing you have to make your stuff believable, because your job is to not let anyone track these people down,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt\u2019s a terrible problem”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In class several of you raised important queries and critiques of Goffman’s methodology in particular and ethnography as a methodological tool in particular. Quinn raised an important point, which the following article addresses: is it that Goffman’s methodology is especially suspect or is the nature of her field site, as well as the IRB protocols … Continue reading The Ethics of Ethnography<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7270,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[142772],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-policing-the-carceral-state-week-7"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7270"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":307,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions\/307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}