Breaking down the question
The directive is to "bring out the significance" of ethnography — that is, to explain what ethnography contributes to social research that other methods cannot, and why it matters. This is an evaluative task, not merely a descriptive one. Defining ethnography is the starting point; the marks lie in demonstrating its distinctive value.
Significance is best shown comparatively. Ethnography's worth stands out against the limits of survey and statistical methods: where the questionnaire captures breadth and measurable regularities, ethnography captures depth, meaning and context. The examiner wants you to articulate this contrast and to connect ethnography to the broader interpretive tradition in sociology, which holds that social life must be understood from the standpoint of those who live it.
At 20 marks a balanced answer also acknowledges limitations — problems of representativeness, subjectivity, ethics and time — since a genuine assessment of significance weighs strengths against costs rather than offering uncritical praise.
How to approach it
Begin by defining ethnography as the intensive, first-hand study of a social group in its natural setting, typically through prolonged participant observation, aiming to describe the group's way of life from the insider's point of view.
Then set out its significance point by point: access to meaning and the actor's perspective, the capacity for thick description, sensitivity to context and process, the ability to discover the unexpected, and its value for studying groups closed to formal methods. Anchor these in the interpretive tradition and in classic fieldwork. Our notes on data-collection techniques place participant observation within the wider toolkit.
Follow with a fair account of the limitations, then conclude that ethnography's significance lies in its unrivalled depth and its complementarity with quantitative methods rather than its replacing them.
Model answer
Ethnography is the intensive, first-hand study of a community or group in its own natural setting, carried out over an extended period, usually through participant observation supplemented by informal interviewing and the collection of documents. Its aim is to produce a rounded account of a way of life as it is understood by the people who live it. From Malinowski's fieldwork among the Trobriand Islanders onward, it has been the signature method of social anthropology and a central resource for qualitative sociology.
Its first and greatest significance is access to meaning. Human conduct is not simply behaviour to be counted but action invested with meaning by those who perform it. By living alongside people, sharing their routines and learning their categories, the ethnographer grasps the actor's point of view — the emic perspective — in a way no questionnaire can reach. This aligns ethnography with the interpretive tradition and with the ideal of understanding social life from within rather than measuring it from outside.
A second strength is thick description, Clifford Geertz's term for interpretation that renders not just what people do but what their doing means to them within a web of shared significance. A wink, to use his example, is physically identical to a blink; only contextual understanding tells them apart. Ethnography is uniquely equipped to supply that context, because the researcher is present as meanings are produced and negotiated in real situations.
Third, ethnography is sensitive to context and process. Social phenomena unfold over time and depend on setting; the method captures how relationships develop, how norms are enacted and sometimes breached, and how the routine texture of everyday life hangs together. It is also strong at discovery: because it does not impose fixed categories in advance, it can reveal practices, meanings and problems the researcher never anticipated, generating fresh hypotheses and concepts. This makes it especially valuable for studying groups that formal methods cannot easily reach — deviant subcultures, closed communities, or informal worlds where people would not respond candidly to a survey.
These strengths carry real costs, and a fair assessment must weigh them. Because studies are small and settings specific, ethnographic findings are difficult to generalise and cannot establish statistical regularities across a population. The method is heavily dependent on the researcher, raising concerns about subjectivity, selective perception and the effect of the observer's presence on those observed. It is time-consuming and demanding, and it raises acute ethical questions about consent, deception and the exposure of private lives, particularly in covert work. Reflexivity — the researcher's honest scrutiny of their own influence on the data — is the discipline's principal response to these worries.
Taken together, the significance of ethnography is that it secures depth, meaning and contextual understanding that quantitative methods cannot furnish, while those methods in turn secure the breadth and representativeness that ethnography lacks. Its true value in social research therefore lies as much in complementarity as in independence: used alongside surveys and statistics, it grounds abstract patterns in the lived reality that gives them sense.
Examiner's perspective
The command "bring out the significance" rewards evaluation, so the examiner expects an argued case for ethnography's value, not a procedural description of how fieldwork is done. Answers that merely list steps of participant observation, without explaining what distinctive knowledge the method yields, remain at a middling level.
Strong scripts tie ethnography to the interpretive project of understanding meaning, illustrate with recognised work such as Malinowski or Geertz's thick description, and — decisively — balance the strengths against genuine limitations of representativeness, subjectivity and ethics. A conclusion that frames ethnography as complementary to quantitative methods, rather than simply superior, shows the methodological maturity that separates the best answers.