Compare methods

	Ethnographic Interview	Grounded Theory
Field	Anthropology	Qualitative Research
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1979	1967
Originator	James P. Spradley	Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss
Type	Structured developmental sequence of interview questions for eliciting cultural knowledge	Method
Seminal source	Spradley, J. P. (1979). The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN: 9780030444968	Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Aldine.
Aliases	Spradley Interview, Developmental Research Sequence Interview, Ethnographic Interviewing, Domain Elicitation Interview	GT, Grounded Theory Approach
Related	3	3
Summary	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.	Grounded Theory (GT) is a systematic qualitative research methodology in which theory emerges directly from data through iterative analysis, rather than being imposed before data collection. Developed by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss in 1967, GT prioritizes generating explanatory frameworks grounded in evidence.