Introduction

These two statements are separated by almost sixty years and the locations are thousands of miles apart. The first scenario is a tropical beach on the Trobriand Islands, off the eastern tip of New Guinea, while the second situation is a girls’ public school in Scotland. Both scenes are ‘fields’; that is circumscribed areas of study which have been the subject of social research. In both cases, the style of research that has been used relies

on an observational approach involving a relationship between the researcher and those who are researched. This type of research has been principally conducted by social anthropologists and sociologists and is known as fieldwork, ethnography, case study, qualitative research, interpretative procedures and field research. Each of these terms results in this kind of research being conceptualised slightly differently as a different emphasis is given to the work which is done by particular people. Among social anthropologists fieldwork is synonymous with the collection of data using observational methods. However, for sociologists the term is also used to refer to the collection of data using a social survey (cf. Srinivas, 1966, p. 156; Moser and Kalton, 1971). Ethnography has been defined by Conklin (1968) as the data of cultural anthropology that are derived from the direct observation of behaviour in a particular society. The making, reporting and evaluation of these observations is the task of ethnographers. For he adds that if these tasks are to be successful they should be related to interpretations derived from social and cultural anthropology. However, Wolcott (1975, 1982) has argued that there has been much confusion around the term ‘ethnography’ as it has become equated with the techniques of doing research. Instead, he argues that it is the cultural perspective not the research technique that distinguishes ethnography from other work. Nevertheless, many British researchers, especially those engaged in the study of schools and classrooms, have used the term ‘ethnography’ to describe their style of work (cf. Woods, 1977; Hammersley, 1980; 1982). However, Stenhouse (1984) has argued against using this term as he considers ethnographers to be aggressive to their subjects through a link that he perceives between ethnography and colonialism (cf. Asad, 1973). Furthermore, for Stenhouse, ethnographers are strangers to the situations they research, a position, he argues, which cannot be adopted by most researchers who study schools and classrooms. Accordingly, he refers to his own research as case study based on condensed field experience involving observation (rather than the classic participant observer strategy), tape-recorded interviews and the collection of documents (cf. Stenhouse, 1982).