Background ResearchTom Martin, PhD

Producing an insightful ethnography starts with a strong sense of what to look out for during fieldwork, what new questions to ask participants, and what conclusions have already been reached about the topic under investigation. All of this is determined long before you ever set foot into the field through background research. Perhaps you reached this chapter on background research from the section of this textbook devoted to the ethnographic project proposal, which indicated that you should conduct a literature search to see what has already been written about the topic you are exploring. Or maybe you found yourself here while thinking about how to formulate strong interview questions and observational instruments, both of which require insight into the history of the subject being investigated. This chapter will provide you with the research techniques necessary to gain a basic familiarity with the topic you are looking into so that you can conduct meaningful ethnographic research from your first moments in the field.

This chapter covers three different kinds of background research: Scholarly literature reviews, non-scholarly literature reviews, and personal or organizational histories. The first two look at the research that has already been published on your topic, while the third looks directly at the people and places you are examining. Many ethnographies begin with all three kinds of background research, and as you will see, there is no hard and fast line between them.

Literature Search and Review

A ‘literature review’ is precisely what it sounds like – a thorough review of previously published literature on a topic. If you undertake ethnographic research, you will need to know which questions have already been asked and answered so that you are not merely reproducing research that has already been done. A literature review allows you to see what questions have been asked, how they have been explored, and how they have been answered so that you can ensure that your research is novel while building upon the work of those who came before you.

Reviewing literature is a two-part process, starting with a literature search before performing a literature review. While you may be excited to jump right into the review stage, remember that there is little point in reviewing literature if you do not first ensure that you have a comprehensive set of relevant literature to examine. The following considerations about literature searches will help you to determine which sources are relevant to your project, and whether you have discovered pertinent existing publications.

Literature searching: Keywords

The first step to discovering new literature is determining keywords. Your keywords will serve as your search terms as you explore academic databases and other sources of information. For example, if you are writing about collaboration within an auto mechanics workshop, your keywords might be “auto mechanics” and “collaboration.”^[1]

Begin by thinking about the scope of the literature search that you want to undertake. A very broad scope will be more thorough and comprehensive but will almost certainly produce too many results. For example, for our paper about collaboration in an auto mechanics workshop, a search for “mechanics” on JSTOR.org yields over 530,000 results – far too many to reasonably review. Searching for “auto mechanics” results in 50,000 hits, which is more reasonable but still too broad. “Auto mechanics collaboration” produces 6,000 results, and “‘auto mechanics’ collaboration” – with “auto mechanics” in quotes – produces just 430, a reasonable enough number that we can now begin whittling sources away by hand.

Note that in the example above, there was a large drop when two keywords were included in quotes. This is an example of operators, symbols that can be used to expand or constrain the scope of a search. When the term “auto mechanics” was searched without quotes, the search engine returned articles that have the words “auto” and “mechanics” anywhere in the paper. By contrast, putting the words “auto mechanics” in quotes tells the search engine to treat this as a single phrase and only returns instances where those two words appear together, in that order. Other operators include “and”, “or”, and “not”, as well as field codes that specify whether the search engine should look in the paper title, paper abstract, or full text. Every search engine treats these operators slightly differently, so look for a Frequently Asked Questions section on your chosen search engine to learn how to get the most out of your search.

Remember that you may not want to look at all the published literature on your topic at once, particularly if you are primarily interested in literature published from within your research discipline. If you are doing an ethnography among auto mechanics, you may not initially want to look at data on auto mechanic unemployment rates from the Department of Labor (although this data may provide helpful data in a later, wider search). Try starting your search very narrowly to see if anyone has conducted a study just like the one you have in mind, adding terms like “ethnography” to thin out results. It will be easier to expand your search later than it will be to begin with a million results and try to narrow down from there.

Literature searching: Search engines, catalogues, and databases

Once you have determined your keywords, you can begin searching for literature. But what is it that you will search through – where will you enter these search terms?

