In 1970, she published her best-known book, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family, based on research conducted while living with an Inuit family along the Chantrey Inlet for 18-months during the 1960s.[1] She documents the culture, language and practices of the family and the surrounding community in the book, which remains a landmark publication in the fields of ethnography and anthropology.[1][2] By her own account, Briggs knew very few Inuit words when she arrived to conduct her research, "When I arrived in Chantrey Inlet in 1963, I knew only six words of Inuktitut: 'yes,' 'no,' ‘I don’t know,’ ‘have some tea,’ 'have some more tea' and 'thank you'."[2]
In 1988, Briggs published a second book, Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old. Her book won two awards, the Boyer Prize from the Society for Psychoanalytic Anthropology and the Victor Turner Prize from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology.[1][3]
Jean Briggs compiled a landmark, bilingual Utkuhiksalingmiut Inuktitut dictionary, which was published in 2015.[1][2] Briggs had begun compiling Utkuhiksalingmiut Inuktitut words in 1970, ultimately gathering and preserving 34,000 words in the dictionary.[2] Prior to its 2015 publication, no dictionary had ever documented the Utkuhiksalingmiut Inuktitut dialect.[1][3][2] Several researches and colleagues from Memorial University and the University of Toronto joined her to create the dictionary, utilizing five grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).[2]