James Spradley

 ( Macalester College Faculty ) 

James P. Spradley (1933–1982) was a Social science and a professor of anthropology at Macalester College. Spradley wrote or edited 20 books on ethnography and qualitative research including The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society (1972), Deaf Like Me (1979), The Ethnographic Interview (1979), and Participant Observation (1980) .

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Life and career Spradley earned his PhD in anthropology from the University of Washington in 1967. His dissertation, which was supervised by Melville Jacobs, was entitled James Sewed: A Social, Cultural and Psychological Analysis of a Bicultural Innovator.

Spradley joined the faculty at Macalester College in 1969 on the behest of the college's anthropology professor, Dave McCurdy, with whom he would later collaborate on a number of academic book projects. Spradley died of leukemia in 1982.

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Work Spradley 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.

Lucy Maddox (2025). 9780801860560, JHU Press. . ISBN 9780801860560

Spradley argued that ethnography differed from other 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.

(2025). 9781478632078, Waveland Press. ISBN 9781478632078

Much of Spradley's work was guided by his interest in "ethnographic semantics", which sought to apply "explicitly 'scientific' analytical frameworks to the analysis of cultural phenomena". 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". The other kinds of analysis are taxonomy analysis, componential analysis, and theme analysis.

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Reception Spradley's work was widely used as college texts for American Studies classes in the 1970s.

Spradley's book You Owe Yourself a Drunk (1970), in which he conducted interviews and created a "typology of the different kinds" of homeless alcoholic men,

Christine Marie Elwell (2025). 9780549926450 . ISBN 9780549926450

has been called an exemplar of "good systemic ethnography".

Janice M. Morse (1994). 9780803950436, SAGE Publications. . ISBN 9780803950436

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Select works

• 1970. . Boston: Little, Brown and Company (Reissued: Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2000).
• 1971. (edited with David W. McCurdy). Boston: Little, Brown and Company. (15th Edition, with additions by Dianna Shandy, Boston: Pearson Education; 16th Edition, with additions by Dianna Shandy, Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press).
• 1972. (with David W. McCurdy). Chicago: Science Research Associates (Second Edition, with additions by Dianna J. Shandy, Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2005).
• 1972. . San Francisco: Chandler.
• 1975. (with Brenda J. Mann). New York: Wiley (Reissued: Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2008).
• 1976. (with Michael A. Rynkiewich). New York: Wiley.
• 1978. (with Thomas Spradley). New York: Random House (Reissued: Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1987).
• 1979. . Belmont, CA: Cengage (Reissued Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2016).
• 1980. . New York: Holt McDougal (Reissued Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2016).
• 1980. (with David W. McCurdy). New York: Wiley (Reissued Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press 1989).

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