Tools of Data Collection: Observation, Schedule, Genealogy, PRA and Analysis of Data

8 (c, d) Research methods in Anthropology: Tools of data collection: observation, interview, schedules, questionnaire, Case study, genealogy, life-history, oral history, secondary sources of information, participatory methods. Analysis, interpretation and presentation of data.

Official Syllabus: Paper I, Unit 8

Unit 8a traced how anthropology moved from the armchair to long-term fieldwork (the Torres Strait expedition of 1898, Malinowski in the Trobriands), separated technique, method and methodology, and examined participant observation, reflexivity and fieldwork ethics. This article takes up the tools a fieldworker carries into the village, and what happens to the data afterwards: how it is analysed, interpreted and written up.

1. Before the Tools: Research Design, Sampling and Mixed Methods

1.1 Research design and the two traditions

A research design is the plan that links a question to the data needed to answer it. It fixes the unit of study (a household, a clan, a village), the tools, and whether a hypothesis (a tentative answer to be tested) is set in advance.

• Exploratory design: used when little is known; it ends in hypotheses, not proof, as most first ethnographies do.
• Descriptive design: records features accurately, as the People of India survey did (§7).
• Explanatory (diagnostic) design: tests why something happens, such as why some households migrate and others do not.

Behind designs lie two traditions of knowing: positivist and non-positivist (interpretive) research.

	Positivist (quantitative)	Interpretive (qualitative)
Assumption	Social facts can be measured like natural facts	Meaning must be understood from the inside
Roots	Comte, Durkheim	Weber’s Verstehen (interpretive understanding), phenomenology
Typical tools	Schedule, questionnaire, census, statistics	Participant observation, unstructured interview, life history
Strength	Generalisation, comparison, replication	Depth, context, the people’s own view (emic)
Weakness	Misses meaning; imposes the researcher’s categories	Small samples; harder to check; researcher’s subjectivity

The table shows a trade-off, not a winner. Numbers say how often; meanings say why. Anthropology has long been mainly interpretive, but it uses counting wherever counting helps, as the genealogical census (§6) shows.

• Subjectivity (the researcher’s own background shaping what is seen) cannot be removed, only disclosed and controlled: by reflexivity (writing openly about one’s own position, Unit 8a), by triangulation (checking one source against another, §9.3), and by long residence that lets first impressions be corrected.
• Phenomenology, founded by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl and carried into social science by the Austrian-American sociologist Alfred Schutz, studies lived experience. As a method it asks the fieldworker to suspend prior theories (“bracketing”) and describe how illness, pain or ritual feels to participants; the American anthropologist Thomas Csordas (1990) built on it to treat the body as the ground of culture (embodiment). Its value is depth of meaning; its limit is that experience is hard to verify or compare.

1.2 Sampling: whom to study

When a population is too large to study whole, a researcher studies a sample: a part chosen to stand for the whole. The question is how it is chosen.

Type	How the sample is drawn	Example of use
Simple random	Every unit has an equal chance (lottery, random numbers)	Households from a complete village list
Systematic	Every k-th unit after a random start	Every 10th house on a census list
Stratified	Population split into strata (caste, sex, age, landholding), then random sampling within each	Ensuring landless and landowning households both appear
Cluster	Whole groups (villages, blocks) chosen at random	Large district surveys
Multistage	Random choice at several levels: districts → villages → households	NFHS (two-stage design)
Purposive (judgement)	Researcher picks typical or information-rich cases	Choosing a village with a new dam
Snowball	Each informant names the next	Hidden groups: migrant workers, healers
Quota	Fixed numbers from each category, chosen non-randomly	Quick opinion studies

The first five are probability samples, which allow statistical generalisation; the last three are non-probability samples, which suit exploration and hard-to-reach groups. Ethnographers also use theoretical sampling: choosing the next case because it can test an emerging idea.

Worked example (systematic sample). A village list has N = 400 households and the researcher needs n = 40. The interval is k = N/n = 10. A random start of 7 gives households 7, 17, 27 … 397. The danger is periodicity: if every tenth house on the list happened to be a corner shop, the sample would be biased.

1.3 Mixed methods

Mixed methods research combines quantitative and qualitative tools in one study, so that each covers the other’s blind spot.

• Convergent design: survey and ethnography run side by side and are compared.
• Explanatory sequential: a survey finds a pattern (say, low uptake of a health scheme); in-depth interviews then explain it.
• Exploratory sequential: fieldwork first discovers local categories; a schedule then counts them across many villages.