While scholarly literature is indexed in a variety of ways, this chapter will outline three of the most common: library catalogs, academic databases, and search engines. Each of these has its own unique benefits and drawbacks, and the choice of which you will use will rely largely on which suits your project best.

It is likely that you will at least begin your search by accessing the library catalog of the college or university where you are a student. For students at the City University of New York (CUNY) – including Guttman College students – the library catalogue is accessed through OneSearch. A library catalogue is a list of all the resources available through that library, including academic journal articles and books. The great advantage of starting with the library catalogue in your search is that every result that the catalogue returns will be available to you; because this is a list of library holdings, you will be able to access any of them with your library credentials. The downside, however, is that you will only see the resources that the library holds, which is certain to be a limited sample of what exists. The library catalogue is, therefore, highly accessible but limited in scope.

On the opposite side of the spectrum from the library catalogue is the academic search engine, the most popular of which is currently Google Scholar. As of the writing of this article, Google Scholar returned over 47 times as many results as the CUNY library catalogue for our example search on “auto mechanics”, as it scours the web for any relevant citation. Unlike a library catalogue, where each result is normally added intentionally by a librarian, a search engine trawls through every corner of the internet to uncover information from sources as varied as academic theses, preprints, technical reports, and government publications. While the clear strength of this strategy lies in the breadth of information it provides, there are necessarily drawbacks as well, mostly relating to the quality and relevance of the results – with no librarian in charge curating the collection, some of what a scholarly search engine will return is likely to come from questionable sources (see the section on “Non-scholarly literature” below to learn to evaluate sources). In addition, not every result on a site like Google Scholar will be accessible to you, unlike library searches where the only listed results will be accessible through that library.

A comfortable middle ground between library catalogue searches and scholarly search engines is the academic database. While these databases differ in their purpose, design, and scope, they are generally intended to be near-comprehensive collections of quality literature from each discipline. Because databases are discipline-specific, more attention is paid to indexing all the relevant information within each discipline, with experts in the subject matter vetting the sources that are included. Databases are therefore generally more comprehensive than library catalogues yet more refined and selective than search engines, establishing a comfortable in-between option for researchers balancing breadth and quality. Your college may provide a list of academic databases.

The literature review process

Once you have all the relevant literature collected, you begin the challenging process of reviewing it, determining its contents and quality and consequently its relevance to your project. While there is no fixed strategy for reviewing literature, this chapter lays out one possible approach, illustrating how organizational tools like Microsoft Excel can help you in your review process.

Begin by making a new Excel workbook with three sheets, organized by title, abstract, and contents (see Figure 1; see official instructions on creating a new worksheet). These will be the three levels at which we review the relevance of the citation – whether the title indicates a relevant source; if so, whether the abstract implies relevance to the project; and if it does, what the contents of the article are and whether/how they are relevant.

Figure 1: The 'Title' sheet in the literature review workbook

The ‘Title’ sheet will list the title, publication, publication date, and any other useful data that will help to keep the results of the search organized. Keeping this page tidy will help you to quickly determine whether you have already encountered sources as you continue your review and new material pops up. Perhaps counterintuitively, it is useful at this step to include all citations that result from your search terms, including those that do not immediately look useful. Recording all the results will ensure that your search is thoroughly comprehensive and will allow you to determine whether your search terms are properly refined.

Now that we have very roughly determined the relevance of our citations based on their titles, it is time to look at their abstracts – the short summaries that appear at the top of an article – to look deeper at their contents. Your ‘Abstract’ sheet includes only the citations that you marked as relevant on the title sheet, providing a space to indicate whether you still think the source is relevant after reading the abstract. For example, we marked an article titled “The work of a mechanic” as relevant at the title stage, but determined after reading the abstract that it does not sufficiently focus on collaboration in the workshop (our example research topic) to be included in our review. The articles that still look relevant after this stage will be the ones that you read in full for your review.

