Community-based collaborative team ethnography: A community-university-agency partnership

This paper describes an approach for building relationships and achieving effective community-university-agency collaboration that was developed to provide information about the issues faced by individuals and families involved in the exploration and production of oil and gas on the outer continental shelf in the Gulf of Mexico. Two university-affiliated ethnographers and a group of local schoolteachers followed the activities of selected workers and their families, tracked local social and economic trends, and identified and talked with workers and families with many different characteristics (e.g., job, age, stage in the family cycle, ethnicity). They were assisted by additional university researchers who spent from two to four weeks at a time in the study communities talking with civic leaders and business and industry representatives, helping to identify and talk with workers and families, conducting focus groups, and facilitating study group meetings for team members. The paper describes the evolution and application of the approach and examines its key attributes.