The approach is old in anthropology even if the label is new: Malinowski combined statistics, maps and genealogies with participant observation.

2. Observation

When the British-born anthropologist Verrier Elwin lived for years among the Baiga (Madhya Pradesh) and wrote The Baiga (1939), he saw how shifting cultivation, myth and taboo fitted together in daily life, which no questionnaire could have shown. That is the promise of observation: it records behaviour in its setting.

2.1 Types of observation

Basis	Types	What differs
Role of observer	Participant, non-participant, quasi-participant	Whether the observer joins the activity
Setting	Uncontrolled (natural setting) vs controlled (planned or laboratory)	Whether the situation is arranged by the researcher
Procedure	Structured vs unstructured	Whether the units to record are fixed in advance
Directness	Direct vs indirect (traces, records, recordings)	Whether behaviour is watched as it happens

• Participant observation: the researcher shares the life of the group, learns the language and takes part in work and ritual. Its logic, history and ethics are the subject of Unit 8a: in short, it reaches the “imponderabilia of actual life” (Malinowski’s phrase for the small, unrecorded details of daily routine) and the gap between what people say and what they do.
• Non-participant observation: the researcher watches without joining, as when recording seating order at a caste panchayat (council); it suits structured recording with an observation schedule (§4.3).
• Quasi-participant observation: the realistic middle position. In a phrase from the methods literature, the long-staying fieldworker becomes a “friendly and curious outsider“: present at everything, a member of nothing.

2.2 Merits and problems

• Merits: records natural behaviour in context; checks words against action; reaches the non-literate; and is open-ended, so unexpected themes surface.
• The observer effect: people change behaviour when watched, the Hawthorne effect, named after the Western Electric factory studies near Chicago (1924–32), where output rose whatever was changed, apparently because workers knew they were studied. Long residence reduces it: people stop performing for a familiar face.
• Over-involvement: a participant in an important role may change the group, and strong emotion can cloud judgement; “going native” (losing analytic distance) is the extreme case.
• Limited reach: sexual life, family crises and sorcery accusations are seldom seen directly, so the observer relies on interview and case material.

3. Interview

An interview is often described as a conversation with a purpose: an intentional process steered toward planned content. It is indispensable because beliefs, motives and past events cannot be observed; they must be told.

3.1 Types of interview

Type	Form	Best use
Structured (formal)	Same questions, same order, often with an interview schedule	Comparable answers from many people
Semi-structured	A guide of topics; order and wording flexible	Most ethnographic interviewing
Unstructured (informal, depth)	Free conversation, follow-up on what emerges	Life histories, sensitive topics
Key-informant	Repeated long interviews with a knowledgeable person	Ritual specialists, elders, headmen
Focus group	6–10 people discuss a topic together, guided by a moderator	Shared norms, contested views
Group interview	Several people answer together, often in public	Village histories, collective decisions

Two points follow. Structure trades depth for comparability: the more fixed the questions, the easier the counting and the thinner the meaning. And who is in the room shapes the answer: a focus group shows what can be said in public, a private interview what cannot.

• Focus group: grew from the “focused interview” of the American sociologist Robert Merton and colleagues (The Focused Interview, 1956), first used on audience reactions to wartime propaganda. Participants react to one another, exposing disagreement, but dominant voices (elders, men, upper castes) may silence others.
• Key informant: a person with special knowledge who becomes the fieldworker’s long-term teacher; the danger is taking one (often elite male) view for the whole culture, so informants are cross-checked.

3.2 Technique, merits and limits

• Technique: explain the purpose; start with easy factual questions; listen more than talk; avoid leading questions (“You must dislike the moneylender, don’t you?”); probe (“Tell me more”); note silences; record only with consent.
• Merits: flexible; works with the non-literate; allows on-the-spot clarification and follow-up of contradictions.
• Limits: depends on the interviewer’s skill; answers may be what the informant thinks is wanted; recall is selective; interviewer bias (caste, gender, outsider status) shapes replies.

4. Schedule and Questionnaire

In Census 2027, an enumerator visits every household with a mobile app and asks the notified questions (33 in the houselisting phase; 40 in population enumeration), entering the answers herself: that is a schedule. For the first time, households could instead fill the same form online through a self-enumeration portal and hand the enumerator an ID to confirm: that is the questionnaire principle. The two tools differ less in their questions than in who holds the pen.

