science

Person-centered ethnography

Person-centered ethnography is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Person-centered ethnography rather than just read about it. In short: Person-centered ethnography is an approach within psychological anthropology that draws on techniques and theories from psychiatry and psychoanalysis to understand how individuals relate to and interact with their sociocultural context. The term was first used by Robert I.

Key takeaways

Person-centered ethnography belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Person-centered ethnography to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Person-centered ethnography from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Person-centered ethnography is an approach within psychological anthropology that draws on techniques and theories from psychiatry and psychoanalysis to understand how individuals relate to and interact with their sociocultural context. The term was first used by Robert I. Levy, a psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist, to describe his psychodynamically informed approach to interviewing during his anthropological fieldwork in Tahiti and Nepal. A key distinction in person-centered interviewing is that between interviewees as informants and as respondents. As Levy and Hollan describe it,

There is a significant difference between asking a Tahitian interviewee something like "Please describe for me exactly how and why supercision (a penis-mutilating rite of passage) is done by Tahitians," and asking him "Can you tell me about your supercision?"..."Did it change your life in any way?" "How?" "What did you think and feel about it then?" "What do you think and feel about it now?" The first question engages interviewees as typical ethnographic informants, asking them to describe features of their culture or social system; the latter questions ask much more directly about their own experiences, feelings, hopes, and desires, as well as changes in these over time. Not surprisingly, asking about these more intimate topics generally requires much longer acquaintance with an interviewee than do questions about more publicly available knowledge. Levy and Hollan note that person-centered interviewing makes use of both modes and tacks back and forth between them; its difference from most methods of ethnographic interviewing lies in its emphasis on the latter and its concern with understanding how individuals relate to, experience, and understand their larger sociocultural context. Within these, major topics of interest typically include: the experience of the self, morality, the body, illness and healing, emotions, and family relationships. Methodologically, person-centered interviewing also depends on a fair degree of experience in self-monitoring for transference and countertransference phenomena, as well as attention to elisions, avoidances, and gaps in interviewees' answers and attention to interviewees' emotional reactions during and outside the formal interview setting. Person-centered interviewing comes out of a psychodynamically informed tradition within Culture and Personality studies and American psychological anthropology and shares a number of methodological and thematic concerns with clinical ethnography.

References

Select bibliography Levy, Robert I. (1973) Tahitians: mind and experience in the Society Islands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levy, Robert I. (1990) Mesocosm: the organization of a Hindu Newar city in Nepal. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Levy, Robert I. and Douglas Hollan (1998) "Person-Centered Interviewing and Observation in Anthropology." pp. 333–364 in Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, edited by H. R. Bernard. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

See also Clinical Ethnography Creative participation Educational psychology Naturalistic observation Scholar-practitioner model Qualitative research

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Person-centered ethnography

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Person-centered ethnography claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Person-centered ethnography before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Person-centered ethnography ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Person-centered ethnography

In research: Person-centered ethnography appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Person-centered ethnography in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Person-centered ethnography is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Anthropology stubs, Ethnography, Psychological anthropology, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Person-centered ethnography outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Person-centered ethnography in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Person-centered ethnography means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Person-centered ethnography out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Person-centered ethnography in simple terms?

Why does Person-centered ethnography matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Person-centered ethnography?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Person-centered ethnography.