James Spradley

James P. Spradley (1933–1982) was a social scientist 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, Deaf Like Me (1979), The Ethnographic Interview (1979), and Participant Observation (1980).

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. 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.

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

Select works 1970. You Owe Yourself a Drunk: An Ethnography of Urban Nomads. Boston: Little, Brown and Company (Reissued: Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2000). 1971. Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology (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. The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society (with David W. McCurdy). Chicago: Science Research Associates (Second Edition, with additions by Dianna J. Shandy, Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2005). 1972. Culture and Cognition: Rules, Maps and Plans. San Francisco: Chandler. 1975. The Cocktail Waitress: Woman's Work in a Man's World (with Brenda J. Mann). New York: Wiley (Reissued: Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2008). 1976. Ethics and Anthropology: Dilemmas in Fieldwork (with Michael A. Rynkiewich). New York: Wiley. 1978. Deaf Like Me (with Thomas Spradley). New York: Random House (Reissued: Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1987). 1979. The Ethnographic Interview. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth (Reissued Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2016). 1980. Participant Observation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston (Reissued Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2016). 1980. Anthropology: The Cultural Perspective'' (with David W. McCurdy). New York: Wiley (Reissued Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press 1989).