ABSTRACT
When we started talking about this book, we did so based on our experiences as field researchers and teachers of research methods in the social sciences. It was born over many cups of coffee and protracted discussions. We expressed our frustration at the representation of ethnography across the social sciences, in textbooks and among our students, who sometimes think it is simply a question of a ‘bit of an observation’. This is hardly surprising because textbooks often describe ethnography in cold or clinical formulaic terms. For example, ethnography is the study of culture, the researcher enters the field, gets to know people, does some interviews, conducts participant observation, writes field notes, analyses the field notes, ‘writes up’ – and there might be a mention of reflecting on the process or, better still, something on reflexivity.
