I love talking about this type of research, because it is the type I hope to conduct when I graduate with my sociology degree. Ethnographic research can be a very complicated form of research because researchers are in contact with their subjects. The text talks about how an ethnographer can have a moral dilemma when deciding whether to be covert or overt with their study subjects. This is a very important decision to make because ethnographers spend a great deal of time immersed in the culture or group that they are studying that an early decision needs to be made. You may lose trust with your subjects if you begin your research as covert, and later decide that you feel bad for lying, and then you decide that you now want to tell them the truth and become overt. Ethnography is all about building rapport with the people you are studying, whether you tell them you are or you don't.
Researchers are supposed to stay as objective as possible, but ethnographic research acknowledges that the researcher is a participant and that it is not the worst thing in the world for them to be a little subjective. This may be another moral dilemma regarding a researcher using this method because you have to identify your own bias and your own beliefs and make sure that they are put aside. In my Qualitative research course last semester there was an example of an ethnographic study of women who had joined a white supremacist group. The researcher held strong beliefs that racism and prejudice was repulsive, but she had to put her own feelings aside in order to get the data that she needed. In her interview after the publishing of her study, she talked about how hard it was to not interrupt or disagree with the women that she was studying. She had to put her own morality aside, and suck it up for the sake of learning something about her subjects.
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