4.1 Origin in anthropology

• The American lawyer-anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan circulated a printed schedule of kinship terms from 1859, through missionaries and officials, to collect terminologies worldwide; many forms never came back, and the replies became Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871).
• The British Association’s Notes and Queries on Anthropology (first edition 1874) was in effect a giant guide-questionnaire for travellers and administrators.

4.2 The distinction

Point	Schedule	Questionnaire
Filled by	Researcher or enumerator, face to face	Respondent himself or herself
Literacy needed	No; works among non-literate groups	Yes
Clarification	Questions explained, answers probed	None; ambiguity cannot be resolved
Response rate	High: the enumerator visits	Often low (mail, online)
Cost and reach	Costly, slow, limited area	Cheap; reaches large, scattered samples
Anonymity	Lower: the respondent faces the enumerator	Higher: suits sensitive topics
Interviewer bias	Possible	Absent
Who answers	The enumerator knows who replied	Unknown: someone else may fill it

The table explains why anthropologists working in villages favour the schedule: it works where literacy is low and lets the investigator see the household. The questionnaire suits literate, dispersed or urban groups and topics where anonymity matters more than probing.

4.3 Kinds of schedule and questionnaire

• Schedules: observation schedule (records behaviour uniformly; a “memory tickler”); document schedule (extracts the same items from records such as land registers); evaluation or institutional survey schedule (assesses a programme); interview schedule (the structured interview’s list).
• Questionnaires: structured, with closed answers (easy to count) or open answers (richer, harder to classify); unstructured (an interview guide for a few intensive cases); pictorial (pictures for children and non-literate respondents).

4.4 Framing good questions

• Wording: simple words, no jargon; ask “How will the respondent understand this?”; no leading questions; one idea per question; stay within the respondent’s knowledge.
• Order: easy factual questions first; group by subject; keep time sequence; stop early questions colouring later ones.
• Pre-test (pilot): try the form on a few people and revise; it exposes superfluous and missing questions.
• Limits of both tools: uniform questions may not fit varied cultures; answers can be perfunctory; attitudes measured by forms have low reliability. Hence they work best as supplements to observation and interview.

5. Case Study, Life History and Oral History

5.1 Case study

A case study is an intensive, all-round study of a single social unit: a person, family, institution, community or event. The American sociologist Ernest Burgess called it “the social microscope”, because it shows in fine detail the forces that shape the unit.

• Origin: the French sociologist Frédéric Le Play used family budgets as cases (Les Ouvriers européens, 1855); W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki (The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 1918–20) made personal documents the core of evidence. Anthropological classics include Robert Redfield‘s Tepoztlán (1930), Oscar Lewis‘s restudy (1951) and Cora Du Bois‘s The People of Alor (1944).
• Indian example: the British anthropologist F.G. Bailey‘s Caste and the Economic Frontier (1957) traced how a new cash economy reshuffled caste ranks in one Odisha village, Bisipara: one case, studied in depth, illuminated a process found across India.
• Extended case method: the Manchester school, led by the South African-born Max Gluckman (“Analysis of a social situation in modern Zululand”, 1940, built around the opening of a bridge) and Jaap van Velsen (1967), followed one dispute or event over time to show how people manipulate rules, rather than treating rules as fixed. Victor Turner’s social drama grew from this approach.
• Characteristics: one or a few units; holistic; usually long; qualitative; traces natural history (how the unit came to be); generates hypotheses.
• Merits: depth and context; captures process and change; reveals motives; helps design better schedules. The American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley said it “deepens our perception and gives us a clearer insight into life”.
• Limits: cases are hard to compare; generalising from few units is risky; slow and costly; and, as the American sociologist Read Bain objected, greater rapport can mean greater subjectivity. Combining cases with statistics reduces these risks.

5.2 Life history

A life history is a person’s account of his or her own life, recorded and set in its social and historical context. It differs from a biography in focus: the question is not only what happened but what the person’s choices and turning points reveal about the culture.

