Analytic Ethnography

The research strategy sometimes termed analytic ethnography has been a prominent—or even the dominant—form of qualitative inquiry for some decades. Lacking challenge by other qualitative approaches, however, there has been little need to articulate it as a distinctive strategy of qualitative research. The approach having now been challenged, it has become necessary clearly to adduce its defining features as a step in the larger task of undertaking accurate and systematic comparisons of diverse qualitative research strategies. I here attempt this first step by delineating seven features or tendencies that, in composite, constitute analytic ethnography. Following this articulation, I suggest some of analytic ethnography's successes and failures as a strategy of social research and I speculate about its future.