Analyzing and Interpreting Ethnographic Data

Ethnographer's Toolkit #5

by Margaret Diane LeCompte

Discusses methods for organising retrieving, rendering manageable, and interpreting the data collection n ethnographic research. A variety of methods are offered for transforming fieldnotes, observations, audio and videotapes, questionnaires, surveys, documents, maps and other kinds of data into research results.

Contents:
1. Analysis and Interpretation --
2. In-the-Field Analysis --
3. Tidying Up --
4. Analysis From the Top Down --
5. Analysis From the Bottom Up: The Item Level of Analysis --
6. Creating a Codebook --
7. Preliminary Results: Identifying Patterns and Structures --
8. Managing Quantitative Data --
9. Analyzing Ethnographic Survey Data --
10. Fine-Tuning Results: Assembling Components, Structures, and Constituents --
11. Creating Interpretations.

Genres: Anthropology, Ethnography

208 pages, Paperback

First published August 19, 1999

About the author

Margaret D. LeCompte is Professor Emerita of Education and Sociology at Colorado University, USA. She is internationally known as one of the leading proponents of qualitative and ethnographic research and evaluation in education. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters on research methods in education and the social sciences, her research also includes studies of school reform and school organization, and of at-risk, ethnically diverse, gifted, artistically creative, and language minority students. A critical theorist trained in action research and the interactionist tradition, her fieldwork includes a five-year study of school reform and culture on the Navajo Nation in the United States, a longitudinal study of programs for urban American Indian children in the Southwest, and an ongoing study of identity construction among middle school children in an arts enrichment public school. She has won the University Press of America award for Outstanding Research Article in 1994 and the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) award for Outstanding Book in 1986.

Dr. LeCompte is a member of numerous professional organizations in education and anthropology and was president of the Council on Anthropology and Education of the American Anthropology Association. She serves on several editorial boards as well as committees for the American Educational Research Association. She served as editor of the journal, Review of Educational Research from 2003-2006.