James P. Spradley (1933–1982) was a social scientist and a professor of anthropology at Macalester College.

His dissertation, which was supervised by Melville Jacobs, was entitled James Sewed: A Social, Cultural and Psychological Analysis of a Bicultural Innovator.

[2][4] 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.

[6] 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".

[5] 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,[7] has been called an exemplar of "good systemic ethnography".