Sarah Childers
EDPSY 582 B, 1/15/2008
Summary of Weisner (1996) Why ethnography should be the most important method in the study of human development.
Main Points
- Main Argument: Cultural is the primary influence on child development. Constructs influencing development (e.g. self-esteem, attachment, identity, resilience, autonomy) that are often characterized as individual, cognitive, or biologically-based, are in fact culturally constituted. Through ethnography, a researcher can know the particulars of a cultural place; it is a method that gets to meaning, how it is constructed by members of a community, and how meaning systems constrain and afford development and action. Through ethnographic fieldwork, a researcher in the developmental sciences would see “what is means to be a parent or a child and the variety of forms development can take”, that “children acquire cultural abilities” and that children are developmentally prepared for their culture (p. 306). Thus, ethnography is the most important method in the study of human development because it keeps central the importance of cultural place to development, “transforming it from ground to figure” (307).
Ethnography and fieldwork get researchers into cultural place of children and families. In contrast to experimental methodologies (i.e. the attachment study referenced in the chapter), ethnography is a naturalistic method. Its goal is to “describe and understand cultural place and its influence on the everyday lives of its members” (307).
In the field there are a number of ways to do research. There is diversity within ethnographic approaches, as evidenced by other chapters in this section. What unites the various approaches is a focus on subjective experience of members of cultural groups. Also ethnography tends to involve a long-term and deep commitment on the part of the researcher, who often works as a participant-observer.
Ethnography is complementary to other methods in studies of human development. In fact, it provides data for understanding cultural and human universals and differences, including “adaptive problems and developmental concerns” and “ecocultural features that … appear to influence child development everywhere” (p. 310). As such, methodocentrism should be resisted. Polarization of qualitative and quantitative traditions, insistence that they are discordant and that researchers choose sides is unnecessary and inaccurate. See Shweder (Chapter 8 in Jessor, Colby, & Shweder) for an interesting discussion of qualitative and quantitative objects of inquiry within ethnography.
Ethnography is not purely descriptive and open-ended in terms of research thrust. It can and should be question driven, even in initial stages. Ethnography does and should produce valid findings/evidence.
Ethnography and developmental sciences should be viewed as siblings as they share a lineage of a naturalistic tradition within the social sciences.
Incorporating fieldwork in another place into training programs for researchers in the developmental sciences would benefit the researcher and the field. Through fieldwork, it would become clear that culture is both the context and primary force of child development.
Terms
Naturalistic – studying a phenomenon in the real world [“the wild”], contrasted with experimental design
Methodocentrism – focusing on one method as the correct/best/only way to understand, explore, and explain the world, ignoring and perhaps disparaging other methods and methodologies.
Link to class readings
Weisner does not claim any one tradition of ethnography, arguing that it is a multi-faceted method. Emerson and Madison clearly articulate the different traditions within ethnography, historicizing turns within the field. It is interesting to think about Weisner's work in dialogue with Emerson and especially Madison. I doubt Madison would take such an a-political view of the multiple ethnographic traditions. Madison is also likely to be wary of Weisner's (simplistic) assumptions about the benefits that are sure to result from sending burgeoning developmental scientists out into the field in another culture. Power and politics in addition to the injustice that can result from field work is missing from Weisner's account of ethnography in the developmental sciences.
Links to my own research
I am being disciplined as a scholar of educational psychology a decade after this piece was published. Although still perhaps not the most popular method within child development studies, ethnography and its derivations are largely acceptable means of understanding and exploring development. Culture is now accepted to be both ground [context] and form [inextricable from the object of inquiry] of development. I currently study achievement motivation, identity enactment, and collaborative learning in college students. Although it is still common to decontextualize these constructs, it is also common and acceptable to theorize them as inherently situative and to study them accordingly through ethnographic methods.
Discussion Question
Considering this piece within the larger child development literature, what are possible responses to Weisner's central claim that development is a cultural phenomenon ---> ethnography is the method to understand nuances of culture ---> ethnography is the most important? Even if development is cultural, is ethnography the most important method for studying development? Can we attribute what we observe in a laboratory to culture yet still study it in a non-naturalistic setting? On a related note, how could we flip Weisner's attachment example, thinking about what would be lost without the lab observations and with only the mother's narrative?
Response
The context for Weisner's piece is the turn in the last few decades within the developmental sciences to appreciating development as a deeply cultural phenomenon. Weisner positions himself as a scientist who is widening his own theoretical and methodological frameworks based on research experiences that themselves were framed by more tradiitonal [i.e. cognitive] ways of conducting developmental research, and his audience seems to be primarily other developmental scientists. He prods his colleagues to consider ethnographic methods as valuable, as scientific, as flexible, and as complementary to the methods they have relied upon for years. I am on board with the general thrust of his arguments but find some of the particulars problematic. For example, I think that it is important to recognize the diverse strains within ethnography as not just different ways of doing things but as bound up in history and politics and are in some ways opposed to one another. I wonder if Weisner affiliates himself with a particular tradition or if he would argue that one ethnographic framework is better suited than others to uncover developmental phenomena. I also hope that Weisner would advocate for a rigorous training regime for developmental scientists who would do ethnographic wok. One does not have to adopt a critical or post-positivist stance to appreciate that simply tossing nascent researchers into "the field" is no way to train them [us!] to value the possibilities of this method or to recognize and grapple with its complexities.
No comments:
Post a Comment