Ethnography and Qualitative Design in Educational Research

by Margaret Diane LeCompte, Judith Preissle, Renata Tesch

An exciting addition to the field of ethnography, this revised and expanded textbook addresses ethical and theoretical concerns central to research in psychology, sociology, and anthropology - an interdisciplinary approach rarely utilized in other text. Like the First Edition, this book explains ways to collect data, methods for assuring the quality of that data, and the techniques and tools used to organize results, conclusions, and interpretations. The Second Edition diverges in that it demonstrates the delicate yet profound relationship between researchers and the material and participants under study. The authors investigate, interpret, and synthesize how each faction informs and affects the others' behavior, as well as the subsequent affect of these interactions on the results. The book discusses the historical development of ethnography and the fundamentals of how to do qualitative and ethnographic research. Other chapters address the problem of selection and of selection and research design, the issues involved in choosing relevant populations and in selecting and sampling qualitative data, and describe how populations are conceptualized. Resource and references lists are expanded to include the most recent developments. Accordingly, the use of computers as analytic tools is now addressed. This book will be of great value for both students and researchers concerned about the effects of theory and interpretation in the research process.

Key Features
* Explores the investigative traditions and terminologies of the various interdisciplinary fields
* Now includes chapters on critical, postmodern, collaborative, and feministic perspectives on the purposes andimplementation of research
* Contains an expanded use of concrete examples.
* Traces the role of research in cultural anthropolgoy and field sociology to its current use in ethnography, educational anthropology, sociology, psychology, and other disciplines

425 pages, Unknown Binding

First published April 1, 1984

About the author

Margaret D. LeCompte is Professor Emerita of Education and Sociology at Colorado University, USA. She is internationally known as one of the leading proponents of qualitative and ethnographic research and evaluation in education. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters on research methods in education and the social sciences, her research also includes studies of school reform and school organization, and of at-risk, ethnically diverse, gifted, artistically creative, and language minority students. A critical theorist trained in action research and the interactionist tradition, her fieldwork includes a five-year study of school reform and culture on the Navajo Nation in the United States, a longitudinal study of programs for urban American Indian children in the Southwest, and an ongoing study of identity construction among middle school children in an arts enrichment public school. She has won the University Press of America award for Outstanding Research Article in 1994 and the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) award for Outstanding Book in 1986.

Dr. LeCompte is a member of numerous professional organizations in education and anthropology and was president of the Council on Anthropology and Education of the American Anthropology Association. She serves on several editorial boards as well as committees for the American Educational Research Association. She served as editor of the journal, Review of Educational Research from 2003-2006.

Reviews

[Lawrence Linnen · Rating 5 out of 5]

LeCompte and Preissle present a comprehensive discussion of qualitative and ethnographic research in education, including the origins, history, and evolution of ethnographic research. The authors suggest all qualitative research, including ethnography, uses both selection processes, defining what kinds of people and how many of them can be studied, and sampling, selecting a smaller subset form the original population to assure representativeness, to generalize from a group of key informants to the large population, or to reduce the size of the study group.