Less is More?

After going through the readings, I was initially trying to contrast ethnography's and case studies looking for some higher form a clarity to determine which of these methods was more viable. Both of these had lists of flaws with them, but curiously the ethnography didn't assume that the observer had to be unbiased. In fact, it encouraged bias. Why was it that when observing a community a bias was encouraged but when observing a single case it was viewed as not only being misleading but brought to mind questions as to the merit of examining a single case? Why is an observer allowed to make inferences about a larger community but not a single individual with whom they come in contact with? Does this have to do with skewing observations because if that's the case, how could one not become skewed when observing a community they take part in like Moss does in her essay.

Are the things that Moss finds when looking through the community of her own African-American church supposed to live up to the same scrutiny as some of the case studies that we looked at last week? Does observing a community give you more power because of its setting? Also, oddly enough, I thought that while plenty was done to give us as researchers viable ways of bulking up the credibility of our case study papers, there wasn't nearly as many ways to enhance the ethnography. Going through all the things that could potentially poke holes in it was like admiring Swiss cheese at the deli.

The other questions I had were primarily from the Lauer and Asher in regards to coding the various information. When observing a whole community and having so many different issues at hand in the community that can contribute to the various things being researched I can't even imagine how you would code these things. It seemed overwhelming coding a single person through various sets of eyes, but an entire community through different lens, that just seems like an overwhelming task for it to be subject to so many pitfalls.