Meta-Ethnography: Synthesizing Qualitative Studies

by George W. Noblit, R . Dwight Hare

This provocative volume deals with one of the chief criticisms of ethnographic studies, a criticism which centres on their particularism or their insistence on context -- the question is How can these studies be generalized beyond the individual case? Noblit and Hare propose a method -- meta-ethnography -- for synthesizing from qualitative, interpretive studies. They show that ethnographies themselves are interpretive acts, and demonstrate that by translating metaphors and key concepts between ethnographic studies, it is possible to develop a broader interpretive synthesis. Using examples from numerous studies, the authors illuminate how meta-ethnography works, isolate several types of meta-ethnographic study and provide a theoretica

88 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1988

Reviews

[Simon Mcleish]

I read this for work, before embarking on a project which will involve carrying out multiple independent lines of enquiry on one subject, then synthesizing the results to come up with a plan for implementation work. The ideas here are likely to be useful for this, especially those in the section on lines-of-argument synthesis (which basically means analysing related studies as providing individual parts of a desired wider picture). It's not my field, but I found much of what was said to be fairly obvious - a lot of it is about translating the metaphors from each study (where "metaphor" is a technical ethnographic term slightly differing from its normal literary meaning) to be able to compare what is said in each of them on a thematic basis. Useful but not revolutionary.