Response to Sarah Pink and Jennie Morgan – Salomon Ruiz

There is a common conception about ethnography as a discipline that only involves long research. Nonetheless, short-term ethnography is more and more being used, where people use diverse methods to analyze something in a shorter period of time, but often with more intensity in order to compensate for the shorter time. However, there are many people who criticizes short term ethnography as superficial,  as it might not derive in the same conclusions as long term research because it is less extensive.  The authors of this article are not trying to define the characteristics or methods used in short-term ethnography, but rather try to argue short-term ethnography can be as good as long-term  ethnography.  They conducted a research to try to understand the everyday work of healthcare professionals. In this research both Pink and Morgan were physically involved as they went to the sites to interview and record people working there. This can be opposite to long term ethnography, where researchers observe for longer time withouth getting involved too much. A possible disadvantage I find in this type of research is that they were very intrusive so people working in these places might have described what they do innaccurately or lied about their emotions.  The same could happen when they started to record them as they might have changed their behaviour after knowing they were being recorded.  An interesting remark made by the authors is the use of visuals in short-term ethnography because even though they migh record something for a short period of time, ethnographers can reproduce this recording multiple times in order to anaylze it in detail which can have similar results than long-term ethnography.  I think short-term ethnography is not a better but different technique and I think depending on what you are researching about, it might be more useful than using long term ethnography.  

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