Carolyn Ellis

Basics of qualitative research : grounded theory procedures and techniques

Introduction Getting Started Theoretical Sensitivity The Uses of Literature Open Coding Techniques for Enhancing Theoretical Sensitivity Axial Coding Selective Coding Process The Conditional Matrix Theoretical Sampling Memos and Diagrams Writing Theses and Monographs, and Giving Talks about Your Research Criteria for Judging a Grounded Theory Study

Telling Secrets, Revealing Lives Relational Ethics in Research With Intimate Others

This article focuses on relational ethics in research with intimate others. Relational ethics requires researchers to act from our hearts and minds, acknowledge our interpersonal bonds to others, and take responsibility for actions and their consequences. Calling on her own research studies, the author examines relational ethics in ethnographies in which researchers are friends with or become friends with participants over the course of their projects. Then she examines autoethnographic narratives in which researchers include intimate others in stories focusing on their own experience. Considering ethical responsibilities to identifiable others, she discusses writing about those who are alive and those who have died. She then reflects on the ways co-constructed autoethnographies circumvent some of the ethical issues in traditional qualitative studies on unfamiliar others, yet avoid some of the ethical concerns in writing about intimate others. The last section presents advice for those who long to write about intimate others.

Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing

chapter 1 About the Authors chapter 2 Preface and Acknowledgments chapter 3 Arthur P. Bochner and Carolyn Ellis, Introduction: Talking Over Ethnography chapter 4 Part 1: Autoethnography chapter 5 1. David Payne, Autobiology chapter 6 2. Lisa Tillmann-Healy, A Secret Life in a Culture of Thinness: Reflections on Body, Food and Bulimia chapter 7 3. Carol Rambo Ronai, My Mother is Mentally Retarded chapter 8 4. Aliza Kolker, Thrown Overboard: The Human Costs of Health Care Rationing chapter 9 (R. Ruth Linden, The Life Boat is Fraught: Reflection on Thrown Overboard) chapter 10 5. Mark Neumann, Collecting Ourselves at the End of the Century chapter 11 Part 2: Sociopoetics chapter 12 6. Judith Hamera, Reconstructing Apsaras from Memory: Six Thoughts chapter 13 7. Deborah Austin, Kaleidoscope: The Same and Different chapter 14 8. Laurel Richardson, Speech Lessons chapter 15 9. Carolyn Ellis, Maternal Connections chapter 16 10. Jim Mienczakowski, An Ethnographics Act: The Construction of Consensual Theatre chapter 17 Part 3: Reflexive Ethnography chapter 18 11. Marc Edelman, Devil, Not-Quite-White, Rootless Cosmopolitan: Tsuris in Latin America, the Bronx, and the USSR chapter 19 12. Tanice G. Foltz and Wendy Griffin, She Changes Everything She Touches: Ethnographic Journeys of Self-Discovery chapter 20 13. Karen Fox, Silent Voices: A Subversive Reading of Child Sexual Abuse chapter 21 14. Richard Quinney, Once My Father Traveled West to California chapter 22 Open-Ending, Readers Talk Back chapter 23 Name Index chapter 24 Subject Index

Creating Criteria: An Ethnographic Short Story

In this work, the author introspects about the steps she takes when evaluating narrative ethnographies. Her story shows how she thinks about and reacts to alternative genres of writing. Optimally, she tries to feel and think with the story, moving back and forth as the two processes merge. She tries to immerse herself in the flow of the story, until she is unable to stop thinking about or feeling the experience. Along the way, she asks questions about what she has learned from the story, and she evaluates the writer’s literary strategies, ethical concerns, and the degree to which the goals of the work have been achieved. When she reviews, she attempts to offer helpful feedback yet protect the writer’s sense of self.

TURN-ONS FOR MONEY Interactional Strategies of the Table Dancer

Using participant observation, retrospective and interactive introspection, and interviews, we describe interactional strategies used by erotic dancers to sell “table dances.” In contrast to past studies, we concentrate on the dynamic, processual nature of the exchange from the point of view of dancers and the dancer as researcher. Instead of emphasizing the deviant aspects of this interaction, we view it as representing a microcosm of strategies used to gain and maintain control in “respectable” exchanges, such as those employed by women in negotiating gender relationships and by sellers in buyer-dominated service occupations.

