Welcome to Unit 3, the virtual ethnography, our final essay for the semester. In general, ethnographic research is the study of people and their culture by way of observation from within specific communities or environments. In a virtual ethnography, the community is online, as in Reddit, and the affordances of the online environment may influence or structure members and their culture and how members interact with each other. In this assignment, you’re tasked with critically observing this community, which you’ve already begun to do with your field notes, which constitutes your primary research for the essay. This assignment serves as an introduction to qualitative research and gathering and interpreting primary research like this, and it is designed to help you effectively integrate primary and secondary research into your writing. Through this work, you’ll learn to trust yourselves as thinkers, writers and researchers exploring and interpreting what you notice in your field work, instead of deferring to what has already been said on the topic. So while you’ll draw on secondary research to further explore your primary research, your starting point is going to be what you observe, or what you’ve put down in your field notes.

Unlike our previous assignments, this essay has two distinct steps: primary research, in the form of field notes, and secondary research, or library research. In the first stage, you’ll produce and reflect on collected notes that consider behavioral dynamics in the community, and you’ll identify patterns that yield a controlling idea or a claim that will steer further secondary research. In these notes, you’ll tell what took place in each set of interactions or thread through rich detailed description, and begin to consider the significance of these moments, interactions, exchanges, events, consequences associated with what transpired, and the potential for future research. You’ll be putting all this together as we move towards formulating our claims for Phase 1. And then, in the second stage, you’ll conduct secondary research. This is where you’ll develop or refine your controlling idea and synthesize scholarship that develops or explores your controlling idea, not just relevant topics. Your Phase 1 claim will generally encapsulate whatever your initial hypothesis was, whatever you interpreted out of the patterns you noticed in your field work. Your secondary research will primarily consist of journal articles or articles in reputable mass media publications that express a different aspect of your claim. You’ll use this scholarship to support your position or the argument you’re making, not just by mimicking what you’re saying, but by expanding on it, exploring it, and challenging it.

As a social science genre, your ethnographic research paper will use subheadings, in a pattern called IMRAD, for Introduction, Method, Results, Analysis and Discussion. This is meant to help set you up for ENG 201 down the road, and also any other forms of social science research you may encounter. This format is going to be key for you if you’re planning on a social science profession. So here’s a breakdown of what you should put in each section. The Introduction section is where you tell us briefly about the community, whatever background information readers need to know in order to understand your claim. Your controlling idea will also go here. In your Methods section, you’ll tell us briefly how the study was done: mainly, you’ll explain how you did non-participant observation, how long you spent observing the space, how many threads you observed, how your approach might have affected the data you collected. In your Results section, you’ll record the parts of your primary research—your field notes—that specifically relate to your claim and to the relevant central themes of the paper you’re trying to write. In other words, don’t list every single thing you noted, just the things the reader needs to know in order to see how you arrived at your claim before the secondary research part. Then in your Analysis section, you’ll bring in secondary research. You’ll begin to identify the patterns that you noticed in your primary research that you just listed in the Results section, and you’ll explain how those patterns led you to your claim based on your own interpretation of the data. You’ll then explore that by using secondary research to indicate what other writers have thought about aspects of your controlling idea. For instance, perhaps a scholar makes a claim about a similar social dynamic in an offline space; perhaps a scholar makes a claim about a different social dynamic in a different online space; in each of these cases, there’s enough similarity that you could apply it to your paper while accounting for the differences as well. You’ll need 2-3 sources, and it might be helpful for you to meet with me as you work on reading, understanding, summarizing, and applying those sources. Finally, your Discussion section is the last section and it operates like a conclusion. This is where you’ll open it up: instead of summarizing everything you’ve said, which we’re trying to get away from, you’ll say, “What is the significance of my findings? What new knowledge does this provide to the field?” This is kind of like the “so what? who cares?” question that we’ve been trying to address in all of our papers so far.

In ethnographic writing, you have to find a balance between primary and secondary sources so you’re not simply presenting your observations but also analyzing them to make and explore claims about them. Through this process, you’ll engage with voices in the dialogue of the discipline by doing secondary research, and you’ll contribute to the conversation in meaningful ways.

While you can use the Writing Center at any point of the brainstorming and writing process, in past semesters, writers working on this assignment have found it useful to have sessions about selecting a focus for these observations; using sources to critically examine the data they’ve collected, and ensuring that they’re analyzing the data rather than simply presenting it. The learning requirements and outcomes for this essay are that it’s meant to demonstrate an understanding of qualitative ethnographic research, meaning you must conduct primary and secondary research, you must synthesize your primary and secondary research, and you must apply rhetorical strategies and research methods. I’ll be looking at how you articulate a complex controlling idea, especially given that we’ve been practicing that already, and at how you implement a clear organizational pattern and structure using subheadings. I’ll be looking for the inclusion of observations as evidence—and again, only the aspects of observations that relate to the central themes of your paper. I’ll be looking for the validity of the sources you choose and how you incorporate them, as well as a correct Works Cited page.

So, for Phase 1 of this essay, your draft should include the Introduction, Methods, and Results sections. I’m trying to divide this paper up based on what is easiest to do first, as we’ve already done this through prewriting exercises and homework assignments. Phase 2 will be those sections plus the rest of them: namely, the Analysis and Discussion sections. By the time that we start working on Phase 2, we’ll have done prewriting exercises to practice appropriately integrating sources into our work. In both phases of drafting, you’ll include your usual post-workshop reflective notes and will incorporate feedback from peer review and from conferences with me.

So this more or less sums up what we’ll be doing in Unit 3. As always, we can discuss any questions that you have about this assignment in our next live session.