Critical ethnography for information research in diverse contexts

✍ Scribed by Lai Ma

• Publisher: Wiley (John Wiley & Sons)
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 37 KB
• Volume: 46
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0044-7870
• DOI: 10.1002/meet.2009.1450460333

✦ Synopsis

Most research in Library and Information Science (LIS) is concerned with the design of information systems and the access and use of information in diverse contexts. These studies usually involve the understanding of the relationships among user, system, and context, for example, how identity of meaning is achieved, on the one hand, and the analysis of cultural forms and social situations, on the other. Cultural forms and social situations, however, cannot be viewed as some kind of background or container where activities and interactions occur, nor are they causes that effect certain kinds of information behavior. Rather, they are 'affordances' that bring forth, for example, user needs and technology uses (Day and Ma, 2009). The search for affordances and the analyses of the interrelationship between interactions (human-human and human-computer) and cultural forms and social situations beg for a methodological framework that allows critical and conceptual analyses and is empirical in which the understanding of the cultural and the social are central concerns. Critical ethnography is a critical and empirical research methodology that encompasses these two criteria. Ethnographic methods are not new in information research. Researchers who investigate humanhuman and human-computer interactions are well aware of the importance of qualitative research methodologies and have adopted some ethnographic methods such as observation, interview, focus group study, and so on, in their research projects. How can critical ethnography supplement these methods and how is critical ethnography different from more traditional qualitative social research, then? Theoretically, critical ethnography is based upon the works of critical social theorists such as