How RAD is Ethnography? Pretty RAD!

So, bad jokes in the title aside, Haswell’s 2005 article “NCTE/CCCC’s Recent War on Scholarship” made me wonder whether ethnography as we’ve defined it my methods class is more or less RAD (Replicable, Aggregable, and Data Supported) than a mixed methods approach. I think the most important distinction that Haswell makes (in terms of evaluating the RAD-ness of a certain piece) is this: a particular study works within Haswell’s framework when practices, people, etc. are “reported so precisely that other people at other institutions could conduct similar surveys and be able to compare data meaningful” (201). So, I started by asking the wrong question. A standard, methodologically pure ethnographic study can easily be a RAD study, just as a quantitative or mixed methods study could not be a RAD study.

Despite what Haswell considers a dearth  of RAD scholarship in Rhet/Comp’s major publications, Southern Illinois’ Studies in Writing & Rhetoric series, of which Lee Ann Carroll’s Rehearsing New Roles and Katherine Sohn’s Women of Appalachia  are apart, seem to attempt to fill this hole with research that is certainly context and description rich even if it isn’t technically RAD.

Carroll’s work in particular offers a depth of context and detail (including the actual name of the university – Pepperdine—at which she did her research) that is supposed to be a hallmark of ethnographic research but is rarer than I had had imagined it would be.  Carroll’s reliance on the voices of her informant/participants contributes to the sense that she’s offering us a depth of description that makes her research more meaningful.

One last question: How are important, in terms of Haswell’s attention to repeatable and critqueable research, is the fact that studies are increasingly focused  on longitudinal work? Carroll’s decision to follow the students for 4 years and pay attention differences instead of improvements seems like an important one and one that enhances the importance of her study. Not only do we know what happened during FYC, but we know what happened after.