From the theories of De Vaus (2001) and Trochim and William (2006), we can say that ethnography is the fundamental method for childhood research. The research design refers to the complete approach that integrates various mechanisms of the study in a coherent and genuine way so as to resolve the research problem efficiently. This proposes the need for data collection, measurement, and analysis.
This studies the behaviour of people in their natural setting. As such, ethnography is apt to study the underperformance of the Black Caribbean students in schools. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) cites that human actions show a world of multiple social meanings that must be understood through recognition of various contextual clues. Interpretation emerges from deep descriptions of cultural phenomena.
Initially, anthropologists and sociologists used ethnography to explain unfamiliar cultural practices, it is now widely used by researchers in vast array of disciplines such as social work, organizational behaviour, psychology, nursing, medicine, and economics.
Ethnography has currently become popular due to its shift away from the positivist approach, that suggests that social research to be modelled after physical sciences, and focusses on the discovery of universal rules and descriptions by means of unbiased observation language. Contrary to using experimentation and manipulation of variables, a naturalist approach to social research gives insights of the social phenomena as they exist, unaltered. As such, ethnography has emerged as an important research method. The analysis of data in this research method would consist of explanation of the connotations, purposes and significances of human actions and institutional practice, and how these are drawn in local, and wider contexts.
Child-centered ethnography has emerged from a hypothetical alteration in sociological study of childhood, that led to the “re-positioning of children from passive recipients of adult socialization to social actors in their own right”. Ethnography serves as a beneficial tool to show children’s perspective on their social worlds. Researchers involve with participants closely, as this facilitates entry into participants’ social worlds.