EMOTIONAL AND ETHICAL QUAGMIRES IN RETURNING TO THE FIELD

When returning to the site of prior research, ethnographers may find themselves embroiled in emotional and ethical quandaries with the people about whom they have written. This article details the conversations and emotional conflicts that erupted suddenly when I returned to a community about which I had published a previous ethnographic account. Writing the story gave me an opportunity to examine orthodox ethnographic research practices, such as omitting the autobiographical self and emotional responses from ethnographic texts. The return visit helped clarify connections between my personal life and the way I conducted fieldwork in this community, and it led me to recommend that ethnographic practices include an examination of how our experiences connect us with those we study rather than emphasize only how they set us apart.

An Introduction to the Arts and Narrative Research: Art as Inquiry

On September 29, 2000, we received an e-mail message from Marjatta Saarnivaara inviting us to speak at a research seminar organized by the Graduate School of Multicultural Art Education at the University of Art and Design, Helsinki. The seminar was to be held in Helsinki, January 25-27, 2001, on the topic “The Arts and Narrative Inquiries.” The goal of the seminar would be to position the arts as media for personal and collective narratives in diverse professional and cultural settings. Participants would foreground art as a mode of narrative inquiry, as a way of transgressing conventions, and as a method for understanding one’s own life, producing multicultural knowledge, evoking self-understanding, and representing research findings. Tempted by the promise of a unique adventure and curious about how Finnish artists and art educators were applying narrative in their work, we agreed to travel to Finland in the middle of winter. Frankly, we were more than a little anxious about how we would adjust to the darkness and cold of winter in Finland as well as how our stories and ideas about narrative and autoethnography would be received by painters, musicians, dancers, performance artists, and art educators. In the months leading up to the conference, we corresponded frequently with Marjatta Saarnivaara and with Inkeri Sava, the conference organizer in Helsinki. They informed us that art universities in Finland were struggling with the question of how to show the appropriateness of alternative forms of representation for doctoral dissertations and the development of suitable criteria by which to judge them. The artists in these graduate programs had the burden of demonstrating the legitimacy of art as a basis for inquiry—a means of producing knowledge and contributing to human understanding. The traditional standards of inquiry that emphasized facts, control, distance, and neutrality had little appeal to these art educators and graduate students. They understood art as an embodied inquiry—sensuous, emotional, intimate. They also believed that imagination was as important as rigor, meanings as important as facts, and the heart as important as the mind.

Talking and thinking about qualitative research

This script comes from an edited transcript of a session titled “Talking and Thinking About Qualitative Research,” which was part of the 2006 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on May 4-6, 2006. This special session featured scholars informally responding to questions about their personal history with qualitative methods, epiphanies that attracted them to qualitative work or changed their perspectives within the qualitative tradition, ethical crises, exemplary qualitative studies, the current state of qualitative methods, and challenges and goals for the next decade. Panelists included Arthur Bochner (communication), Norman Denzin (sociology/communication/critical studies), Yvonna Lincoln (education), Janice Morse (nursing/anthropology), Ronald Pelias (performance studies/ communication), and Laurel Richardson (sociology/gender studies). Carolyn Ellis (communication/sociology) served as organizer and moderator.

Fisher Folk: Two Communities on Chesapeake Bay

Document Type Book Publication Date 1986

Shattered Lives: Making Sense of September 11th and Its Aftermath

During the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001, the author was on a plane headed to Dulles Airport. She narrates and analyzes her experience in terms of how she reframed and made sense of these events. After she first resisted the frame of terrorism, her perceptions were influenced by her location during the attacks as well as by personal experiences of loss, both current (her mothers and mother-in-laws deteriorating health) and past (her brothers death on a commercial airplane). Through autoethnography, she shows that everyday stories of those not directly involved in the attacks, yet devastated by what happened, merit telling. She tells this story to find personal and collective meaning in this tragedy and to provide incentive for others to tell their stories so that we might discuss and better understand the impact of what happened. The author hopes this piece will stimulate a dialogue among qualitative researchers about their role in understanding September 11th.