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.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- 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
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.