1. Chapter 16
Directed Strategies for
Data-Making

2. Ethnography Essentials: A Brief
Review
• In the course of ethnographic research:
– You may draw upon any combination of the
“tools” presented in this book
• Everything you recall having seen, heard,
felt, tasted, smelled, and touched will be:
– Reduced to handwritten and then typed words
on a page
© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

3. Ethnography Essentials: A Brief
Review
• The ethnographer’s ultimate goal is to
generate “an account” of the culture
• The individual cultural insider is not the
primary unit of analysis;
– Rather, the UOA is the culture itself;
• As culture is the outcome of interacting individual
and institutional forces.
© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

4. The Directed Strategies
• When Should I Use Directed Strategies?
– Too many ethnographers rely on directed
strategies and techniques only when they:
• Feel they need to test their hypotheses
– Within the culture you’re studying, you’ll be an
outsider
© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

5. The Directed Strategies
– Reprioritizing roles
– Directed techniques
• What Do Directed Strategies Produce?
• Asking Questions
– Remember, ask a lot of “how” questions
– Estimation
© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

6. The Directed Strategies
– Compare And Contrast
– Baiting
• Processual Interviewing
• Manualize
– Every culture encompasses specific
processes for getting things done
© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

7. The Directed Strategies
– A behavioral domain is a kind of collective
“habitus”
• Free-Listing and Pile-Sorting
– Upon first entering a culture, you’ll be ignorant
of many things
– A cultural domain is an area of shared reality
– Doing a free-list with an informant is easy
© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

8. The Directed Strategies
• Sociometric Grid Mapping
– A sociometric grid is nothing more than a
table, or matrix
• Daily Diary
– Daily diaries are generally more reliable than
retrospective interviewing
© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

9. The Directed Strategies
• Ethnographic Shadowing
– Yields even more nuanced and rich data
– Shadowing can give you a tremendous
amount of data on how:
• Informants view and navigate the world
• Informant Mapping: Individuals and Focus
Groups
© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

10. The Directed Strategies
– Will furnish you with data on how they see the
social, natural; and built “ecology” of daily life
• Systematic Social Observation (SSO)
– Gather qualitative & quantitative ethnographic
data on physical and social phenomena in:
• The neighborhood/area that encompasses the
culture you’re studying
© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.