Ethnography

Hobbs, 2006
A cocktail of methodologies that share the assumption that personal engagement with the subject is the key to understanding a particular culture or social setting. Participant observation is the most common component of this cocktail, but interviews, conversational and discourse analysis, documentary analysis, film and photography all have their place in the ethnographer’s repertoire. Description resides at the core of ethnography, and however this description is constructed it is the intense meaning of social life from the everyday perspective of group members that is sought.

Hobbs, Dick. "Ethnography" in Victor Jupp (ed.) The Sage dictionary of social research methods Sage Publications Limited, 2006:101