The Center for Indigenous and Cultural Psychology (CICP) at Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) is organizing the School of Researcher (SOR) 2024, which is exclusively open to CICP members.
SOR aims to broaden participants’ understanding of the aspects of psychological research from multiple perspectives.
The SOR event will be held in person from April 26 to May 26, 2024, at the Faculty of Psychology, UGM.
SOR is divided into two categories: in-depth material sessions and fieldwork sessions. The first session on material depth, held on Friday (April 26), focused on ethnography for psychological research and was attended by 20 participants.
Dr. Wenty Marina Minza, Vice Dean for Research, Community Service, and Cooperation at the Faculty of Psychology, spoke for the first SOR session.
“Ethnography is a research method that uses interviews to collect data and requires researchers to conduct observations by living with informants for a specified period. This is done to reduce the occurrence of ‘faking good’ by the informants,” explained Dr. Minza.
She described the origins of ethnography, stating, “Ethnography began with certain parties wanting to understand the conditions of countries targeted for colonization. The observations were sent to the colonizers to devise appropriate strategies for colonization. Over time, ethnography evolved and became widely used to study social groups within societies.”
“Ethnography is closely tied to culture. It involves studying human behavior based on the culture they adhere to and their knowledge of culture and subcultures. Nowadays, ethnography includes both the informant’s and researcher’s perspectives,” Dr. Minza elaborated.
At the end of her presentation, Dr. Minza discussed the challenges of applying ethnographic research within psychology.
“Ethnography, which is inherently linked to culture, presents challenges when applied to psychological research. Ethnographic research results are often considered to lack psychological dynamics,” she said.
“This presents a task for all psychology researchers interested in ethnographic methods to work hard to develop the discipline, thereby increasing the number of psychological studies using ethnographic approaches.”
Author: Relung Fajar Sukmawati