Define the methods of ethnography and how they compare to netnography.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

An ethnography is the study of a culture or cultures that a group of people share (Van Maanen, 1995). As a method, it is usually meant to refer to the process by which a single investigator immerses himself or herself in a group for a long time (often one or more years), gradually establishing trust and experiencing the social world as do the participants (Madden, 2010). Ethnographic research can be called naturalistic, because it seeks to describe and understand the natural social world as it is, in all its richness and detail. This goal is best achieved when an ethnographer is fluent in the local language and spends enough time in the setting to know how people live, what they say about themselves and what they actually do, and what they value (Armstrong, 2008)
Communities can refer not only to people in a common physical location but also to relationships that develop online. Online communities may be formed by persons with similar interests or backgrounds, perhaps to create new social relationships that location or schedules did not permit or to supplement relationships that emerge in the course of work or school or other ongoing social activities. Like communities of people who interact face-to-face, online communities can develop a culture and become sources of identification and attachment (Kozinets, 2010). And like physical communities, researchers can study online communities through immersion in the group for an extended period. Netnography, also termed cyberethnography and virtual ethnography (James & Busher, 2009), is the use of ethnographic methods to study online communities.
Netnography: The use of ethnographic methods to study online communities; also termed cyberethnography and virtual ethnography.
In some respects, netnography is similar to traditional ethnography. The researcher prepares to enter the field by becoming familiar with online communities and their language and customs, formulating an exploratory research question about social processes or orientations in that setting, selecting an appropriate community to study. Unlike in-person ethnographies, netnographies can focus on communities whose members are physically distant and dispersed. The selected community should be relevant to the research question, involve frequent communication among actively engaged members, and have a number of participants who, as a result, generate a rich body of textual data (Kozinets, 2010). For example, after a residence center in Sweden that housed asylum-seeking unaccompanied minors was vandalized and its staff members threatened with violence, Katrina Hirvonen (2013) conducted a netnography to understand how the anti-immigration sentiment was rising in a country that has traditionally perceived tolerance as a national virtue. Based on the frequency of comments about the residence center, Hirvonen examined three anti-immigration websites and specifically coded data from 288 comments and 60 articles. She discovered that the “comment fields on sites serve as an echo chamber with extremists reaching out for others with the same ideas to reinforce extreme opinions already held.?.?.?.?[S]uch a forum for sharing ideas constantly encourages the development of ever more extreme thoughts and suggested action” (2013).
A netnographer must keep both observational and reflective field notes, but unlike a traditional ethnographer, he or she can return to review the original data—the posted text—long after it was produced. The data can then be coded, annotated with the researcher’s interpretations, checked against new data to evaluate the persistence of social patterns, and used to develop a theory that is grounded in the data.