Non-scholarly literature

The section above outlines a strategy for reviewing scholarly literature – that is, research produced by academics or literature that is otherwise connected to colleges and universities. Depending on your topic, however, you may find more pertinent information beyond just academic citations. Professional organization websites, magazines, newspapers, and even social media can serve as rich sources of background information for your ethnographic project. The big difference, however, is that these non-scholarly sources do not undergo peer review, which means that they have not necessarily been vetted for accuracy by experts in their field. Therefore, while such sources can be highly useful, they must be approached with an extra degree of caution to make sure that the information they contain is accurate and unbiased.^[2]

To find non-scholarly sources, your process will roughly follow the steps described above: establish keywords, collect and organize sources, then review them for relevance and trust. The last step is particularly important for non-scholarly materials, and these sources should be examined with some suspicion until their author and purpose become clear. The Guttman College librarians have provided an excellent resource for evaluating literature, titled the C.A.R.D.I.O. process, which is open for anyone to use. C.A.R.D.I.O. asks you to identify:

If you can answer all the questions above accurately (with the help of the C.A.R.D.I.O. guide, which has prompts to help you), then you are in a good position to determine whether the non-scholarly resource you have identified is trustworthy.

Personal and Organizational Histories

In many cases, you will find that there has not yet been anything published on the people and organizations that you are researching. This is to be expected with ethnography, as ethnographic research is often at its best when it sheds light on previously unstudied topics. Before you start your ethnography, however, you will still want to gather whatever information is available about the people you will be talking to and the places where they work. This kind of personal and organizational research is more like detective work than a literature review, as the sources you will encounter are most likely to fall outside conventional publications.

It is important to carefully study the website of the organization that you will be researching, as well as any print publications that the organization may have produced – for example, some organizations put out promotional material or annual reports. Keep in mind that such information is necessarily biased to some degree; it is designed to promote the organization and therefore highlights certain aspects and not others. You can still take this information into account, as long as you keep in mind critical questions about who the author is, who the intended audience is, and what message is being conveyed.

Likewise, the people who you will work alongside as you conduct your ethnographic research are likely to have a professional web presence as well. Public-facing resources like LinkedIn pages or staff profiles will serve as excellent sources of information about participants in the workplace you are studying, showing you the details of their job roles, how long they have been employed there, and sometimes even what other jobs they have held in the past. Again, remember that you are only seeing a portrait of these individuals as they wish to be perceived; you will be likely to develop a fuller, more nuanced picture of their professional roles and histories as you interview them and watch them perform their jobs.

Many individuals that you will collaborate with in research will make their personal social media accounts public as well, but you should most likely resist examining these during your background research unless you have some specific and justifiable reason to. If you are conducting a workplace ethnography, the personal lives of your research participants are probably outside the scope of your research, and poking through their social media may be considered an invasion of privacy. Such concerns may be alleviated, however, in cases where a person’s work persona and private life are intertwined; highly public figures such as celebrities and elected officials may curate personal profiles online that are designed for public consumption, and which are therefore acceptable for you to examine in your research.

Conclusion

Collecting background research involves not only carefully combing through published peer-reviewed literature, but also finding non-scholarly resources that will help you refine and contextualize your research questions. At each point in the process, it is important to stay organized and maintain a critical eye. Tidy data organization and critical questions about bias and authorship will help you to ensure that you are only collecting background information that is relevant and trustworthy.

Study Questions

1. What is the difference between a ‘literature search’ and a ‘literature review’?
2. What do you need to be particularly aware of when reviewing non-scholarly publications?
3. What can you learn from professional websites and public profiles? What are the limitations of these sources?
   

Key Terms

Literature search

Literature Review

Scope

Keywords

Operators

Library catalog

Database

Search Engine

Abstract

Scholarly Literature

Peer Review

Outside Resources

Sources below curtesy of Guttman Community College Library, Information Literacy at Guttman

1. More tips on generating keywords appear in the Outside Resources section at the end of this chapter, through the Guttman College Library “Information Literacy” link. ↑

2. More tips on evaluating sources and identifying Fake News appear in the Outside Resources section at the end of this chapter, through the Guttman College Library “Information Literacy” link. ↑