Ethnography: research method or philosophy?

From pioneering beginnings at the Chicago School of Sociology in the 20s and 30s, ethnography (as described in other articles in this issue) has developed into an important methodology that is widely used by social scientists ( 1 ). It was from the 30s a split began to appear between ethnography as practised by social scientists, and ethnographic methods used by anthropologists. Anthropology continued to study the culture of races, while social scientists used the same methods to look at culture on a social level. Sociologists realised that the methodology of ethnography was just as appropriate to the description of everyday Western cultures as it was to that of more distant cultures.