The ethnography of communication is an approach to the study of discourse which focuses, basically on particular ways of seeing and experiencing the world and how these are reflected in particular ways of speaking. If you will analyze the discourse that transpires, you will need to know the basic background of the people involved in the exchange of ideas as part of defining the word ‘ethno’ which means people. In a deeper sense, there’s a question as to how culture reflects discourse. Therefore, the manner of answering the question will be different because they have their individual culture.
Let us discuss the ultimate goal of ethnography of communication and allow me to present my critical points. Basically, it focuses on communication as a matter of cultural competence and caters the factors in analyzing the discourse such as setting, participants, mood, and other kinds of behavioral rules. In fact, ethnographers observe patterns of communication, and the symbols and meanings, premises, and rules applied to speaking within specific groups of people. The groups studied by ethnographers may be quite large and diverse, like for example, the study of "Americans’" symbolic uses of the term "communication" or quite small and even temporary and an a simple way of assessing how the respondents responded the question – Would you like to have sex with me? – Is somewhat an unusual question and with that, you can discover how they answer the question based on their own perception. Based on the video presentation, some of the respondents are liberated and others are conservative. The depicted objects of study within this tradition are the ways of speaking, speech communities and native terms for talk. The ways of speaking denotes the patterns of their talk distinctive of a particular group of people and understood as symbolically meaningful within the broader spectrum of communicative behavior generally. The speech communities groups of people who share at least one valid way of speaking, and interpretive resources within which that way of speaking is located; and native terms for talk group-specific labels for communicative practices that index their symbolic importance and meaning.
Historically, the ethnography of communication was initially proposed as a program of research in 1962 by Dell Hymes. Since then it has developed into a comprehensive philosophy, theory, and methodology for systematically investigating communication practice. The guiding questions ask about the culturally distinctive means of communication and their meanings to the participants who use them. On the one hand, ethnographers of communication ask what means or media of communication people use in contexts. These may include words, images, and sounds; specific channels, including oral, print, electronic, face-to-face, and the Internet; or any combination thereof. A related question asks what the meanings of these means of communication are for the people who use them. Simply, the basic philosophy of ethnography of communication is to investigate aiming to explore the particularity and diversity of communication practices in social contexts; the theory provides a range of concepts for understanding sociocultural lives as a complex system of communication practices; the methodology includes stringent criteria for generating various types of data based upon observational field research, various types of interviewing, and archival data, among other sources; methods for analyzing data include rigorous attention to descriptive, interpretive, and comparative procedures, each with its own set of techniques. A key and essential aspect of this type of research is interpretive inquiry that focuses analysts’ attention on the participants’ meanings of the communication they produce.