Leon Anderson | |
---|---|
Born | 1950 |
Nationality | American |
Occupation(s) | Sociologist, academic, researcher |
Awards | Charles Horton Cooley Award, Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction Scholarly Achievement Award, North Central Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarship Award, Pacific Sociological Association |
Academic background | |
Education | B.A M.A Ph.D. |
Alma mater | Portland State University University of Texas at Austin |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Ohio University Utah State University |
Leon Anderson is an American sociologist,academic and researcher. He is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Ohio University [1] and Utah State University. [2]
Anderson's primary scholarly contributions fall in social inequality and qualitative social science research methods. Among these,he has focused on sociology of deviance,qualitative research methods,homelessness,and auto-ethnographic methods. Anderson has authored or coauthored several books including,Down on Their Luck:A Study of Homeless Street People,Analyzing Social Settings:A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis 4th Edition and Deviance:Social Constructions and Blurred Boundaries. [3] Down on Their Luck has been translated into Portuguese and Analyzing Social Settings has been translated into Polish. [4]
In 2012 he co-edited an issue of the journal American Behavioral Scientist on mental health courts. [5]
Anderson was born in Snohomish,Washington,in 1950. He graduated from Portland State University in 1980. He then studied at University of Texas at Austin and received his master's degree and Doctoral degrees in 1985 and 1987,respectively. [2]
Following his Ph.D. degree,Anderson joined Ohio University as an Assistant Professor in 1988. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1993,and to Professor in 2000. [1] In 2011 he joined Utah State University as a Professor of Sociology. He retired as Professor Emeritus in 2019. [2]
Anderson's research is primarily focused on social inequality,sociology of deviance,qualitative research methods,homelessness,and autoethnographic methods. He is recognized for articulating analytic autoethnography,a genre of autoethnography focused on extending theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena.
Anderson has collaborated with numerous researchers to promote and expand qualitative research methods. He and his coauthors have examined the information yield of fieldwork roles, [6] facilitative dynamics in research with deviant street populations, [7] distorting tendencies in research with the homeless, [8] strategies for linking of ethnographic research to sociological theory,and challenges in social service ethnographic research.
Anderson's contributions to qualitative research methods also include his co-authorship of the fourth edition of classic ethnographic methods textbook,entitled,Analyzing Social Settings:A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis,which was published in 2005. The book was reviewed as an "excellent" book that "introduced the reader to the three broad tasks of gathering,focusing and analyzing data with clarity and appropriate complexity." The reviewer also stated that "the direct and clear writing reminds one of a truly useful handbook in a favorite subject field". [9]
In 2006,Anderson introduced the term 'analytic autoethnography' as an alternative to the more widely known genre of 'evocative autoethnography'. Anderson presented five features of analytic autoethnography,including complete member researcher status,analytic reflexivity,narrative visibility of the researcher's self,dialogue with informants beyond the self,and a commitment to theoretical analysis. [10] While he has since acknowledged analytic features in some evocative autoethnography,Anderson continues to advocate for optimizing theoretical contributions of analytic autoethnography. Anderson has also explored the wide variety of leisure settings and activities that have been approached through auto-ethnographical research. [11]
Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining the behavior of the participants in a given social situation and understanding the group members' own interpretation of such behavior.
Participant observation is one type of data collection method by practitioner-scholars typically used in qualitative research and ethnography. This type of methodology is employed in many disciplines, particularly anthropology, sociology, communication studies, human geography, and social psychology. Its aim is to gain a close and intimate familiarity with a given group of individuals and their practices through an intensive involvement with people in their cultural environment, usually over an extended period of time.
Qualitative research is a type of research that aims to gather and analyse non-numerical (descriptive) data in order to gain an understanding of individuals' social reality, including understanding their attitudes, beliefs, and motivation. This type of research typically involves in-depth interviews, focus groups, or observations in order to collect data that is rich in detail and context. Qualitative research is often used to explore complex phenomena or to gain insight into people's experiences and perspectives on a particular topic. It is particularly useful when researchers want to understand the meaning that people attach to their experiences or when they want to uncover the underlying reasons for people's behavior. Qualitative methods include ethnography, grounded theory, discourse analysis, and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Qualitative research methods have been used in sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, communication studies, social work, folklore, educational research, information science and software engineering research.
Autoethnography is a form of ethnographic research in which a researcher connects personal experiences to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. It is considered a form of qualitative and/or arts-based research.
Grounded theory is a systematic methodology that has been largely applied to qualitative research conducted by social scientists. The methodology involves the construction of hypotheses and theories through the collecting and analysis of data. Grounded theory involves the application of inductive reasoning. The methodology contrasts with the hypothetico-deductive model used in traditional scientific research.
Narrative inquiry or narrative analysis emerged as a discipline from within the broader field of qualitative research in the early 20th century, as evidence exists that this method was used in psychology and sociology. Narrative inquiry uses field texts, such as stories, autobiography, journals, field notes, letters, conversations, interviews, family stories, photos, and life experience, as the units of analysis to research and understand the way people create meaning in their lives as narratives.
Visual sociology is an area of sociology concerned with the visual dimensions of social life.
