ABSTRACT
Researching the effects of dementia on social interaction is a project that inevitably relies on ethnographic methods. Ethnography is a qualitative methodology that attempts to describe a culture from the perspective of the people for whom it is a way of life. Through observation of and interaction with the community they are investigating, ethnographers may be better placed to recognize and record significant patterns of social behavior in a particular culture. As was noted in chapter 1, collecting data from speakers who have dementia is a task that often relies on the researcher becoming actively involved in the AD community.1 Our interest in pursuing this research has, for example, resulted
in active involvement in support groups, nursing homes, and the lives of the people we have interviewed. Therefore, ethnography has shaped this book and aided in both the collection of the data and in gaining a better “understanding” of the AD speech community. In this chapter, we explore the data from the perspective of a particular type of ethnography, EC.
