Research tradition

3.2.1 Ethnography

As Silverman (2010:10) advised, my choice of qualitative or quantitative method was defined by my research problem. A qualitative approach was chosen as it offered a better fit and purchase for my interest in the student experience of work placement. In broad terms, my questions revolved around ‘how’ rather than ‘how many’ (Silverman 2010:11). Quantitative methods such as a survey might provide me with statistical results but an in- depth account of the experience would be elusive.

As I reflected on how I might explore this experience, the potential of ethnography to provide a rich understanding of specific situations was too hard to ignore. To some extent, it seemed a natural choice. Ethnography is aptly suited for studies in which little is known about the phenomenon, process, context or situation (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007:22; Dornyei 2007:132; Mackay and Gass 2005:169).

Ethnography’s general principles suited this study. Its orientation towards prolonged engagement with the group being studied had the potential for knowing about the group more intimately (Walford 2001:8) and perhaps also faithfully since ‘as the researcher becomes a more familiar presence, participants are less likely to behave uncharacteristically’ (Walford 2001:9). Moreover, with its focus on naturally-occurring

66 behaviour in ongoing settings or ‘observation of culture in situ’ (Denscombe 1995:184), ethnography ensured an ‘authenticity [that] can help provide an accurate depiction of a given situation or culture’ (Heigham and Sakui 2009:95). These principles also held the promise of developing an ‘inside standpoint’ (Miller et al. 2004:328) for interpreting the student experience.

Ethnography as a mode of inquiry also appealed to me as a researcher. Ethnography today does not have a standard, well-defined meaning (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007:2, Walford 2009). Blommaert and Dong (2010) observe that there is a widespread perception of ethnography as simply a method for collecting certain types of data, a view the writers argue must be corrected (2010:5). Hammersley agrees, explaining that while the kinds of methods employed are a key dimension of ethnography, ethnography is fundamentally a methodological approach, ‘a specific form of qualitative inquiry’ (2006:3).

Agar (2006) puts forth a logic that underlies the ethnographic approach. He defines this logic as abductive (from Latin meaning ‘lead away’), iterative (from Latin meaning ‘to repeat’) and recursive (from Latin meaning ‘run again’ or ‘run back’). Developing the notion of abductive logic from the logician and semiotician Charles Peirce (1906), the writer explains that abductive logic paves the way for arriving at new concepts. As deductive logic derives conclusions from previously-known premises and inductive logic focuses on how new material fit existing concepts, both these kinds of logic were ‘closed’ with reference to the concepts in play. To account for learning something from our experience that takes us to new places, or ‘leads us away’, ethnographers abduct from their data new understandings to explain their observations:

The purpose of ethnography is to go forth into the world, find and experience rich points [raw data], and then take them seriously as a signal of the difference between what you know and what you need to learn to understand and explain what just happened. (Agar 2006)

67 Abductive logic does not ignore the processes we typically engage in in scientific inquiry. Having derived new concepts to explain our observations, we systematically collect, compare and contrast, and try to determine if the new concepts are fitting explanations for observations. This leads us to the second characteristic of ethnographic logic, which is that abduction in ethnography is necessarily iterative:

What an ethnographer learns early might be the most important to report to an outsider but that early abduction fades with time as new rich points come up that were invisible until the earlier work was finished. (Agar 2006)

Finally, abduction in ethnography is also recursive. What ensues is a progressive sequence of abduction as we explain one observation after another until we return to the original observation:

Sometimes we use abduction right in the middle of abducting. A surprise happens and we pursue it on the way to constructing a new [concept] that explains it. But as we pursue it, another new surprise comes up, so now we need to pursue that. … it is recursive in the sense of abducting in the process of abducting. (Agar 2006) Agar sums up the ethnographic logic as follows:

It is first of all abductive logic, taking surprises seriously and creating new explanations for them. It is also iterative, something that is applied over and over again in the course of a piece of work. And it is recursive, calling on itself to solve a problem that comes up even as it is solving a problem. (Agar 2006)

The notion of an abductive, iterative, recursive logic reads like a set of procedures for engaging in ethnographic work: the ethnographer engages in abduction, iteratively and recursively, in the process of coming up with new concepts to produce new understandings. But more than that, these procedures point to a way of coming to know about things and explicitly describe ethnography as an epistemological approach. The very engagement with abduction requires a certain way of approaching inquiry. While it may be impossible to approach a new situation without preconceived ideas, it is important to strike a balance between these ideas, be open to ‘rich points’ and allow the data to speak for themselves.

