Ethnography that Serves Communities

Ethnographic research often extracts knowledge from communities without providing anything meaningful in return. In collaboration with my co-authors, I helped adapt a methodological framework for keeping researchers accountable to the communities being studied in field research for communications.

This approach is particularly useful for research aimed at generating positive societal impact by addressing problems faced by the communities under study.

The Community-First Research Model

Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) is most popular among public health researchers. CBPR fundamentally reimagines how ethnographic studies should be conducted. Instead of researchers parachuting into communities with predetermined questions, CBPR requires systematic sharing of leadership, decision-making, resources, and credit between researchers and community partners throughout every stage of the research process.

The approach begins with community stakeholders identifying problems they want to solve, followed by collaborative development of research questions, data collection methods, and analysis frameworks. Rather than treating community members as "subjects" to be studied, CBPR positions them as co-researchers with equal expertise and decision-making power.

Practical Implementation: The Three-Phase Structure

• Phase 1: Collaborative Question Development - Community partners and researchers jointly identify pressing issues and develop research questions that serve community needs. This phase involves creating formal agreements that outline expectations, resources, and data ownership through memoranda of understanding.

• Phase 2: Shared Data Collection - Semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and other ethnographic methods are conducted with ongoing community input on methodology refinements. Interview guides, consent procedures, and data collection protocols are continually developed and refined based on community feedback and evolving circumstances.

• Phase 3: Community-Partnered Dissemination - Research findings are translated into actionable insights for the community. This may include town halls, policy recommendations, training materials, or other formats that directly serve community goals.

Strategic Advantages for Organizations

This approach offers significant benefits for organizations seeking to understand complex social dynamics:

• Authentic Data Access: Community partnership provides access to genuine insider perspectives that external research cannot capture, while building trust that enables more honest responses to sensitive questions.

• Actionable Insights: Because research questions emerge from actual operational needs, findings directly inform decision-making rather than sitting unused in academic journals.

• Sustainable Relationships: The collaborative structure creates ongoing partnerships that can inform multiple projects and provide continuous feedback on organizational effectiveness.

• Risk Mitigation: Community oversight helps identify potential negative consequences of research and ensures that findings serve rather than harm the populations being studied.

Addressing Implementation Challenges

The framework requires acknowledging legitimate concerns about power dynamics and exploitation. Successful implementation requires genuine power-sharing, which means academic researchers must share control over research timelines, publication priorities, and analytical frameworks. This "decentering" of the researcher’s perspectives—often informed by normative academic models—is challenging but essential for producing research that communities actually want and can use.

The methodology also requires longer timelines than traditional research, as building authentic partnerships and conducting thorough ethnographic work cannot be rushed. Organizations must be prepared to invest in relationship-building and refining their iterative methodology.

Broader Applications

While developed in the context of public health research, this framework is applicable to any situation where organizations require a deep understanding of complex human behaviors and community dynamics. The principles work particularly well for:

• Understanding how policy changes affect ordinary people

• Identifying gaps between the research organization’s intentions and community needs

• Developing culturally responsive interventions and outreach strategies

• Evaluating the effectiveness of existing interventions from multiple stakeholder perspectives

The ethnographic research skills required—including interviewing, participant observation, and cultural analysis—become more powerful when embedded within community-controlled frameworks that ensure findings serve the people being studied rather than just the people conducting the study.

By transforming research from an extractive practice into a collaborative tool for community empowerment, this approach produces better data while building stronger, more equitable relationships between research organizations and the communities they serve.