Researcher Bias

• Because ethnographic research is often conducted by a single individual, researcher bias is unavoidable. Observations made about a culture or event are filtered through the particular lens of the researcher, which contains any number of preconceived notions about a culture based on the researcher's past experiences and knowledge.
  
  

Qualitative Data

• Unlike most scientific studies, ethnographic research deals almost exclusively with qualitative data. In place of numbers and statistics are the recorded testimonies of individuals and the observations of the researcher. For this reason, the conclusions reached by the ethnographer can't be considered absolute truths or positively verified.
  
  

Length of Research

• To meet professional and academic standards, ethnographic research usually must be conducted over long periods of time. To provide an accurate depiction of a culture, a researcher must observe its activities over the course of months or years. Also, if studying a particular event or festival, a researcher can't possibly observe all aspects of the event during a single visit. Instead, the ethnographer must return multiple times to draw valid conclusions.
  
  

Nonreplicable Study

• Ethnographic research doesn't occur in a controlled environment but rather in the field, where unpredictable occurrences are common. Because of the innumerable variables that can affect human behavior at any given moment, ethnographic research can't be replicated like other scientific studies. Each observation a researcher makes is unique to that particular study.
  
  

Generalizations

• Because of the specificity of ethnographic research, the conclusions a researcher makes can't and shouldn't be generalized to other cultures or to other time periods. However, another difficulty of ethnographic studies is that researchers must often generalize the different activities and beliefs of many individuals to make conclusions about cultures as a whole.