Experimental Ethnography: The Marriage of Qualitative and Quantitative Research

Lawrence W. Sherman and Heather Strang
Additional contact information
Lawrence W. Sherman: American Academy of Political and Social Science, Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania
Heather Strang: Centre for Restorative Justice at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2004, vol. 595, issue 1, 204-222

Abstract: Experimental and ethnographic research methods are often described as mutually exclusive. This article suggests how they could be combined in the method of “experimental ethnography.†Building ethnographic methods into the separate branches of randomized controlled trials could substantially increase the range of conclusions that can be produced by experimental research designs, as well as by ethnographic methods. Experimental designs offer greater internal validity for learning what the effects of a social program are, and ethnographic methods offer greater insight into why the effects were produced. The prospects for such integration depend on the capacity of two different communities within social science to work together for the common goal of discovering truth.

Keywords: randomized controlled trials; restorative justice; sampling; experimental research designs; quantitative; qualitative (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716204267481 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:595:y:2004:i:1:p:204-222

DOI: 10.1177/0002716204267481

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().