Ethnographic Essay Examples

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I will split this essay into two parts. Firstly, I will describe to the reader the product of my research, including the main ethnography itself and also the way in which I arrived at the conclusions I did. Secondly, I will critically analyse the process I undertook to gain my data. This will include reflecting on dilemmas such as ethics, choice of field site and other issues that I encountered whilst carrying out my research. The full title of my ethnographic essay is ‘Are public spaces fully public? A study of various social groups and their utilisation of a given social space, Withington Library’. Withington library is a small public library in South Manchester. My ethnography involves participant observation of people who used the library during the time I observed it. Combined with the participant observation, I also conducted formal interviews
Originally, I wanted to compare the five groups that I believed to frequent the library, these were: staff, families, elderly people, students and homeless people. I wanted to compare the ways that different groups used the library, and to see what was acceptable for some groups but perhaps not for others. As time went on and I thought more about the groups and carried out participant observation, I found that there was another group of people, the unemployed. I discovered this group after informally speaking to people in the library who then informed me that they were unemployed. After discovering this, I narrowed my focus to think about both the negative and positive aspects of attitudes towards certain people in a given space. I focus on the negative stigma surrounding homeless people in the given space of Withington library, but also the positive, wide range of support that is offered to unemployed people in the very same

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