An Ethnographic Study on Social Diversity Among College Students

Running head: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY 1
An ethnographic study on the level of social diversity among college students
Student’s Name
University

AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY 2
An ethnographic study on the level of social diversity among college students
Shaffir, Dietz, & Stebbins (1994), article views field research as an ongoing process that
is dynamic and interactive where the researcher seeks to identify the different dimensions of
experience in collecting relevant information for a research study. Thus the practitioner has to
overcome the barriers of entry that are presented in different situations of research. To overcome
this barrier the researcher has to develop familiarity with the context as a way of addressing these
challenges. When addressing the barriers, cultural and ascriptive differences between the
researcher and the study population can define or constrain the outcome of the study. this means
that ethnographers have to be careful with factors that influence the level of diversity among
college students. Factors that influence ethnographic research are gatekeepers, research bargains,
learning the ropes research roles, research bargains, the distance that the researcher maintains
with the subjects and even the way relationships are maintained in the study. since diversity is a
broad concept, the researcher requires to understand the cultural and social measures of diversity
that define the relationships that people form while at the same time stratify these relationships
along cultural lines.
Gatekeepers are factors or people that can influence access to the research participants or
settings. These may call for the need to seek permission before studying the participants thus
limiting the nature of the research and the data that is gathered. Research bargains are used to
assist the ethnographer gain access to the research settings which leads to the collection of
adequate data for the research study. On the other hand, learning ropes are relevant in the
analysis of research settings and outcomes that the researcher encounters. Since ethnography
applies participative or non-participative observation, it is important to understand how to collect
the information from the participants without being biased. Thus it is important to ensure that

AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY 3
bias is avoided as a way of ensuring that the researcher is not negative to the research while
participating in the study.
Proposal
Mills, Durepos, & Wiebe (2010) argue that non-participant observation is a form of
ethnographic study where the researcher studies the participants in their own settings with their
permission but without active participation in their activities. Thus to get more insights about the
study, the researcher has to study the subjects in similar settings for some time to be able to
unearth the issues that revolve around the study topic. This method offers better outcomes since
it allows the ethnographer to avoid being negative and biased towards the subjects during
participant observation process (Najafi, Roudsari, Ebrahimipour, & Bahri, 2016). Further, it
allows the researcher to gather all the information since by being non-participant, then the
quality of the finding can be higher. Thus the researcher is able to analyze situations before
drawing conclusive judgments by comparing them with other situations that have been analyzed
before.
This study will apply grounded theory in studying the respondents since it allows a
systematic indictive process to conduct qualitative research allowing the researcher to prioritize
the phenomenon rather than settings in which they are studied. This means that the theory offers
better advantages to the researcher through providing explicit and sequential strategies and at the
same time offer (El-Hussein, Hirst, Salyers, & Osuji, 2014). This theory offers distinctive
qualitative guidelines that make it easy for the researcher to collect the required data. Through
ethnographic study, the theory allows the researcher to qualitatively approach the study and
generate the required data that can be used to draw conclusions for the study.