• Classic works: the American anthropologist Paul Radin‘s Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of an American Indian (1926), about a Winnebago man; Oscar Lewis’s The Children of Sánchez (1961), which let a poor Mexico City family speak in their own voices.
• Indian example: Viramma: Life of an Untouchable (1997), recorded over years by Josiane and Jean-Luc Racine, presents a Dalit (Paraiyar) agricultural labourer and midwife of Tamil Nadu telling her own life, and shows caste, work, ritual and womanhood from below.
• Criteria (the American social scientist John Dollard, Criteria for the Life History, 1935): see the person as a member of a cultural group; treat behaviour as socially relevant; show the family as transmitter of culture; trace experience from childhood to adulthood; study the social situation; and conceptualise the material, not merely transcribe it.
• Merits and the typicality problem: it shows social change through one life and the insider’s turning points, but is one life representative? Careful choice of narrators and comparison with other sources answer the doubt.

5.3 Oral history

Oral history is the recording, preservation and interpretation of the past as remembered and spoken by those who lived it. It includes eye-witness accounts and also oral tradition: myths, songs, genealogies and stories passed down the generations. The Belgian historian-anthropologist Jan Vansina (Oral Tradition as History, 1985) showed how such traditions can be tested as historical evidence.

• Indian example: the Indian writer and publisher Urvashi Butalia‘s The Other Side of Silence (1998) used interviews with survivors, especially women, to recover Partition experiences absent from official records.
• Merits: gives voice to the non-literate and marginal, and the source can be questioned: for the British oral historian Trevor Lummis (Listening to History, 1987), the “closed door” of the document becomes the “open door” of the interview.
• Problems and safeguards: memory fades and is reshaped; so oral historians interview many people about one event, seek agreement, treat how a community remembers as data, and obtain informed consent for recording and archiving.

	Case study	Life history	Oral history
Unit	Person, group, event or institution	One individual’s life	An event or period, through many tellers
Time	Natural history of the unit	Childhood to present	The remembered past
Main source	All methods combined	Long interviews, personal documents	Recorded testimony, oral tradition
Key example	Bailey’s Bisipara	Radin’s Crashing Thunder; Viramma	Butalia on Partition

6. The Genealogical Method

During the Cambridge expedition to the Torres Strait (1898), the British physician-anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers found that islanders could recite their ancestry for several generations. By recording it systematically he could check marriage rules, name kin terms precisely and count births and deaths. He published the technique as “A Genealogical Method of Collecting Social and Vital Statistics” (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 1900) and used it for almost the whole population in The Todas (1906), on the polyandrous Toda of the Nilgiri Hills.

6.1 Technique

• Start with Ego: ask the name of the informant’s mother (“the woman from whose womb you were born”) and father (“the man who begot you”), then how Ego addresses each and how each addresses Ego.
• Use only five terms: father, mother, husband, wife, child. Rivers forbade words like “brother”, “uncle” or “cousin” in questions, because their meanings vary between cultures; every other relative is reached as a chain of these five (“your father’s mother’s child”).
• Extend outward: each parent’s other spouses and children (to reveal half-siblings), then the parents’ parents and their children, for as many generations as remembered; then the spouse’s genealogy.
• Record: in Rivers’ convention, male names in capitals and female in lower case; husband to the left of wife; d.y. (died young) and d.unm. (died unmarried); the living underlined. Today the chart uses △ male, ○ female, = marriage, vertical line for descent, horizontal line for siblings.
• Cross-check: the same family appears in many informants’ trees, so accounts can be corroborated. Young informants are trusted only for their own generation.

6.2 Uses

• Kinship and social organisation: the exact meaning of each kin term (Unit 2.5); rules of marriage, descent, inheritance and succession, which show up as patterns in the chart.
• Demography: a genealogical census gives fertility, mortality, sex ratio and migration across generations: Rivers’ “vital statistics”.
• Field rapport: knowing everyone’s name and relations shows who gathers at a birth, wedding or funeral, and why.
• Genetics: the same chart, marked for a trait, becomes a pedigree (Unit 9.1).

6.3 Difficulties

• Name taboos on the dead or certain affines; adoption and fictive kinship blurring biological and social links (Rivers advised treating each difficulty as data about the society); suspicion that the record is for tax; and memory, which rarely reaches beyond a few generations and may “add” prestigious ancestors.

7. Secondary Sources of Information

Primary data are collected by the researcher; secondary data already exist.

