Scribd
Upload
13 views1 page

COVID-19 Communication Needs Today2

The document discusses the challenges faced by ethnographic methods during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the importance of close observation in understanding public behavior. It emphasizes the ethical and practical difficulties of conducting in-person field research while acknowledging the risks of relying on alternative data sources. The text argues that the absence of ethnographic data limits our understanding of vulnerable populations, particularly impoverished seniors, and suggests that ethnography has become a high-risk endeavor in modern academia.

Uploaded by

X
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
13 views1 page

COVID-19 Communication Needs Today2

The document discusses the challenges faced by ethnographic methods during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the importance of close observation in understanding public behavior. It emphasizes the ethical and practical difficulties of conducting in-person field research while acknowledging the risks of relying on alternative data sources. The text argues that the absence of ethnographic data limits our understanding of vulnerable populations, particularly impoverished seniors, and suggests that ethnography has become a high-risk endeavor in modern academia.

Uploaded by

X
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 1

Ethnography-based Methods of Understand Public Behaviour

If there is one fundamental fact about ethnography, it is that closeness, not distance, is
essential. While the pandemic's hotspots, shutdowns, and chosen victims have yet to be
completely realised, certain early impacts are visible. The present epidemic and its potential
consequences pose significant ethical and practical difficulties to ethnographic practice. In
the absence of a vaccine, physical separation has been one of the most successful techniques
in reducing pandemic transmission.

However, one result has been a de facto embargo on in-person field observation, which has
long been the quintessential practice of ethnography. When researching the vulnerable during
a pandemic, however, the threat of our mere existence as possible asymptomatic carriers of a
silent killer is apparent, personal, and serious. At the same time, the lack of ethnographic
observation presents risks. While epidemiological estimates track illness spread and poll
measure sentiments, the mechanism by which people traverse their social surroundings
becomes guesswork in the absence of field investigation.

Anecdotes, determinism, and strategic media framing substitute data-driven explanations of


in situ behaviour in both quantitative research and public discourse in the absence of
ethnography, to the disadvantage of our understanding. This process may occur even if
ethnography is not quarantined, but the absence of ethnographic data eliminates a critical
resource for those seeking to fill their work with proof at a moment when this knowledge is
critical. Simultaneously, the projected amount of papers required for employment has
increased, producing still another pressure toward methodical techniques with a faster
turnaround. The risk of studying ethnography in modern academia appears to be increasing,
particularly for doctoral students and those beyond the protective walls of sociology's most
elitist institutions.

Ethnography has become a high-risk/high-reward enterprise that is becoming less accessible


to many, particularly in light of the COVID-19 demands.

Many who employ this method contend, persuasively, that by close observation, we can
understand the processes of social life in ways that methods that are more distant cannot. This
is especially the case for populations like impoverished seniors that might otherwise be
invisible to academics. This unique characteristic has been crucial for developing and
extending theory, generating concepts, and illuminating empirical patterns in a host of
ethnographic traditions including symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, interpretivism,
local sociology, grounded theory, the extended case method, and analytical sociology.
Observing the struggles of seniors to gain adequate housing in an inflexible economy, as we
both have seen, allows us to understand the complexity of the rental market and
governmental attempts at providing shelter for those at risk.

You might also like