Applied Ethnography ─ Guidelines for Field Research

This comprehensive, engaging guide to applied research distills the expertise of the distinguished ethnographer and methodologist Pertti Pelto over his acclaimed 50-year career. Having written the first major text promoting mixed qualitative and quantitative methods in applied ethnography in the 1970s, Pelto now synthesizes decades of innovation, including examples from around the world that illustrate how specific methods yield immediate results for addressing social problems. Ideal for researchers, students, training programs, and technical assistance projects, this thorough text covers the key topics and skills required: gaining entry, recording and organizing field data, a host of specialized techniques, integrating qualitative and quantitative methods, building and training research teams, rapid assessment and focused ethnographic studies, short- and long-term ethnography, writing up results, non-Western perspectives on research, and more.

Pertti J. (Bert) Pelto is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, where he founded the program in medical anthropology. During his career he also served on the faculty of Cornell University, the University of Minnesota, and Washington University. His foundational Anthropological Research: The Structure of Inquiry (1970), in which he argued for a comprehensive mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches, was the first methodology textbook in socio-cultural anthropology and among the first in qualitative research more generally. He is author or editor of many other major books and textbooks, some of which are The Snowmobile Revolution (1973), Technology and Social Change (ed., with H. R. Bernard, 1983), Research Methods in Nutritional Anthropology (with G. Pelto and E. Messer 1989), and Sexuality in the Time of AIDS (ed., with R. Verma, S. Schensul, and A. Joshi, 2004). Dr. Pelto has spent much of the past two decades time in India training and advising research groups and working with HIV/AIDS projects and other applied programs.