Negotiated validity in collaborative ethnography

Abstract

This article is an attempt to reconstruct and analyze the process of conducting a collaborative, interpretive study of the experience of Hurricane Andrew. Study data consist of accounts, including in-depth and focus-group interviews, collected in the months following the storm. The current inquiry addresses validity, with a focus on the impact of the investigators ’ biographies and theoretical orientations on the collection and analysis of qualitative data. We found that our interviews differed in terms of style, level of detail sought, and the degree of taken-for-granted knowledge shared by interviewer and respondent. In analysis, we found different aspects of the data interesting and, initially, produced different stories. These proved to be complementary, rather than contradictory. Collaboration made it possible to identify some of the biases we brought to the task and yielded a richer interpretation of the hurricane experience than either of us would have produced alone. When Hurricane Andrew tore through southern Dade County, Florida, 250,000 people were left homeless and everyday life was disrupted or de-stroyed for countless more. Within a few weeks, social scientists and others were in the field examining the impact of the hurricane. The focus of this article is an attempt to reconstruct and comment on the research process involved in producing an ethnography of Hurricane Andrew. The method chosen to analyze our research is a verstehen process similar to Cooley’s &dquo;sympathetic introspection,&dquo; Mills’s &dquo;sociological imagination,&dquo; and Ellis’s &dquo;systematic sociological introspection&dquo; (Ronai & Ellis, 1989). Despite rather different research backgrounds and interests, the two of us joined forces to do an interpretive study of the experience of Hurricane Andrew (Smith & Belgrave, 1993,1994). Either one of us could have done such a sturdy. However, neither of us alone could have done precisely the study we did or produce