Ethnographic Research in Psychology

Ethnography begins with the recognition that people are deeply situated in local worlds that shape their experience and behavior. Ethnographic research, which employs experiential immersion and participant observation in a cultural context, can reveal the embedding and elaboration of experience through engagement with social institutions and practices. Ethnographic methods are well-suited to explore the impact of culture and social context on behavior and experience. The social dynamics revealed by ethnographic research have profound implications for how we understand mental health and illness, challenging the reduction of human predicaments to discrete disorders without attention to meaning and context. While psychology and psychiatry frame mental health problems as located within the individual in mental or neurobiological processes, an ecosocial perspective shows the ways in which mental health problems are always embedded in and constituted by configurations of the social world that vary by culture and context. Individuals actively negotiate meaning and pursue plans of action that are both scaffolded and constrained by social structure. Lack of attention to these structures may lead researchers and clinicians to misattribute the causes of experience and behavior to individual states or traits rather than to the dynamics of social systems and the affordances of specific contexts. Ethnographic research can inform a cultural–ecosocial approach to research, theory, and practice in mental health.