Author: Katie Nelson

Stephen Lyon Durham University March 7, 2017 My University is considered one of the research intensive universities of Britain. We are one of the largest in terms of faculty numbers as well as student intake. We teach methods at every year of our undergraduate programmes and all single honours students are required to do a double dissertation module in their final year in which they must produce or analyse primary data as part of a supervised independent project. We struggle with weaning them off the excessive teaching that has come to characterise the sorts of schools from which our students come (more than half come from the independent, fee paying secondary school sector). Getting students to produce their own research questions is a challenge for some students and I’ve often wondered why they find it so difficult to think of what they’d like to know about some situation. This has led me to reflect on how I come up with questions that I find interesting– which I am convinced is a necessary early part of preparing a coherent research project. I’ve done this in different ways over the years. Some field research has been very ‘scripted’ and I’ve had pre-determined goals for number and category of informants I would need and specific tasks that I would ask them to carry out. Frequently, particularly during my doctoral research, such questions...

Douglas William Hume Northern Kentucky University March 7, 2017   In the fall 2016 semester I was scheduled to teach an upper-division undergraduate course titled “Ethnographic Methods and Research” in which I use McCurdy, Spradley, and Shandy’s The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society (2004) to introduce students to qualitative ethnosemantic research methods. It so happened that one of the sociologists in my department left the university last spring who was scheduled to teach a course titled “Qualitative Research Methods”, which had similar student learning objectives as my course. After negotiating with the sociology program coordinator, I was allowed to cross-list the courses, resulting in a mix of 20 sociology students and 10 anthropology students. The plan of the course was to spend the first half of the semester in class discussing research design and practicing data collection methods. The second half of the course involved students conducting their own research project using the methods introduced in the class and meeting with me each week to review their progress and guide them through the methods outlined in our textbook. During the first few one-on-one meetings with students focusing on their progress with grand tour/story/mini-tour/native language check questions and writing field notes, a stark difference between the anthropology and sociology students appeared. The sociology students would ask grand tour and story questions, such as, “What is a typical day like...