Thick Description
Richly detailed description of behavior and its context that conveys the meanings participants attach to what they do.
Thick description is richly detailed writing about people, actions, and settings that goes beyond recording what happened to convey what it meant to those involved. Associated especially with ethnography, it situates behavior in its social and cultural context, capturing intentions, norms, and circumstances. A thin account might note that someone winked; a thick account explains what the wink communicated in that situation. The term is closely tied to interpretive approaches to social research.
In a thesis, thick description serves two purposes. It lets readers experience the setting well enough to judge your interpretations, and it supports transferability, since readers can only assess whether findings apply to other contexts if the original context is fully described. Build it from detailed field notes rather than reconstructing scenes from memory.
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