• Census of India: the first synchronous census was 1881; colonial censuses up to 1931 recorded caste; from 1951 only Scheduled Castes and Tribes were counted, until Census 2027 again enumerates caste.
• Colonial surveys: H.H. Risley‘s The Tribes and Castes of Bengal (1891), Edgar Thurston‘s Castes and Tribes of Southern India (1909), R.V. Russell and Hira Lal on the Central Provinces (1916); district gazetteers.
• Anthropological Survey of India (ASI, founded 1945): People of India project. Launched on 2 October 1985 under its Director-General K.S. Singh, it identified and studied 4,635 communities (from about 6,748 first listed) in every state, using a common schedule guideline, about 24,951 key informants and some 26,510 field-days, and published national and state volumes from 1992.
• Others: NFHS and National Sample Survey rounds; archives, museum collections, maps, photographs, and personal documents (letters, diaries).
• Uses: context and sampling frames; historical depth; regional comparison; checking field findings.
• Cautions: sources were made for administrative purposes; categories may be imposed (the colonial census ranking of castes is held by critics to have hardened caste identities); errors of enumeration; and outdated or politically shaped figures. Every secondary source must be read for who produced it, why and with what categories.

8. Participatory Methods: RRA, PRA and PLA

In 1988, the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (India) and the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development ran what they called a “participatory rapid rural appraisal” in Gujarat: villagers drew maps of their land, water and households and discussed priorities themselves. Indian NGOs, with MYRADA of Bengaluru prominent, soon made Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) a national movement.

8.1 Robert Chambers and the critique of “rural development tourism”

The British development scholar Robert Chambers (Rural Development: Putting the Last First, 1983; Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last, 1997) argued that experts on short rural visits saw a distorted picture. He named the biases of this “rural development tourism”:

• Spatial (villages near roads), project (places already showing success), person (men and the elite rather than women and the poor), seasonal (dry, cool months, missing the hungry wet season) and diplomatic (politeness that avoids the worst conditions).

Together with frustration at long, costly questionnaire surveys and growing respect for indigenous technical knowledge, these criticisms produced Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) in the late 1970s, and from about 1988–89 (in Kenya and India) PRA. When the journal RRA Notes was renamed PLA Notes in the mid-1990s, Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) became the umbrella term, stressing that the process continues into action.

	RRA	PRA / PLA
Period	Late 1970s–1980s	From about 1988–89
Purpose	Quick, cost-effective learning by outsiders	Empowerment: local analysis, planning and action
Role of outsider	Investigator who extracts data	Facilitator who “hands over the stick“
Role of people	Informants	Analysts and planners
Who owns the output	Outsiders take it away	Stays with the community

The table’s key line is the last one. Both use similar tools; what changes is who holds the information and the power to act on it. That is why PRA is described as a shift “from extracting to empowering”.

8.2 Tools

• Social and resource map: villagers draw households, water, fields and forest on the ground.
• Transect walk: walking across the territory with local guides, noting soils, crops and problems.
• Seasonal calendar: month-by-month rain, work, hunger, illness, debt and migration.
• Venn (chapati) diagram: circles for institutions, sized and placed to show importance and access.
• Wealth ranking; matrix scoring: sorting households, or comparing options, by people’s own criteria.
• Timelines and trend lines: village history and change in key resources.
• Principles: optimal ignorance (collect only what is needed), triangulation, self-critical awareness, and “use your own best judgement“.

8.3 Anthropological critique

• “Quick and dirty”: anthropologists worry that a few days of appraisal replace the long fieldwork needed to see hidden relations.
• Public performance: the British anthropologist David Mosse (1994), from a project among the Bhil of western India, showed that PRA sessions are public events in which dominant voices shape what is said, while women’s and the poor’s knowledge stays private. “Participatory” outputs can thus reflect local power, or even what villagers think the agency wants.
• Co-option: in Participation: The New Tyranny? (2001), Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari argued that participation can legitimise decisions already taken. Good practice answers with separate groups for women and the poor, repeated visits, and triangulation with household data.

9. Analysis of Data: Qualitative and Quantitative

9.1 Processing

• Editing (checking completeness), coding (labelling each answer or passage with a category), and classification and tabulation (grouping coded data into simple and cross-tables).

9.2 Two kinds of analysis

	Quantitative analysis	Qualitative analysis
Data	Numbers from schedules, measurements, censuses	Field notes, transcripts, texts, images
Main procedures	Frequencies, mean, median, mode, standard deviation; cross-tabulation; chi-square test (whether two variables are associated); correlation and regression	Coding and thematic analysis; content analysis; grounded theory; domain, taxonomic and componential analysis; narrative and discourse analysis
Logic	Mostly deductive: test a hypothesis	Mostly inductive: build concepts from data
Software	SPSS, R, Stata, spreadsheets	NVivo, ATLAS.ti, MAXQDA (earlier The Ethnograph)
Quality test	Reliability and statistical significance	Credibility, depth, fit with the people’s view

The point of the comparison is that both are systematic. Qualitative analysis is not “impressions”: it has explicit steps, and the software only organises the coding that the researcher must still do and justify.

