ON ETHNOGRAPHY - STORYTELLING OR SCIENCE

There are two basic analytical approaches in social research. The first, using formal methods (e.g., standard statistical analysis), aggregates over the attributes of individual cases to determine the influence of abstract effects on events. This approach, which results in correlations between variables, is unable to provide adequate causal explanations for what happens in particular cases. The interpretive or narrative approach, in contrast, aggregates over events to trace the causal development of a single case. This type of analysis cannot be made reflexive (i.e., cannot account explicitly for the intersubjective nature of data collection procedures in human studies). Thus each method, by itself, is problematic. There have been a number of attempts to combine the two approaches in a single theoretical framework. However, because the constituent approaches are fundamentally different in their ontological and epistemological stances, the proposed reconciliations remain forced. This paper outlines a strategy that sequentially utilizes both approaches, preserving their independent and complementary virtues, while providing formal links that allow the results of one approach to inform use of the other directly. It is hoped that practice of this two-step method will dissipate some of the recent doubts about the value of ethnographic fieldwork.