Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes

by Robert M. Emerson

experience: (1) what is observed and ultimately treated as “data” or “findings” is inseparable from the observational processes; (2) in writing fieldnotes, the field researcher should give special attention to the indigenous meanings and concerns of the people studied; (3) contemporaneously written fieldnotes are an essential grounding and resource for writing broader, more coherent accounts of others’ lives and concerns; and (4) such fieldnotes should detail the social and interactional processes that make up people’s everyday lives and activities.

First, ethnographers should take note of their initial impressions.

Second, field researchers can focus on their personal sense of what is significant or unexpected in order to document key events or incidents in a particular social world or setting.

may look closely at something that surprises or runs counter to her expectations, again paying attention to incidents, feeling tones, impressions, and interactions, both verbal and nonverbal.

use their own personal experience of events that please, shock, or even anger them to identify matters worth writing about.

To use personal reactions effectively, however, requires care and reflection. One must first pay close attention to how others in the setting are reacting to these events; it is important to become aware of when and how one’s own reactions and sensitivities differ from those of some or most members.

we recommend that the ethnographer first register her feelings, then step back and use this experience to ask how others in the setting see and experience these matters. Are they similarly surprised, shocked, pleased, or angered by an event? If so, under what conditions do these reactions occur, and how did those affected cope with the incidents and persons involved? Whether an ethnographer is working in a foreign or in a familiar culture,

Third, in order to document key events and incidents, field researchers should move beyond their personal reactions to attend explicitly to what those in the setting experience and react to as “significant” or “important.”

This requires not just that the ethnographer describes interactions but that she consistently attends to “when, where, and according to whom” in shaping all fieldnote descriptions.

Fourth, ethnographers can begin to capture new settings by focusing and writing notes as systematically as possible, focusing on how routine actions in the setting are organized and take place.

jottings—a brief written record of events and impressions captured in key words and phrases. Jottings translate to-be-remembered observations into writing on paper as quickly rendered scribbles about actions and dialogue.

Making jottings, however, is not only a writing activity; it is also a mind-set. Learning to jot down details that remain sharp and that easily transform into vivid descriptions on the page results, in part, from envisioning scenes as written. Writing jottings that evoke memories requires learning what can be written about and how.

First, jot down details of what you sense are key components of observed scenes, events, or interactions.

Second, jot down concrete sensory details about observed scenes and interactions.

Third, avoid characterizing scenes or what people do through generalizations or summaries.

Fourth, fieldworkers use jottings to capture detailed aspects of scenes, talk, and interaction; short or more extended direct quotes are particularly useful for capturing such detail,

Fifth, use jottings to record the details of emotional expressions and experiences; note feelings such as anger, sadness, joy, pleasure, disgust, or loneliness as expressed and attended to by those in the setting.

Beginning ethnographers sometimes attempt to identify motives or internal states when recording observed actions.

Sixth, use jottings to signal your general impressions and feelings, even if you are unsure of their significance at the moment.

Whether it be an incident, event, routine, interaction, or visual image, ethnographers recreate each moment from selected details and sequences that they remember or have jotted down: words, gestures, body movements, sounds, background setting, and so on. While writing, they further highlight certain actions and statements more than others in order to portray their sense of an experience. In other words, ethnographers create scenes on a page through highly selective and partial recountings of observed and re-evoked details.

Writing up dialogue is more complicated than simply remembering talk or replaying every word. People talk in spurts and fragments. They accentuate or even complete a phrase with a gesture, facial expression, or posture. They send complex messages through incongruent, seemingly contradictory and ironic verbal and nonverbal expression as in sarcasm or polite put-downs. Thus, ethnographers must record the meanings they infer from the bodily expression accompanying words—gesture, movement, facial expression, tone of voice. Furthermore, people do not take turns smoothly in conversations: They interrupt each other, overlap words, talk simultaneously, and respond with ongoing comments and murmurs. Such turn taking can be placed on a linear page by bracketing and overlapping speech.

In a sketch, the fieldworker, struck by a vivid sensory impression, describes a scene primarily through detailed imagery. Much as in a photograph, sequencing of actions does not dominate. Rather, the writer, as a more distanced observer looking out on a scene, describes what she senses, pausing for a moment in recounting the action to create a descriptive snapshot of a character or a setting. As a result, sketches might be short paragraphs or a few sentences within the overall narrative. Such static snapshots help orient the reader to the relevant details of the contexts in which actions take place.

Unlike a sketch, which depicts a “still life” in one place, an episode recounts action and moves in time to narrate a slice of life. In an episode, a writer constructs a brief incident as a more or less unified depiction of one continuous action or interaction. Consequently, when recalling an incident that does not extend over a long period of time or involve many characters, ethnographers often write up that memory as a one-or two-paragraph episode.13

descriptions. The most immediate forms of analytic writing are asides and commentaries, interpretive writings composed while the ethnographer is actively composing fieldnotes.14 Asides and commentaries consist of brief questions, ideas, or reactions the researcher writes into the body of the notes as he recalls and puts on paper the details of a specific observation or incident.

Asides are brief, reflective bits of analytic writing that succinctly clarify, explain, interpret, or raise questions about some specific happening or process described in a fieldnote.

A commentary is a more elaborate reflection, either on some specific event or issue or on the day’s experiences and fieldnotes. Focused commentaries of the first sort are placed just after the fieldnote account of the event or issue in a separate paragraph set off with parentheses.

writing fieldnotes gives way to reading them.