68 With iteration and recursion, the researcher is called to be alert to changes, be skeptical towards ready explanations, constantly imagine new and previously unimagined alternatives, and persist with abductive work until no further conclusions can be made. The position taken in this research is to see ethnography as a methodological approach in qualitative inquiry and to follow its logic to arrive at new understandings of what is being studied.

My decision to use a qualitative ethnographic approach was based on a pragmatic reasoning that this was what worked best for my research problem, general principles in ethnography as well as the ethnographic logic which appealed to me as a mode of inquiry. Several features of this research are common to ethnographic work. In what follows, I describe my research based on four key features of ethnography stated in Hammersley and Atkinson (2007:3):

1. People’s actions and accounts are studied in everyday contexts, rather than under conditions created by the researcher ... research takes place ‘in the field’. In my fieldwork, I observed my participants in their everyday contexts of college classrooms, on-campus training facilities and work placements. In addition, I interacted with them beyond classroom and work environments. Writing about school ethnographies, Ball (1990:162) observed that the emphasis was almost entirely on classroom life but as he rightly notes, school life does not cease at the classroom door but goes on in the corridors, changing rooms, ‘behind the bicycle sheds’, and other places that constitute students’ ‘backstage arenas’. I observed and interacted with my participants outside their school and working hours: attending their social gatherings, hanging out with them individually, chatting with them on social networking websites and exchanging text messages with many of them. These extensive interactions with my research participants built our friendship and helped me to understand their everyday experiences more deeply.

69 2. Data are gathered from a range of sources … but participant observation and/or relative informal conversations are usually the main ones. The writers also state that ‘ethnography usually involves the researcher participating, overtly or covertly, in people’s daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, and/or asking questions through informal and formal interviews, collecting documents and artefacts – in fact gathering whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the emerging focus of inquiry (ibid.).

I gathered data through participant observation, fieldnotes, interviews and as Hammersley and Atkinson described it, ‘whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the emerging focus of inquiry’. The last in this list consisted of my relatively informal conversations with participants and other individuals during the fieldwork as well as text messages exchanged with my participants.

3. Data collection is, for the most part, relatively ‘unstructured’, in two senses. First, it does not involve following through a fixed and detailed research design specified at the start. Second, the categories that are used for interpreting what people say or do are not built into the data collection process … [but] are generated out of the process of data analysis.

Like many ‘novitiate researchers’, I had taken a ‘plunge into the unknown’ and experienced ‘risk, uncertainty and discomfort’ with the ethnographic approach (Ball 1990:157) when I began this research. Armed with a methodological approach and a general interest in the experience of students in vocational programmes, I began fieldwork with little more than orienting questions (Frank and Uy 2004:270) and continued with anxiety until the development of more focused questions evolved through data collection and analysis. Although not derived through Grounded Theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Charmaz 2006), the categories that developed were grounded in the data and emerged through the research process.

4. The focus is usually on a few cases, generally fairly small scale, perhaps a single setting or group of people. This is to facilitate in-depth study.

Such was the case in this research which has focused on a small group of vocational students and their experience in the placement kitchens.

70 Guided by the ethnographic logic described by Agar and sharing common features with ethnographic work, this research differs however in certain practical aspects from traditionally full-blown, long-term, comprehensive ethnographies (Green and Bloome 1997:183). In Green and Bloome’s terms, it would be described as ‘using ethnographic tools’, or ‘the use of methods and techniques usually associated with fieldwork. These methods may or may not be guided by cultural theories or questions about social life of group members’ (ibid.). In addition, it also differs from traditional ethnographies in its orientation to language, specifically talk, as a topic for investigation.

