Ethnography Project
Case Studies
Evaluation: The project will be graded for professionalism, clear focus, comprehensiveness, careful language, adherence to APA citation rules, and understanding of the conventions of research and case studies as discussed in class.
Topic: The purpose of the case studies is to develop and assess primary material for the ethnographic research paper, focused on a carefully defined ethnic or cultural group.
Step 1: Prepare release forms. Prepare your release forms using the template on our Moodle class page. Have your interview subjects sign your release forms at the beginning of their interviews. If you conduct interviews electronically, print out e-mails from your subjects acknowledging that they have read the form and agreed to it. Remember to turn in the signed release forms in class.
Step 2: Conduct interviews. The project requires interviews with three individuals from the ethnic or cultural group being studied. Record your interviews, using either audio or video (either could be incorporated into your upcoming classroom presentation). Although you should have a clear idea of the main issues you want to cover in your interviews, try to maintain a spontaneous conversation-ideally, you should learn things from your participants that you had not expected beforehand. Online interviews are acceptable, but face-to-face interviews generally produce more useful results.
Step 3: Write up the case studies. The project requires interviews with three individuals from the socio-cultural group being studied. Write individual case studies on each of your interview subjects. In addition to evaluating specific findings from your interviews, each case study should compare your interview subject with the findings of your bibliography sources. Each case study should include a few quotations from your interviews. Your bibliography sources, on the other hand, should be cited using paraphrase or summary (APA recommends avoiding direct quotations from published sources). Remember that direct quotations, paraphrase, and summary all require in-text citations (author, date). Each case study should be at least 300-600 words long.
Style: To construct an effective, professional-sounding case study, you'll want to strive for a balance between representing your interview material in an interesting way and meaningfully relating that material to the published research on your topic. You should incorporate brief quotations from your interviews, along with your own overview of what the subject said. (See the model for in-text citation of interviews below.) In discussing the published sources, use paraphrase and summary instead of quotation, followed by parenthetical citations in APA Style. Following the conventions of APA Style, do not use first person in your paper. You may refer to yourself in third person as the interviewer, the researcher, the author, etc., or better yet, simply phrase your sentences to avoid referring to yourself at all. Unlike MLA style, APA does not discourage use of the passive voice. For example:
Active voice in first person: "I conducted the interviews in February, 2016."
Passive voice, avoiding first person: "The interviews were conducted in February, 2016."
Format: Compile your all of your case studies in a single APA-style paper. Within this paper, give each case study its own APA Level 1 style subheading (see model below). Remember to include a running head on all pages.
Title page: First, include an APA-style, including running head
Page 2: Abstract giving one brief formal overview of all three case studies Page 3: Center the title of your paper at the top. For example:
Muslim Teenagers in Oakland County: Case Studies
Begin your paper with a brief introductory paragraph giving an overview of your ethnography project (about 100 words). Then center the subheading for your first case study, following this model carefully:
Case Study 1: Sophia Iqbal
As in the Annotated Bibliography, do not include any extra white space-if one case study ends in the middle of a page, go directly to the subheading for the next case study. However, if there is only room for the next subheading at the bottom of a page, you can move it to top of the next page.
References page: Finally, list all of your published sources in careful APA format.
Do not include your interviews in the References list, but do cite them within your paper. Here is the APA model for in-text interview citations:
During the interview, Ms. Iqbal noted that she "decided to begin wearing the hijab about two years ago" (personal communication, February 16, 2016).