''Interrogating Ethnography: Why Evidence Matters'' is a 2017 book by

Steven Lubet Steven Lubet is a legal scholar and author. Lubet is the Edna B. and Ednyfed H. Williams Memorial Professor of Law at Northwestern University. Lubet has been noted for his commentary on controversial issues such as the appointment of scholar Stev ...

Northwestern University Law School Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law is the law school of Northwestern University, a Private university, private research university. It is located on the university's Chicago campus. Northwestern Law has been ranked among the top 14, ...

, critiquing methods used in the discipline of

ethnography Ethnography (from Greek ''ethnos'' "folk, people, nation" and ''grapho'' "I write") is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject o ...

. Writing in ''

Contexts ''Contexts'': ''Understanding People in their Social Worlds'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal and an official publication of the American Sociological Association. It is designed to be a more accessible source of sociological ideas ...

'', Syid Ali of

Long Island University Long Island University (LIU) is a private university with two main campuses, LIU Post and LIU Brooklyn, in the U.S. state of New York. It offers more than 500 academic programs at its main campuses, online, and at multiple non-residential. LIU ...

called it "an essential critique of the most public-facing product sociology has to offer." ''Interrogating Ethnography'', which criticizes ethnographers for the practice of changing the name of the area they study, is part of the Replication crisis. But it is largely a critique of ethnography methodology when it relies on the narratives of interviewees with no attempt to verify assertions of fact. Lubet began the project of writing this book after reading and publishing a notable critique of the use of evidence

Alice Goffman Alice Goffman (born 1982) is an American sociologist, urban ethnographer, and author. She was Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin and Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Pomona College. Goffman wrote ''On th ...

's controversial 2014 book ''On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City," That critique led him to read and attempt to verify "more than 50 ethnographic monographs and an equivalent number of articles. Focusing on sociologists’ studies of American cities... (and checking) facts that could be documented — or not... by consulting experts and pulling public records." According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the book "has touched off a debate about what ethnographers might learn from legal scholars, and vice versa. The book's reception by ethnographers has been mixed.

References

Scientific method Criticism of science 2017 non-fiction books Oxford University Press books Ethnographic literature {{ethnography-book-stub