Why is reflectivity important to ethnography?
What will be an ideal response?
A researcher completing ethnography must understand that he or she is part of the social world being investigated. Researchers cannot accept what they see at face value, but must consider the material raw data that require corroboration or verification. The goal is not to simply observe social facts, but to understand the behavior being witnessed and the motivations behind it. Observations must be systematically collected through interviews, photography, computers, archival searchers, documents, and other methods. Analyzing data collected involves finding and explaining patterns. The researcher must reflexively examine what the researcher knows and how the researcher came to know this, to have an ongoing internal conversation. The researcher cannot simply report findings as facts, but construct interpretations of experiences in the field, and then question how these interpretations arose. The goal is to produce reflexive knowledge that provides insight into the workings of the world and insights on how that knowledge came to be. Reflectivity as an approach is called critical ethnography.
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