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Ethnographic returning, qualitative longitudinal research and the reflexive analysis of social practice
This paper makes the argument that ethnographic returning, in which ethnographers return to their field over time, and which is an engaged and long-term ethnography,can be considered a form of longitudinal qualitative study that can inform a reflexive analysis of the practice, or unfolding, of social life. Longitudinal qualitative studies have been designed as longitudinal at the outset and therefore have a specific focus on temporality, processes and social change. They often have an implicit theory of social change informing the analyses. Re-studies revisit the field site or community, and update or challenge the work of earlier researchers. These also tend to focus on change, if not so much on processes or time.Though their work is rarely labelled longitudinal, it is also quite common for ethnographers to return
to the field and their (changing) communities over time, and here some focus on
change is also inevitable. I call this ethnographic returning. All such temporal
approaches require a constructive and positive approach to reflexivity, in which
research is enhanced by acknowledgement that the social world, the academic world
and the personal world of the researcher are intermingled and co-created through
the ongoing process of social life. But, more than this, reflexivity needs to be
relocated within a theory of the reflexive nature of social life (a theory of practice).
I illustrate, through my own work, and drawing on the wider field of study on British migration to Spain, the contribution that participant observation and ethnographic
returning can make to this endeavour.
Funding
I thank the Economic and Social Research Council for funding this research on two occasions and through my PhD studentship and through grant reference R000223944.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEWVolume
60Issue
3Pages
518 - 536 (19)Citation
O'REILLY, K., 2012. Ethnographic returning, qualitative longitudinal research and the reflexive analysis of social practice. Sociological Review, 60 (3), pp. 518 - 536Publisher
© 2012 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2012 The Editorial Board of The Sociological ReviewVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2012Notes
This article is in Closed Access.ISSN
0038-0261Publisher version
Language
- en