Ethnography is defined as the systematic study of people and cultures. It is the process of collecting ethnographic interviews in order to provide us with a window into the lives and experiences of others. To use the words of Weiss’ Learning from Strangers, “interviewing rescues events that would otherwise be lost. The celebrations and sorrows of people not in the news, their triumphs and failures, ordinarily leave no record except in their memories.” To conduct ethnography is to ensure that this knowledge doesn’t die with the people who were primary witnesses, allowing us to gain a better understanding of what life is like in a given place and time.

My personal experience with ethnography for the purposes of this class will be twofold. I have recently interviewed my father, Dr. Mark Hite, as a first attempt at conducting ethnographic interviewing. I chose to ask him questions about his experiences with medical service in the Dominican Republic, something that is relevant to myself and the rest of the CCESP clinical health (CH) team, since we will be serving as part of a similar medical outreach program in Nicaragua. This serves as practice for my time in Nicaragua, where I’ll be helping the CH team to collect information on patients there. In particular, I will be collecting information on maternal mental health from women at the casa materna as part of my final project alongside my group members, Valentina Sedlacek and Kate Herrington. Our goal is to get an understanding of the emotional experience of a woman in Nicaragua as she finds out she is pregnant, goes through the process of pregnancy and birth, and then becomes a mother. We believe that by collecting this information and discussing emotion with women in the process, we can spark a conversation about maternal mental health that will hopefully continue after we’ve gone.

Some concerns for ethnographic research include striking a balance between structured questioning and free response, getting answers without leading participants in any one direction with their responses, asking questions without making interviewees uncomfortable, respecting the privacy of participants, and asking questions without ever questioning the integrity or experience of the person being interviewed. The goal of ethnography is to get an honest, unbiased, and holistic view of the interviewee and their experiences with the subject about which they are being interviewed. The interview needs to be focused so that all necessary information is collected in a reasonable time frame, but the questions need to be open-ended enough that the participant can share their thoughts and experiences in an authentic way. The interviewee also needs to feel able to share honestly without feeling pressured or pushed to respond in any given way. These considerations are especially salient in the case of the Nicaragua interviews, where language barriers and cultural differences make it even more important that all questions asked are carefully considered and vetted by people with experience in the regional culture before they are asked in an interview setting.

My interview with my father was my first time conducting this sort of interviewing process. The final recording, as well as some transcription of the questions asked and responses given, has its own page on this site, but the process of the interview is something I’d like to draw attention to here. I tried to use Weiss’ work as a guide for establishing this first interview, choosing an appropriate person to interview for the purposes of the project, developing appropriate questions, asking for consent for the interview itself as well as my recording of the conversation, easing into the conversation, and then working with the participant collaboratively to get the information I was looking for.

My prompt for the interview was to choose someone with insight into the issues explored in LACS 20, so I decided to interview someone with experience working in medical service abroad. My father was a simple choice because it was easy to get in touch with him, I knew he would likely agree to it, and I felt very comfortable having a structured conversation with him. My next step was to determine how I would get at his experience with medical service by drawing up a list of questions. I decided to focus my questioning on three themes: his positive experiences with service abroad, his negative experiences with service abroad, and his experience of the impact that his trip had on the community. My resulting list of questions was as follows:

1. Can you describe the role of the service trip in the community?
2. Can you describe your role within the service trip?
3. In what ways was the trip difficult?
4. In what ways with the trip rewarding?
5. What do you think was the short-term and long-term impact of this trip?
6. Do you feel that this trip was immersive? Do you feel that you learned about the community that you visited?
7. Is given the chance, would you do it again?

I felt that this would give me a comprehensive picture of his experience and his understanding of the experience of the members of the community that he interacted with. Having drawn up this list, I sat down to a Skype interview with him, where I made it clear that I would be recording the conversation and using it on this public website as a project for my class. We then went through the questions, starting by discussing the class that I would be using this interview for and then transitioning into a more structured interview format. We made it through all of my questions with pauses for followup questions that kept the interview feeling conversational, and at the end, I had all of the information I had originally wanted as well as some good followup info.

Looking forward to my interviews in Nicaragua, I think that this mini oral history with my father served as good practice. I definitely learned the importance of having a ready-made last of questions and staying on task in order to stay within the time frame. I have a few concerns in moving forward towards interviews outside the U.S., namely involving my imperfect Spanish skills and potential cultural barriers to talking about mental health. Still, with the help of Dartmouth faculty and medical professionals who have experience in the area and the input of locals like Hugo and Eva from Bridges to Community, I feel that my group’s questions will be ready to go when we arrive at the casa materna so that we can gain a better understanding of the emotional experience of pregnancy and motherhood from the perspective of rural Nicaraguan women.