• Grounded theory (the American sociologists Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory, 1967): concepts are built from the data upward. Codes are compared constantly; in Strauss’s later scheme, open coding labels the data, axial coding links categories, and selective coding integrates them around a core idea.
• Thematic analysis finds recurring themes (“debt”, “shame”, “migration”) across interviews; content analysis counts words or images in texts; domain and componential analysis, from cognitive anthropology (Unit 6j), sorts native categories (kinds of rice, kinds of kin) and the features that distinguish them.
• The life table, a demographic tool, summarises for each age how many of an initial cohort survive (lx), die (dx), the probability of dying (qx) and the expectation of life (ex). Anthropologists build it from genealogical censuses and skeletal series (Unit 11).

9.3 Triangulation

Triangulation means checking a finding through more than one angle, as a surveyor fixes a point from two known positions. The American sociologist Norman Denzin (The Research Act, 1970) distinguished four kinds:

• Data triangulation: different times, places and persons.
• Investigator triangulation: more than one observer.
• Theory triangulation: reading the same data through more than one theory.
• Methodological triangulation: combining tools, such as observation, interview and a household schedule.

How it works: if villagers say bride-price is falling (interview), the household schedule shows lower recorded payments, and the fieldworker observes smaller transfers at weddings, the finding stands on three legs. If they disagree, the disagreement is itself a clue (perhaps the ideal norm differs from practice).

10. Interpretation and Presentation: From Field Notes to Ethnography

10.1 Interpretation

Interpretation is drawing inferences from analysed data: searching for the broader meaning of findings. It links results to other studies (continuity in research) and to explanatory concepts (theory).

• Functions: reveals the principle beneath the findings; explains why results are what they are; turns exploratory findings into new hypotheses.
• Precautions: data must be adequate and trustworthy; do not confuse correlation with causation; do not over-generalise beyond the time and place studied; a supported hypothesis is “in accord with” the data, not proven.
• Analysis vs interpretation: analysis finds patterns within the data (“women in landless households migrate more”); interpretation explains what they mean and links them to theory (“a household strategy of spreading risk”).
• The American methodologist Pauline Young (Scientific Social Surveys and Research, 1939) located originality in the interaction of hypothesis, observation and theory: interpretation is where the three meet.

10.2 Presentation

• Forms: tables, graphs and population pyramids; kinship diagrams, settlement maps, photographs and ethnographic film (from Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, 1922, to Jean Rouch’s participatory cinema); today GIS maps and digital archives.
• The research report: outline → rough draft → rewriting → bibliography → final draft. A technical report stresses methods, data and limitations; a popular report stresses findings, implications and visuals. Either should be long enough to cover the subject, short enough to hold interest, and state its limitations.

10.3 Ethnographic writing: classical to contemporary

The written ethnography is anthropology’s main product, and its conventions have shifted with the discipline’s theory.

	Classical (realist)	Contemporary
Voice	Impersonal, all-knowing narrator; the author hidden	Reflexive: the author’s position and encounters shown
Time	“Ethnographic present“: the culture described as timeless	Historical: change, colonialism and the global context included
Subject	A bounded tribe or village “as a whole”	Networks, flows, multi-sited fields (Unit 6k)
Other voices	Informants quoted as data	Dialogic and polyphonic texts: several voices, sometimes co-authored
Authority	“I was there”, so the account is true	Authority questioned; texts seen as partial truths
Media	Monograph with tables and diagrams	Monograph plus film, photography, digital and sensory forms

Classical monographs (Malinowski’s Argonauts, 1922; Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer, 1940) wrote in the ethnographic present, which the German-born anthropologist Johannes Fabian (Time and the Other, 1983) criticised for denying coevalness: placing the studied people outside the writer’s own time. Clifford Geertz‘s thick description (1973) moved writing toward meaning; Paul Rabinow‘s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977) put the fieldworker into the text; and Writing Culture (1986, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus) opened the debate on the “crisis of representation” (Unit 6k). The Dutch-American ethnographer John Van Maanen (Tales of the Field, 1988) classified ethnographic writing as realist, confessional (the fieldworker’s own story) and impressionist (vivid scenes that recreate the experience).

