Deaf Like Me, The Ethnographic Interview, Participant Observation
James P. Spradley (1933–1982) was a
social scientist and a professor of
anthropology at
Macalester College.[1] Spradley wrote or edited 20 books on
ethnography and qualitative research including The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society (1972), Deaf Like Me (1979), The Ethnographic Interview (1979), and Participant Observation (1980).[2]
Life and career
Spradley earned his PhD in anthropology from the
University of Washington in 1967. His dissertation, which was supervised by
Melville Jacobs, was entitled James Sewed: A Social, Cultural and Psychological Analysis of a Bicultural Innovator.[3]
Spradley joined the faculty at Macalester College in 1969 on the behest of the college's anthropology professor, Dave McCurdy, with whom he would later collaborate on a number of academic book projects.[4] Spradley died of leukemia in 1982.[2][4]
Work
Spradley was a major figure in the development of the "new ethnography" which saw every individual as a carrier of the culture rather than simply looking to the outputs of the great artists of the time.[5] Spradley argued that
ethnography differed from other deductive types of
social research in that the five steps of
ethnographic research—selecting a problem, collecting data, analyzing data, formulating hypotheses, and writing—all happen simultaneously.[6]
Much of Spradley's work was guided by his interest in "ethnographic semantics", which sought to apply "explicitly 'scientific' analytical frameworks to the analysis of cultural phenomena".[4] In The Ethnographic Interview, Spradley describes four types of ethnographic analysis that basically build on each other. The first type of analysis is
domain analysis, which is "a search for the larger units of cultural knowledge".[6] The other kinds of analysis are taxonomy analysis, componential analysis, and theme analysis.
Reception
Spradley's work was widely used as college texts for American Studies classes in the 1970s.[5]
Spradley's book You Owe Yourself a Drunk (1970), in which he conducted interviews and created a "typology of the different kinds" of homeless alcoholic men,[7] has been called an exemplar of "good systemic ethnography".[8]