Doing Anthropological Research provides a practical toolkit for carrying out research. It works through the process chapter by chapter, from the planning and proposal stage to methodologies, secondary research, ethnographic fieldwork, ethical concerns, and writing strategies. Case study examples are provided throughout to illustrate the particular issues and dilemmas that may be encountered. This handy guide will be invaluable to upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students who are studying or intending to use anthropological methods in their research.

Doing Anthropological Research provides a practical toolkit for carrying out research. It works through the process chapter by chapter, from the planning and proposal stage to methodologies, secondary research, ethnographic fieldwork, ethical concerns, and writing strategies. Case study examples are provided throughout to illustrate the particular issues and dilemmas that may be encountered. This handy guide will be invaluable to upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students who are studying or intending to use anthropological methods in their research.

An essential new guide to the theory and practice of conducting ethnographic research in consumer environments, drawing on decades of the authors’ own research—from coffee in Bangkok and boredom in New Zealand to computing in the United States—using methodologies from focus groups and rapid appraisal to semiotics and visual ethnography.

This text presents topics such as treatment of sampling, interviewing, participant observation, taking and managing field notes, analyzing data, and text analysis. The author also discusses recording equipment, voice recognition software, computer-based questionnaire methods, internet-based surveys, and word processors as text managers.

What is the relationship between health, human nature, and human needs? The impact of social change on communities? The processes by which communities confront and overcome their health problems? How do we study these health questions in new communities and become advocates for change? These are critical questions in confronting the social causes of ill health, yet many health students do not have the appropriate training in the anthropological methods and techniques that help answer them. Christie Kiefer has written Doing Health Anthropology to prompt students to enter the community already prepared in these methods so that they can accurately ask and solve these important questions themselves. Using this book as a guide, students learn to integrate cultural anthropology with health science and come to their own conclusions based on field research. The book includes common pitfalls to avoid when conducting interviews and observations, and ways to formulate and answer research questions, maintain field notes and other records, and correctly analyze qualitative data. With the help of this text, practitioners and students alike will be able to integrate cultural anthropology methods of research into their health science investigations and community health initiatives. For news and to learn more about how you can implement a community approach to building global health and social justice, visit

The first time that we, the editors of this volume, met, a chance remark by one of us, newly returned from fieldwork in Fiji, quickly led to an animated discussion of our experiences doing anthropological research with children. Following that occasion, we began to seek each other out in order to continue such conversations, because we had found no other opportunity to discuss these significant events. We knew our experiences were rich sources of cross-cultural data and stimuli to rethinking anthro pological theory and methods. A cursory review of the literature on fieldwork revealed, to our surprise, that fieldworker's experiences with children were rarely and only briefly mentioned (Hostetler and Huntington, 1970, are an early exception). In order to learn more about research that included the ethnographers' children, we organized a conference on the topic at Michigan State University on May 1, 1982. This volume includes papers from that conference, as well as insights and ideas from the formal and informal discussions among the conference participants and audience. This volume, like the conference which preceded it, is intended to be the effects of accompanying children on anthropological an exploration of field research and on the effects of fieldwork on the children themselves. Additionally, we see this book as part of an anthropological inquiry into research as a cultural process, by which is meant the effects of the researchers' cultural identity--class, gender, age, ethnicity, and other characteristics--on fieldwork.

This book presents case studies that address how to improve the use of applied or policy research done by anthropologists. It documents the applications of anthropology and in so doing, improves practice. The case studies treat the problem of knowledge use from a variety of perspectives.