Counting as a Qualitative Method: Grappling with the Reliability Issue in Ethnographic Research

ISBN-13: 9783030348052 / Angielski / Miękka / 2021 / 140 str.

Wayne Fife

Spis treści

Chapter 1: The Reliability Issue

Chapter 2: Creating a Counting Schedule

Chapter 3: Success, Failure, and a Missed Opportunity

Chapter 4: Counting Qualitative Results

Chapter 5: Counting in the Archives

Chapter 6: Tourism – Counting the Overlooked

Chapter 7: Making Fiction Count

Chapter 8: The Importance of Counting for Qualitative Research

 

O autorze

Wayne Fife is Professor of Anthropology at Memorial University, Canada. He is the author of Doing Fieldwork (2005) and some two-dozen peer-reviewed journal articles. He has done research and written about aging in Ontario, education in Papua New Guinea, Pacific Island missionaries, ecological and heritage tourism in Newfoundland, imaginary worlds, and research methods and theory.

Blurb

“This book will be very valuable for teaching students how to use counting in the context of research and analysis in sociocultural anthropology. It is full of very vividly described examples from the author’s own research that make the book’s explanation of counting as a research method clear and engaging.”

—Vanessa Fong, Professor of Anthropology, Amherst College, USA

This book aims to explore counting as an often-overlooked research tool for qualitative projects. Building off of a research method invented by the author in 1986 called counting schedules, this volume provides instruction on how to use counting not only to enhance fieldwork results, but also as a form of analysis for extant field notes, interview results, self-reporting diaries or essays, primary archival material, secondary historical texts, government sources, and other documents and narratives, including fictional work. The author buttresses his discussion of counting schedules with extensive examples from previous fieldwork and research experiences, drawing on three decades of anthropological experience in Canada and the Pacific Islands. Counting as a Qualitative Method provides ethnographic researchers with the answer to the number-one question asked by qualitative and non-qualitative researchers alike: How can a qualitative researcher know his or her results are reliable?