I don't come from a humanities background, so INF1001 was the first I'd ever heard of ethnography. I thought it sounded completely bananas then, and I'm still not really won over.
I agree with Colin that Luker did not really offer any critical insights into the potential issues surrounding PO and ethnography. There is no mention of the researcher bias, and no mention of potential researcher influence, like the Hawthorne Effect. Ethnography mostly puzzles me because I can't wrap my head around how it is actually going to work well in the real world. In theory, it sounds okay, but once you introduce actual people, I think it all falls apart (like so many theories). If the researcher has some kind of bias heading into the project, that will have an effect, same if the people s/he is observing have any sorts of feelings about being researched. People who make terrible impressions on the researcher might affect her or his findings in improper ways - I've interviewed jerks before, and it made me want to take what they were saying with less value. I would imagine that would be magnified in an immersive, long term study like an ethnography. Conversely, if the researcher started to sympathize with the subjects, which would probably be easier to do in ethnography than interviews, that could have an effect as well. I just can't see how any ethnographic results could possibly be anything but horribly biased by the end.
I'm looking forward to class discussion today, I'd be really interested (and surprised!) if anyone had taken part in an ethnographic study before.
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