• Indian example: M.N. Srinivas lost his Rampura field notes in a fire at Stanford in 1970 and rebuilt the village from memory in The Remembered Village (1976): a classic that is openly personal, written in the first person, and a bridge between the realist and reflexive styles.

Key Terms

Term	Meaning in simple words
Research design	The plan linking a research question to the data and tools needed
Sample / sampling frame	The part studied / the list from which it is drawn
Stratified sampling	Dividing a population into groups and sampling within each
Snowball sampling	Each informant leads the researcher to the next
Mixed methods	Combining numbers and in-depth qualitative study in one design
Phenomenology	Studying experience as people live and feel it
Hawthorne effect	People change their behaviour because they know they are watched
Key informant	A knowledgeable person interviewed repeatedly as a guide
Focus group	A guided group discussion on one topic
Schedule	A question form filled in by the researcher face to face
Questionnaire	A question form filled in by the respondent alone
Pre-test (pilot)	Trying a form on a few people before the main study
Case study	Intensive study of one person, group or event
Extended case method	Following one dispute or event over time
Life history	One person’s life told in its social setting
Oral history	The remembered past recorded from speakers
Genealogical method	Recording family trees to study kinship and population
PRA / PLA	Methods by which local people map, rank and plan for themselves
Grounded theory	Building concepts step by step from the data
Triangulation	Checking a finding through several sources, observers or methods

Contemporary Developments

• Census 2027, India’s first digital census: houselisting (33 questions) ran from April to September 2026 with an optional self-enumeration portal in 16 languages before each enumerator’s visit; population enumeration (40 questions, including caste recorded as declared) is due in February 2027, with a reference date of 1 March 2027 (Ministry of Home Affairs; Registrar General of India).
• NFHS-6 (2023–24): fact sheets released on 29 May 2026; four schedules canvassed by CAPI in local languages in about 6.79 lakh households, with new items on digital literacy and self-help groups (International Institute for Population Sciences).
• GenomeIndia biobank (2025): alongside 10,000 genomes, the project stores anthropological and socio-economic data for its participants, but codes the 83 populations numerically rather than by caste or tribe name, a live example of research ethics shaping how data are kept and shared (Department of Biotechnology).
• AI-assisted qualitative analysis: the major qualitative packages (NVivo, ATLAS.ti, MAXQDA) now offer automatic coding suggestions and summaries, reopening old questions about who interprets the data and how confidential transcripts are protected.

Diagrams to Master

1. Topic map: design and sampling → tools (observation, interview, schedule, questionnaire, case, life and oral history, genealogy, secondary sources, PRA) → analysis → interpretation → presentation.
2. Schedule vs questionnaire: label who fills, literacy, clarification, response rate, cost, anonymity; Census 2027 example.
3. Genealogy chart: Ego, △ ○ = and descent lines, Rivers’ five terms, a chain such as FZS built from them.
4. RRA vs PRA: extract vs empower, “hand over the stick“, six PRA tools.
5. Analysis and triangulation: edit → code → tabulate; quantitative vs qualitative; Denzin’s four triangulations.

Revision Grid

Scholar	Work (year)	Key idea
L.H. Morgan	Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity (1871)	Kin-term schedule circulated from 1859
W.H.R. Rivers	“A Genealogical Method…” (1900); The Todas (1906)	Genealogical method; five basic terms
Thomas and Znaniecki	The Polish Peasant (1918–20)	Personal documents as data
Paul Radin	Crashing Thunder (1926)	Life history
John Dollard	Criteria for the Life History (1935)	Six criteria
Max Gluckman; van Velsen	Zululand bridge (1940); 1967	Extended case method
Robert Merton	The Focused Interview (1956)	Origin of focus groups
F.G. Bailey	Caste and the Economic Frontier (1957)	Village case study (Bisipara)
Glaser and Strauss	The Discovery of Grounded Theory (1967)	Theory built from data
Norman Denzin	The Research Act (1970)	Four kinds of triangulation
M.N. Srinivas	The Remembered Village (1976)	Ethnography from memory, first person
Robert Chambers	Rural Development: Putting the Last First (1983)	RRA and PRA; development tourism biases
K.S. Singh	People of India (from 1985)	4,635 communities surveyed
John Van Maanen	Tales of the Field (1988)	Realist, confessional, impressionist tales
David Mosse	1994	Critique of PRA as public performance