Ethnology is a disciplinary field that is more or less interwoven with anthropology. Its main focus is the analysis of various cultures and cultural expressions, usually within a national context. In practice, ethnologists favor an approach toward culture from the individual perspective, with a key interest in how single ordinary individuals, seen as active cultural beings, think and act in their everyday lives. This implies that they are both shaped by and contributors to the shaping of cultures in their everyday lives. However, within ethnology, culture viewed as a bidirectional phenomenon is not merely regarded as an individual process. Rather, it is regarded as something that occurs in collective social contexts. When analyzing culture, ethnologists usually employ a combined focus on its ideational and folkloric aspects as well as aspects of materiality, locality, and identity. Ethnology's general methodological approaches comprise ethnographic fieldwork as well as studies of artifacts and sociocultural structures.