Describe ethnography, noting its strengths and limitations

What will be an ideal response?

Ethnography is a method borrowed from the field of anthropology. Like the clinical method, ethnographic research is a descriptive, qualitative technique. But instead of aiming to understand a single individual, it is directed at understanding a culture or a distinct social group through participant observation. Typically, the researcher spends months and sometimes years in the cultural community, participating in its daily life. By taking extensive field notes, the investigator tries to capture the culture's unique values and social processes. The strength of the ethnographic method is that entering into close contact with a social group allows researchers to understand the beliefs and behaviors of its members in a way that is not possible with an observational visit, interview, or questionnaire. There are two limitations of ethnographic research. First, the findings may be biased by investigators' cultural values and theoretical commitments, which sometimes lead them to observe selectively or misinterpret what they see. Second, the findings cannot be assumed to generalize beyond the people and settings in which the research was conducted.