We have found the following sorts of questions useful in beginning to examine specific fieldnotes: • What are people doing? What are they trying to accomplish? • How, exactly, do they do this? What specific means and/or strategies do they use? • How do members talk about, characterize, and understand what is going on? What assumptions are they making? • What do I see going on here? What did I learn from these notes? Why did I include them? • How is what is going on here similar to, or different from, other incidents or events recorded elsewhere in the fieldnotes? • What is the broader import or significance of this incident or event? What is it a case of ?

While the fieldworker should try to read and code all fieldnotes, he may turn from the coding to writing memos at any time, seeking to get ideas and insights down on paper when they occur. He may also reread in-process memos, abandoning some, while revising and elaborating others in light of subsequent observations and the insights generated by coding. We encourage writing memos about as many ideas, issues, and leads as possible. While some of these ideas reflect concerns and insights that the fieldworker brings to the reading, others grow out of reengaging the scenes and events described in the fieldnotes.

Note the limited intent of this analytic memo:

Ethnographers also write initial memos to try to identify and explore a general pattern or theme that cuts across a number of disparate incidents or events.

Field researchers have different ways of selecting core themes. The ethnographer might begin by coding fieldnotes for themes and topics that she has already identified and begun to develop in writing in-process memos. During open coding, the ethnographer can elaborate, deepen, and refine or discard themes developed at earlier points in time. But, because she is not bound by previous preliminary analysis, open coding provides the opportunity for developing new themes and insights as she views the entire corpus of her notes through fresh eyes. One consideration is to give priority to topics for which a substantial amount of data has been collected and which reflect recurrent or underlying patterns of activities in the setting under study. Fieldworkers might also give priority to what seems significant to members, whether it is what they think is key, what looks to be practically important, or what engages a lot of their time and energy.

The fieldworker must also consider how a selected theme can be related to other apparent themes. A theme that allows the researcher to make linkages to other issues noted in the data is particularly promising. Finding new ways of linking themes together allows for the possibility that some of the themes that might have been seen as unrelated and possibly dropped can, in fact, be reincorporated as “subthemes” under more general thematic categories.

Once the ethnographer has identified a set of core themes for further analysis, he might find it useful to sort fieldnotes on the basis of these themes. Here, the fieldworker breaks down the corpus of fieldnotes into smaller, more manageable sets, collecting together, in one place, all those pieces that bear on each core issue. This sorting or retrieving procedure involves physically grouping segments of the data on a theme in order to more easily explore their meanings. Sorting into one place or pile facilitates analysis by concentrating fieldnotes relevant to an emerging issue.6

Having decided on core themes, and perhaps having sorted the fieldnotes accordingly, the ethnographer next turns to focused coding that is a finegrained, line-by-line analysis of selected notes. This involves building up and, in some cases, further elaborating analytically interesting themes, both by connecting data that initially may not have appeared to go together and by further delineating subthemes and subtopics that distinguish differences and variations within the broader topic.

By breaking down fieldnotes even more finely into subcodes, the ethnographer discovers new themes and topics and new relationships between them. The same openness to new ways to understand and fit pieces of data together that we encouraged earlier applies to focused coding as well. In some cases, this process generates new issues or opens up new topics that carry the analysis in an entirely different direction and may even require a rethinking and regrouping of the fieldnotes.

As the ethnographer turns increasingly from data gathering to the analysis of fieldnotes, writing integrative memos that elaborate ideas and begin to link or tie codes and bits of data together becomes absolutely critical. One approach to writing integrative memos is to explore relationships between coded fieldnotes that link together a variety of discrete observations to provide a more sustained examination of a theme or issue. Alternatively, the ethnographer may reorganize and revise previously written in-process and code memos, identifying a theme or issue that cuts across a number of these memos and pulling together relevant materials.

At this point, many ethnographers continue to write primarily for themselves, focusing on putting the flow of their thoughts on paper and maintaining the loose, “note this” and “observe that” style characteristic of several of the memos we have considered to this point. Others, however, find it useful to begin to write with future audiences explicitly in mind.

Writing a thematic narrative differs fundamentally from writing an analytic argument, both in the process of putting that text together and in the structure of the final text. Structurally, in a text that presents a logical argument, the author sets forth a formal thesis or proposition in the introduction as a stance to be argued, then develops each analytic point with evidence logically following from and clearly supporting the propositional thesis.4 In contrast, an ethnographic story proceeds through an intellectual examination of evidence to eventually reach its contributing central idea. While a thematic narrative begins by stating a main idea or thesis, it progresses toward fuller elaboration of this idea throughout the paper. Indeed, the more precise, fuller statement of the thesis is often most effectively presented at the end of the story in a conclusion to the

is, thematic narratives use fieldnotes, not as illustrations and examples of points that have already been made, but, rather, as building blocks for constructing and telling the story in the first place. In this sense, the main idea grows out of the process of coding and selecting excerpts rather than prefiguring the choice of fieldnotes to include. The excerpts in an ethnographic story are not so much evidence for analytic points as they are the core of the story.

processes, developing a thematic narrative requires constant movement back and forth between specific fieldnote incidents and progressively more focused and precise analysis. To facilitate this process, we do not recommend beginning with a tentative thesis or working hypothesis. Instead, we urge the writer to hold off formulating an explicit thesis until the paper is finished, so that even in the process of writing, she will make discoveries about data and continue to balance her analytic insights with the demands of sticking close to indigenous views. We suggest that the ethnographer begin developing a thematic narrative by writing out a statement of a general topic or question.

Alternatively, the ethnographer may come away from his coding and memo writing with a clear sense of an interesting and unifying general topic. He should write out this topic as explicitly as possible and then attempt to specify more particular themes that might develop that topic by reviewing his codings, memos, and original fieldnotes.