Cultural ethnography interview

I am interviewing fraternity. I need to write a positive cultural ethnography paper based on the interview. What are some good questions to ask?

Hi Janman74:

What kind of fraternity are you interviewing? Are you interviewing one member? Multiple members? Will you be doing participant observation (living and/or shadowing them)? etc... How long is the interview?

The major thing to consider when writing an ethnography paper is to create OPEN ENDED questions that don't LEAD the interviewee to particular answers or that aren't yes or no answers. Use words and phrases like:

Describe
Tell me about
Tell me a story about a time when
That's interesting, can you elaborate on that?
Tell me more about ...
Cool, can you give me an example of ...

You ideally want the members of the fraternity to engage in story-telling vs. question answering. You want to encourage them to tell you about their "culture" without interruption from you as much as possible. So the more descriptive you can get them to be in their own language the better. The more you can encourage them to tell you stories in detail, the better.

I don't want to give you actual questions because I feel like that's likely a large part of the assignment but these guidelines should help you to formulate some great ones on your own. Then, if you have other questions, please feel free to re-visit this post and I'll happily take a look.

Good luck to you! EF_Season

I think that you could interview the fraternity brothers about what they know about their family history. As a participant on Genie, an ancestry website, I have seen the following as questions you would want to know: when did your family come to America? what was the make-up, of the first family here-married? how many children? what was there profession? what town, and country did they come from? what was the reason for emigrating?

If you can find out any, or all of these answers, I believe you would have a good paper.

Hope that helps!