Some questions after reading Luker this week.

The Luker text this week left me wondering about a few things related to the ethnographic method.  From what I know and what she has explained this week in the reading the ethnographic method is an intensive method involving field work and notes.  Researchers must be careful to gain the right type of acceptance to the group they want to study, lest their research be in vain and totally useless.  

This method seems rather time intensive.  It would be very difficult to entice participants to participate unless they were compensated somehow for their input.  Is this considered unethical?  On page 172 Luker advises thanking the intervewee...is that enough? On one hand the researcher is taking a significant amount of the participant's time and energy and producing work that could increase the researcher's social and economic status so is it unreasonable to compensate participants.  On the other hand would participants only then participate for the money and what does that mean to the research, will the quality of the participation be better or worse?

She also uses the word theory a lot.  From what I understand the ethnographic method is birthed out of the Anthropological discipline.  Anthropologists don't really believe in social theory.  Because social theories can't be replicated under the same conditions and they believe that social theories are constructed.  The Anthropological discipline argues that information that comes out of ethnographies and participant research is filtered through the researcher and therefore their positionality. Positionality is a mish mash of a person's position in society such as their age, gender, socioeconomic class etc.  These act as a filter and information is filtered through this positionality.   As a result that ethnographic work is a truth not the truth about a social aspect.  Other researchers with different positionalities may not produce the same ethnographic results and therefore not the same "theories".  

She also advocates capturing themes in research earlier rather than later.  Ethnographic field work notes are likely dense and difficult to wade through if left until the end of the research; however, speculating on themes and elements early may lead you to miss more important information in later interviews and leaves the researcher focused on "finding" things that they believe are important to their original research question rather than simply letting the research take it's course even if that means the original research question becomes redundant.