3.2.2 Linguistic ethnography

As this research concerns what students experienced whilst at work placement, I was not only interested in what students did but also what they said in their interactions with others in their world. In addition to ethnography, this research was enhanced by a research perspective that emphasises ‘language in use’ (Brown and Yule 1983:1) and a systematic and rigorous way of analysing linguistic data. Linguistic approaches to discourse analysis, in emphasising ‘language as social interaction’ (Schiffrin 1994:414), fulfilled this purpose. In ‘linguistic ethnography’, Miller and Fox’s metaphorical bridge between ‘two or more analytic formations that may be linked and made mutually informative, while also respecting the distinctive contributions and integrity of each perspective’ (2004:35) is exemplified; and it is in this field which draws on the contributions of ethnography and linguistics that this research is positioned.

Rampton and his colleagues (2004) describe the emergent field of linguistic ethnography as a ‘site of encounter’ linking up a number of established lines of research including ‘New Literacy Studies’, Interactional Sociolinguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, neo-Vygotskian research on language and cognitive development, and interpretive applied linguistics for

71 language teaching (2004:9-11). The writers describe the general orientation of linguistic ethnography as follows:

[Linguistic] ethnography generally holds that to a considerable degree, language and the social world are mutually shaping, and that close analysis of situated language use can provide both fundamental and distinctive insights into the mechanisms and dynamics of social and cultural production in everyday activity. (Rampton et al. 2004:2)

They argue for the complementarity of ethnography and linguistics, and characterise this combination as ‘tying ethnography down’ and ‘opening linguistics up’ (2004:4). Elaborating on the metaphor, Creese states that ethnography provides linguistics with a close reading of context while linguistics provides a reliable analysis of language use not usually available through participant observation and taking of fieldnotes (2008:232).

Where linguistic analysis is concerned, Creese describes a linguistic-ethnographic analysis as combining close detail of local action and interaction within a wider social world, and drawing on the technical vocabularies in linguistics to do so (2008:233). Rampton and his colleagues elaborate on the enhanced value of discourse analysis in ethnography, stating that texts and recordings of interaction taken as the ‘point of entry’ into cultural analysis provide important data for (citing Duranti 2001:7 and Trueba & Wright 1981) ‘counter- arguments and independent testing’ (Rampton et al. 2004:6-7). Moreover, the analysis of interactional and institutional discourse can reveal much about social identities which are produced and reproduced in language. Finally, discourse analysis affords distance from the taken-for-granted, commonsense and everyday practice and provides means of uncovering the ideological or interactional processes that constitute it (ibid.).

Although this research is grounded in the logic, principles and data collection methods in ethnography, it also recognises and places emphasis on the role played by language, specifically talk, as participants interacted with others in their world. The position it takes with respect to language is to treat naturally occurring talk as a topic for investigation

72 instead of exclusively as a source of ethnographic data for example, as participants’ oral accounts of themselves and their world. Linguistic ethnography endorses and legitimises this complementarity of ethnographic methodology and linguistic analysis, and suggests a fit for this research within the discursive space it opens up. As Rampton puts it:

In contrast to ‘ethnographic linguistics’ which would declare ‘linguistics’ as the principal arena for its activity, ‘linguistic ethnography’ situates this work within a methodology – ethnography – that is very widely shared not just in anthropology but also in sociology, education, management studies, etc. At the same time, it specifies the linguistics of discourse and text as the primary resource for our efforts to contribute in a distinctive way to the broader enterprise of social science. (Rampton 2007:599-600)

The fields of ethnography and linguistics were drawn on in this research. I relied on ethnographic methodology in terms of the logic proposed in Agar (2006) and ethnographic methods of data collection including participant observation, fieldnotes and interviews. As I was also interested in analysing naturally occurring talk, I collected taped data in audio- recordings of verbal interactions between kitchen workers and my research participants. I describe how data were collected in Section 3.3. The subsequent analysis of ethnographic data made a close examination of the transcripts of taped data necessary and the latter was analysed using linguistic methods. Arguably the combination of these analyses produced a deeper and informed interpretation of the overall data. I describe the process of data analysis in Section 3.4.