Examples Of Institutional Ethnography

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Institutional ethnography (IE) was developed by Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith. This is a method of social research that studies the way people’s everyday life is structured through institutions. This method looks at the way people interact within a social institution. A social institution can be work, school, marriage, etc. The goal of IE is to produce research that helps people understand their own lives better. IE helps people understand how their lives are organized and coordinated in ways they might not see. This does not necessarily mean understanding what they do, it is more along the lines of understand that what they do is controlled by an institution without the person even realizing it. Institutional ethnography asks …show more content…

The term “work” is something that a person does in his or her life. They are processes that may or may not usually be counted as work. For example, we had to choose three types of work that our classmates wrote about in an essay. The three I chose were: 1) “Being a student at a university is not cheap and it is difficult to work full time as well as being a full time student.” This is a prime example of how an institution organizes or coordinates the way this person lives their life. In order for this person to pay the high cost of tuition they must work full time. But, it is hard for him/her to balance work and school work. Therefore, they need to pick one before their grades start to slip or they become stressed …show more content…

Once an ethnographer determines what “work they do, they need to find a problematic in order to further their research. According to Smith, problematics open up many doors of concerns, issues and questions. The questions being asked need to be structured in a way that leads us out of our “local setting”. For example, asking a question like “why is he stressed out?” may not lead us out of our local setting. A better question could be, “why can’t he work full time and go to school full time?” That is a question that requires us to leave our local setting to find answers. Suppose that person has school from 9am to 1pm, then they have work from 2pm to 10pm, there is no time for he/she to do their school work. Stress can arise because they are falling behind on their assignments. There is no “right” answer for a problematic. In any given situation, there can be a different problematic due to each person’s experience. Ethnographers begin every problematic by asking the question “why is this the way it is?” This question gives us a direction of where to

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