Method evidence record
Ethnographic Interview
The ethnographic interview, formalized by James Spradley, is a deliberately staged conversation whose goal is to discover how an insider categorizes and talks about their own cultural world rather than to test the researcher's categories. It proceeds through a developmental research sequence of question types — broad grand-tour questions, fine-grained descriptive questions, structural questions that probe how knowledge is organized, and contrast questions that surface the distinctions informants draw between terms. The point is not a list of facts but a reconstructed map of meanings expressed in the informant's own native terms.
Evidence statusSources recorded, not reviewedBibliographic sources are present. Claim-level evidence review has not been performed.
Source record
Recorded
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley's Developmental Research Sequence)
Taxonomic method recordprocess-pipelineanthropology
Spradley, J. P. (1979). The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. · ISBN 9780030444968
Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. · ISBN 9780759112421
Open full method2 recorded citations, copied from the method source record.
Curated claims
Assessed
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
No curated claims yet
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Suggested3
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations. No evidence claim is inferred.
- Same method familyCultural Domain Analysis
machine-suggestedRelational suggestion, not evidence.
- Same method familyCultural Models Analysis
machine-suggestedRelational suggestion, not evidence.
- Same method familyFree Listing
machine-suggestedRelational suggestion, not evidence.