James P. Spradley (1933–1982) was a social scientist and a professor of anthropology at Macalester College. Spradley wrote or edited 20 books on ethnography and qualitative research including The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society (1972), Deaf Like Me (1979), The Ethnographic Interview (1979), and Participant Observation (1980).
Online ethnography is an online research method that adapts ethnographic methods to the study of the communities and cultures created through computer-mediated social interaction. As modifications of the term ethnography, cyber-ethnography, online ethnography and virtual ethnography designate particular variations regarding the conduct of online fieldwork that adapts ethnographic methodology. There is no canonical approach to cyber-ethnography that prescribes how ethnography is adapted to the online setting. Instead individual researchers are left to specify their own adaptations. Netnography is another form of online ethnography or cyber-ethnography with more specific sets of guidelines and rules, and a common multidisciplinary base of literature and scholars. This article is not about a particular neologism, but the general application of ethnographic methods to online fieldwork as practiced by anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars.
Field research, field studies, or fieldwork is the collection of raw data outside a laboratory, library, or workplace setting. The approaches and methods used in field research vary across disciplines. For example, biologists who conduct field research may simply observe animals interacting with their environments, whereas social scientists conducting field research may interview or observe people in their natural environments to learn their languages, folklore, and social structures.
Critical ethnography applies a critical theory based approach to ethnography. It focuses on the implicit values expressed within ethnographic studies and, therefore, on the unacknowledged biases that may result from such implicit values. It has been called critical theory in practice. In the spirit of critical theory, this approach seeks to determine symbolic mechanisms, to extract ideology from action, and to understand the cognition and behaviour of research subjects within historical, cultural, and social frameworks.
Institutional ethnography (IE) is an alternative approach of studying and understanding the social. IE has been described as an alternative philosophical paradigm, sociology, or (qualitative) research method. IE explores the social relations that structure people's everyday lives, specifically by looking at the ways that people interact with one another in the context of social institutions and understanding how those interactions are institutionalized. IE is best understood as an ethnography of interactions which have been institutionalized, rather than an ethnography of specific companies, organizations or employment sectors, which would be considered industrial sociology or the sociology of work. For the institutional ethnographer, ordinary daily activity becomes the site for an investigation of social organization. IE was first developed by Dorothy E. Smith as a Marxist feminist sociology "for women, for people"; and is now used by researchers in social sciences, education, nursing, human services and policy research as a method for mapping the translocal relations that coordinate people's activities within institutions.
Jaber Fandy "Jay" Gubrium is an American sociologist and social psychologist. His research perspective is the narrative ethnography of caregiving, especially care constructed in organizational context. He is a professor emeritus in the University of Missouri Department of Sociology.
Video ethnography is the video recording of the stream of activity of subjects in their natural setting, in order to experience, interpret, and represent culture and society. Ethnographic video, in contrast to ethnographic film, cannot be used independently of other ethnographic methods, but rather as part of the process of creation and representation of societal, cultural, and individual knowledge. It is commonly used in the fields of visual anthropology, visual sociology, visual ethnography and cultural studies. Uses of video in ethnography include the recording of certain processes and activities, visual note-taking, and ethnographic diary-keeping.
Netnography is a specific type of qualitative social media research. It adapts the methods of ethnography to understand social interaction in contemporary digital communications contexts. Netnography is a specific set of research practices related to data collection, analysis, research ethics, and representation, rooted in participant observation. In netnography, a significant amount of the data originates in and manifests through the digital traces of naturally occurring public conversations recorded by contemporary communications networks. Netnography uses these conversations as data. It is an interpretive research method that adapts the traditional, in-person participant observation techniques of anthropology to the study of interactions and experiences manifesting through digital communications.
David A. Snow is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine.
John Franklin Lofland is an American sociologist best known for his studies of the peace movement and for his first book, Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of Faith, which was based on field work among a group of Unification Church members in California in the 1960s. It is considered to be one of the most important and widely cited studies of the process of religious conversion, and one of the first modern sociological studies of a new religious movement.
Annette Markham is an American academic, Chair Professor of Media Literacy and Public Engagement at Utrecht University, Adjunct Professor at RMIT University in Melbourne, and Adjunct Professor of Information Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is Director of RMIT's Digital Ethnography Research Centre. She has served on the executive committee of the Association of Internet Researchers since 2013. She publishes research in the area of Internet studies, digital identity, social interaction, innovative qualitative methods for social research, and Internet research ethics.
Kathleen Marian Charmaz was the developer of constructivist grounded theory, a major research method in qualitative research internationally and across many disciplines and professions. She was professor emerita of sociology at Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California, and former director of its Faculty Writing Program. Charmaz’s background was in occupational therapy and sociology. Charmaz’s areas of expertise included grounded theory, symbolic interactionism, chronicity, death and dying, qualitative health research, scholarly writing, sociological theory, social psychology, research methods, health and medicine, aging, sociology of emotions, and the body.
Video Data Analysis (VDA) is a curated multi-disciplinary collection of tools, techniques, and quality criteria intended for analyzing the content of visuals to study driving dynamics of social behavior and events in real-life settings. It often uses visual data in combination with other data types. VDA is employed across the social sciences such as sociology, psychology, criminology, business research, and education research.
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