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Friday, 10 March 2023

Emic and etic approaches to research

Many of us in the career field are drawn to the relational side of research, which tends to use the more qualitative approaches. However, we also need to understand the difference and the different legitimacies between 'etic' and the 'emic' methods within the qualitative field. Etic and emic are anthropological terms, and mean either an outsider perspective (etic), or an insider perspective (emic) (Peters, 2015). It is easy to remember which is which: just remember that if something becomes endemic, it is 'normalised' within a population or cultural group. Emic is not without. Etic is without.

To clarify origin and meaning, the SAGE dictionary of sociology defines these terms as:

"EMIC AND ETIC: A distinction fashionable in the late 1970s, this pair comes from linguistics where ‘phonemic’ refers to a speaker’s own recognition of patterns of sound, whereas ‘phonetic’ refers to the professional observer’s modelling and measurement of differences in sound. By extension, ‘emic’ came to mean ‘internal’ or ‘indigenous’ and etic ‘external’. An emic approach to analysis involves describing a situation or pattern of behaviour from the standpoint of those involved in it while an etic one is based on the external observer’s accounts. Often the distinction is used for moral purposes; the emic or indigenous being preferred to the etic. In practice the distinction is hard to maintain because in most social settings there are major differences within the group and major similarities between some insiders and some outsiders" (Bruce & Yearley, 2006, pp. 83-84).

For example: 

Etic: an outsider’s perception of Māori appointment barriers as Iwi representatives on boards. This is a study of the group from outside the group. It is arms-length; possibly more objective. 

Emic: Māori appointee perception of appointment barriers for Iwi representatives to boards, usually undertaken by a Māori researcher who experienced the Iwi representative appointment process. This may be a compassionate study of lived experience. The researcher is also researched. Emic approaches are used in field and ethnography research (Andrews et al., 2012). 

As we can see by the examples above, there are opportunities for a mixed methods approach: where while the participants may come from 'within', the researcher is partly from 'without' (Bruce & Yearley, 2006): a swimming coach could explore experiences of high performance swimmers without having been an elite athlete themselves, but understanding much of the elite athlete context. Because of the likelihood of mixed approaches - because life is not tidy - we must remember that, as the researcher, it is our job to "decode the data gathered, seeking to join emic observations and etic explanations" (Albuquerque et al., 2014, p. 438). 

Another way to consider this pair is as "etic (or universal) rather than the idiosyncratic emic" (Trimble et al., 1983, p. 259). I like this idea of idiosyncrasy and universality: I find that enlightening. Within, idiosyncratic, experienced, indigenous; versus without, universal, global, observed (Arthur & McMahon, 2005).

We can be aware of the within and without but not let it take over our lives.


Sam

References:

Albuquerque, U. P., da Cunha, L. V. F. C., De Lucena, R. F. P., & Alves, R. R. N. (Eds.). (2014). Methods and Techniques in Ethnobiology and Ethnoecology. Springer.

Andrews, R., Borg, E., Davis, S. B., Domingo, M., & England, J. (Eds.). (2012). The SAGE Handbook of Digital Dissertations and Theses. SAGE Publications Ltd.

Arthur, N., & McMahon, M. (2005). Multicultural career counseling: Theoretical applications of the systems theory framework. The Career Development Quarterly, 53(3), 208-222. ttps://doi.org/10.1002/j.2161-0045.2005.tb00991.x

Bruce, S. & Yearley, S. (2006). The SAGE Dictionary of Sociology. SAGE Publications Ltd.

Peters, B. (2015). Qualitative Methods in Monitoring and Evaluation: The Emic and the Etic: Their Importance to Qualitative Evaluators. American University. https://programs.online.american.edu/msme/masters-in-measurement-and-evaluation/resources/emic-and-etic

Trimble, J. E., Lonner, W. J., & Boucher, J. D. (1983). Stalking the wily emic: Alternatives to cross-cultural measurement. In S. H. Irvine, J. W. Berry (Eds.), Human Assessment and Cultural Factors (pp. 259-273). Plenum.

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