An Ethnographic Approach to the Study of School Administrators

The ethnographer's task is the selective recording of human behavior in order to construct explanations of that behavior in cultural terms. The standard ethnography thus provides an account of the way of life of some special human process (say, law or more narrowly, divorce) or of some particular group of people, such as the Tikopia or the Children of Sanchez. My approach in this paper is ethnographic in that the purpose of the research project is to describe and analyze in cultural terms the behavior of one elementary school principal and the behavior of those who interact with him, such as teachers, pupils, spouse and family, and other principals.