Spring 2002
Eng 521
Sibylle Gruber

There are certainly many ways of writing a good ethnographic/field research paper. You can follow different practices of "writing it up"--from mainly narrative to mostly scientific. However, no matter how you decide to write your paper, you should address several components to make sure that your readers understand what you are doing and that you are doing justice to the information your participants provided.

Before you start writing, ask yourself: Who is my audience? Who do I want to read this? What do I want them to get out of this? What do I want to get out of this? What position am I going to take? Do I want to be distanced (3rd person) or do I want to be more involved (1st person).

How you write it is up to you, but here are some parts that should be included in one way or another:

This should be a lead-in to your case study and should situate your study in the specific field you are studying. It should act as the frame for the picture you will be presenting. It should discuss the goals of the study and the questions you tried to answer.

Think about questions such as:
* Why are you doing this study?
* Is there a need for it?
* Is there a problem that you are addressing?
* What's the problem?
* What's the need?
* Why is there a need for such a study?
* What's been done in the general area you are studying?
* What's been left out?
* What's missing right now that won't allow us to get a clear picture of what you are doing?
* Why is your study doing more/ doing better?
* What is your contribution to the discussion?
* How are you going to present this contribution?
* What information will be included in your study?

* How are you going to do what you are proposing to do? What's your overall design
* Is your approach influenced by other people you have read? Who? Why?
* Who did you study? How did you select your participants? Why did you use these specific participants?
* What methods are you using? (interviews, notes, papers you collected; number of participants, age, gender, general background)
* Why are you using these methods? What makes them work better than other methods?
* How do you fit into the picture? What do you bring to the study? What are your goals? What are your experiences? How does your world view influence the study in general, the way you asked questions, who you selected...?
 

This will be the long part of your paper. Here you present your findings, engage in thick description, analyze/interpret the data you collected. Go through your data, find out if there is any pattern, major points that come up again and again, discrepancies that are important to note. Make sure that you explain why you chose the information you are presenting and why you leave out other aspects that you also explored but are not telling us about. Similar to any other paper, you need to support and develop your main points by using specific examples from your data collection. You can structure your study around:
* thematic units
* people you interviewed
* times you did your interviews
* places you went for your interviews
* artifiacts important for your study
* distinct cultural practices within the group you studied
*  any other structure that makes sense in the context of your study.
Review the various strategies (experiential, rhetorical, aesthetic) outlined by Chiseri-Strater and Sunstein, pp. 297 ff).

In your final section (conclusion) you can indicate what your study tried to contribute to the discussion and what still needs to be done:
* discuss how your line of argument needs further discussion (it doesnít end right here);
* discuss the parts of your question that remain unanswered;
* discuss the next question to be answered;
* discuss the implications of your main findings for later discussions.