James Spradley

James P. Spradley (1933–1982) was a social scientist and a professor of anthropology at Macalester College. Spradley wrote or edited 20 books on ethnography and qualitative research including The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society (1972), Deaf Like Me (1979), The Ethnographic Interview (1979), and Participant Observation (1980).

Life and career

Spradley earned his PhD in anthropology from the University of Washington in 1967. His dissertation, which was supervised by Melville Jacobs, was entitled James Sewed: A Social, Cultural and Psychological Analysis of a Bicultural Innovator.

Spradley joined the faculty at Macalester College in 1969 on the behest of the college's anthropology professor, Dave McCurdy, with whom he would later collaborate on a number of academic book projects. Spradley died of leukemia in 1982.

Work

Spradley was a major figure in the development of the "new ethnography" which saw every individual as a carrier of the culture rather than simply looking to the outputs of the great artists of the time. Spradley argued that ethnography differed from other deductive types of social research in that the five steps of ethnographic research—selecting a problem, collecting data, analyzing data, formulating hypotheses, and writing—all happen simultaneously.

Much of Spradley's work was guided by his interest in "ethnographic semantics", which sought to apply "explicitly 'scientific' analytical frameworks to the analysis of cultural phenomena". In The Ethnographic Interview, Spradley describes four types of ethnographic analysis that basically build on each other.