The Unspoken use of Ethnography in Engineering Education

By Fushcia Hoover

I sat down with Dr. Julia Thompson, a recent graduate of the Engineering Education program at Purdue to discuss the use of qualitative and ethnographic methods within her department. Taken from the department website, the Engineering Education program (ENE) is “distinct from instructor-training programs” and focuses on “conducting fundamental research on engineering learning and bridging research and practice—defining effective practices, identifying the reasons why they work, developing curricula, assessing how students learn, and moving those findings into the classrooms of tomorrow’s engineers”. Dr. Thompson’s dissertation research comprised a collection of semi-formal interviews for a multi-site case study of three different education-outreach programs. We sat down to discuss her choice of methods and their use amongst her colleagues.

Dr. Thompson with the LSU mascot, while at one of her research sites.

Interviews and surveys are very common in ENE; however, they have a few additional qualitative methods that are used as well. The first is called a think-a-loud, and it is used to learn how a person thinks through a problem. For example, the participant will be given a design task to complete, and is then asked to vocalize their mental process as they are solving the problem. Draw-an-engineer and draw-a-scientist are also methods used, particularly with children. In this case, children are asked to draw dominant images that they associate with an engineer or a scientist. Content analysis and observation are all techniques used in the department by researchers as well. While these methods are clearly identified as qualitative measures, they are not identified as ethnography. There seems to be recognition of ethnographic themes in the types of methods used, but it is not formally presented that way.

Said Dr. Thompson, “I think mine [referring to her own research methods] are definitely ethnographic in nature. I don’t ground the words in it, that’s not how I write it up when I talk about it.”

For example, one of her colleagues spent three months in northern India to work with Tibetan refugees, teaching them engineering skills while learning about the culture and community. Though ethnographic in nature, and named as such by the researcher, she presented her findings in a systematic way.

Lastly, we discussed the challenges for researchers in ENE interested in specifically using ethnographic methods and identifying them as such. While researchers within the ENE department often perform interdisciplinary work and value qualitative methods to a greater degree than quantitative, apprehension towards the use ethnographic methods due to its flexibility persists as a challenge.

“I think that in our field, that would be hard to fly [in reference to ethnography being less concerned with quantification and more concerned about describing a particular situation, community or interactions]. Realistically, we would want to be like, exactly how did you answer you question, what steps did you take. It definitely…there’s a need for high level of rigor and high clarity in the process and I think that would make ethnography more difficult”.

So while their department performs primarily qualitative research, the need to quantify results inhibits the acceptance of ethnography as a research method, as quantitative research is more appreciated.

Qualitative Methods in Comparative Literature: An Ethnography of Words?

By Garett Hunt

The Comparative Literature Program at Purdue University is multi-disciplinary in its nature, structurally encompassing collaboration between the Department of English and the School of Language and Cultures. In practice, research in comparative literature draws from a broad range of methodological approaches from the social sciences and humanities. In his graduate studies analyzing modern literary myths through rhetoric analysis, Mr. Lott’s research has drawn from an array cross-disciplinary qualitative approaches to guide his reading of literary text. He explains that literature represents “equipment for the living” from which an author’s position within their society can be read. Words and text is the product of expressions of reoccurring social situations which individuals are confronted with. These situations are products of larger social structures. By exploring rhetoric expressed within metaphors, analogies, and proverbs these structures can be evaluated through the author’s position navigating and negotiating within them.

In order to ask questions of the larger structures and properly frame the author’s responses to these those, researchers need to understand the experience of the social situation themselves. What makes mythological characters, such as vampires and werewolves, particularly pertinent to today’s society?  What experiences do they represent? What messages are authors conveying to their readers through these characters about their society? Lott explains that he has studied and used a wide range of qualitative methods in order to understand the social contexts of modern myths. This has included the use of survey questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and participant observation with the primary consumption audiences and consumer organization, or “fandoms”. Others in his field have used other methods, such as the content analysis of coded historic texts, philosophical analysis, and dramatic analysis.

Lott attributes participant observation as a highly informative way to gather large volumes of contextual data. People are not always, and perhaps often, not fully consciously aware of social structures in which they operate. As a result, asking people to identify their engagements with these structures in direct approaches, such as questionnaires or interviews, may not provide the full framing of how individuals are actually engaging and responding to literary rhetoric. Participant observation within spaces where text is discussed or engaged with actively can reveal cognitive, ideological, and cultural themes that might not otherwise be obvious.

Lott does not describe his participant observation as ethnography in the classic anthropological sense of a long-term deep hang out, but suggests that collaboration between comparative literature and anthropology could be mutually beneficial. Anthropology can provide a rich contextual description of experiences within different identified social structures. A rhetorical analysis of comparative literature in turn can assist as a means for studying individual agency and identity within these structures. The analysis of text provides a methodological process for theorizing the internalized way in which experiences are interpreted, symbolical coded, and reproduced. While Lott has taken classes in qualitative anthropology, he is not aware of any current actively pursued collaborative projects between the programs. He suggests that such partnerships might provide exciting new directions for future research.

Qualitative Methods in Political Science

 

By Savannah Schulze

For my exploration into ethnography outside of anthropology I chose to interview a fellow graduate student in the department of political science. Her research focuses on framing people’s perceptions of climate change and the cultural dimensions that shape these perceptions. As a primatologist I found her work fascinating and the different interconnections between our research and ultimate goals for conservation was really surprising. Her first introduction to ethnographic methods was during her undergraduate work during a course on qualitative methods-such as interviews and participant observation. In political science there is a rather large division between people who use or see the benefits between qualitative and quantitative methods. However, some political scientist do use methods such as interviewing, case studies, and content analysis, but with most people viewing it as largely quantitative field. These different qualitative methods are used but may not be considered “ethnographic” in a true sense.

My interviewee utilizes many aspects of qualitative methodology in her own research and does content analysis to understand how climate skeptics frame and talk about climate change. She would also like to compliment this research with semi-structured interviews with climate skeptic bloggers or expand upon this research for her dissertation work. Collaboration in political science varies depending upon your research topic and her work is inherently interdisciplinary. Occasionally, researchers in political science collaborate with anthropologists and at Purdue the political science department has hired a few researchers who specialize in using qualitative methods. My overall sense from this interview was that quantitative methods have been traditionally preferred in this field, however the value of using mixed methods and qualitative methods in particular, are becoming more popular and valued in the discipline of political science.

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