Career
Spradley wrote or edited 20 books on ethnography and qualitative research including Participant Observation and The Ethnographic Interview (1979, Wadsworth Thomson Learning). In The Ethnographic Interview, Spradley describes 12 steps for developing an ethnographic study using ethnosemantics. This book followed his 1972 textbook (with David West McCurdy) The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society.
He was a major figure in the development of the "new ethnography" which saw every individual as a carrier of the culture rather than simply looking to the outputs of the great artists of the time.
He died of leukemia in 1982. Spradley"s work was widely used as college texts for American Studies classes in the 1970s.
In You Owe Yourself a Drunk he conducted interviews and created a "typology of the different kinds" of homeless alcoholic mentor lieutenant has been called a "classic" of "good systemic ethnography".
Spradley provides a deep and meaningful insight into what its like to have a deaf child.
At the time, many doctors encouraged a purely oral environment. Most of the book explains what led to this revelation. Spradley describes ethnography as different from deductive types of social research in that the five steps of ethnographic research--selecting a problem, collecting data, analyzing data, formulating hypotheses, and writing--all happen simultaneously (p 93-94).
In The Ethnographic Interview, Spradley describes four types of ethnographic analysis that basically build on each other.
The first type of analysis is domain analysis, which is “a search for the larger units of cultural knowledge” (p 94). The other kinds of analysis are taxonomic analysis, componential analysis, and theme analysis.