Drug use, AIDS, and ethnography: advanced ethnographic research methods exploring the HIV epidemic

This chapter identifies and explores a small number of recently developed advanced ethnographic research methods. There are other techniques that provide an excellent adjunct to standard prevention research efforts, as well. These include the cultural models approach (Price 1987; Quinn and Holland 1987), anthropological decision modeling (Gladwin 1980, 1989; Plattner 1984; Young 1980), the advances in focus group techniques (Morgan 1989), the processes for using ethnographic interviews to create culturally competent survey questionnaires (Converse and Presser 1986), and the uses of systematic direct observations of public behavior. Some of these issues are explored in the references cited above, as well as in other recent articles (e.g., Trotter 1991; Trotter et al. 1995). The number of tools available to ethnographers is growing rapidly, and they promise to greatly increase the capacity to make important contributions to reducing the spread of HIV in human populations.