From how to why: On luminous description and causal inference in ethnography (Part 2)

Ethnographers often start fieldwork by focusing on descriptive tasks that will enable them to answer questions about how social life proceeds, and then they work toward explaining more formally why patterns appear in their data. Making the transition from 'how?' to 'why?' can be...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Ethnography 2002-03, Vol.3 (1), p.63-90
Main Author: Katz, Jack
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Causal explanations
Causality
Children
Cultural studies
Ethnographic research
Ethnography
Inference
Methodology
Methodology (Data Analysis)
Mothers
Police
Social interaction
Social life
Social research
Social theories
Social theory
Writing
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Summary:Ethnographers often start fieldwork by focusing on descriptive tasks that will enable them to answer questions about how social life proceeds, and then they work toward explaining more formally why patterns appear in their data. Making the transition from 'how?' to 'why?' can be a dilemma, but the ethnographer's folk culture provides especially useful clues. By dwelling on their appreciation of especially luminous data, ethnographers can light the path to causal inference. In this, the second of a two-part article, four of seven forms for characterizing the rhetorical effectiveness of ethnographic data are illustrated and the distinctive resources they offer for causal explanation are analyzed.
ISSN:1466-1381
1741-2714
DOI:10.1177/1466138102003001003