Video created by UNSW Sydney (The University of New South Wales) for the course 'Transmedia Storytelling: Narrative worlds, emerging technologies, and global audiences'. Titled Understanding The Audience Using Ethnography. In the previous lesson.
Ethnographers study human cultures and societies by living among the people they study, by immersing themselves within the subject group in a process called participant-observation. The ethnographer participates as much as possible while observing, taking detailed notes, developing an ongoing analysis from the notes and compiling a report, or more often a book, about the findings. Used in cultural anthropology, sociology, business and organizational psychology, ethnography brings strengths and weaknesses to the research problem.
Investigates Complex Issues
Ethnographies are well suited to study complex cultural, societal interactions, unpredictable situations, and relationships that are too complex and difficult for quantitative methods, such as surveys and statistical analysis of numerical data. Ethnographers are able to tease out the the range of group experiences in ways that are sensitive to the uniqueness of the subject group. Because the ethnographer takes carefully structured and detailed notes in the participant observation, interviews, and other data-collection processes, an ethnography is a powerful way to reveal, in context, the many elements of group interactions. The result is an in-depth understanding of the culture, and interpretations with validity, often called a “thick description.” This thick description often provides answers to perplexing policy problems from struggles by remote indigenous peoples to Western societal problems, such as welfare recipients.
A Voice for Understanding
Ethnographies allow the culture to speak about its views and perspectives that would otherwise be drowned out by the dominant culture, and go untold. The ethnographer develops an understanding of the group's point of view and, in cases of human rights, sometimes act as an advocate for the group. Ethnography provides a window, so those outside the culture can understand what the group does and why. In addition, ethnographies probe the deep attributes of culture, bringing them to the surface, allowing people in the group greater understanding of themselves, and in the process helping members understand how to interact outside their group and culture.
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Expensive, Protracted and Difficult
Ethnographies are difficult to replicate, are primarily applicable to the subjects in the study and heavily dependent on the ethnographer. Ethnographers require extensive training, with training and practice in interviewing methods, note taking, alternate data collection methods, and methods of analysis, in addition to language and other training specific to the group or culture they plan to study. Once in the field, an ethnographer must take time to build trust. Once trust is built, the ethnographer spends inordinate amounts of time in participant observation and other data collection methods, taking notes and other chores, to maintain as near a perfect record as possible. It is time consuming to analyze the data, which results in a thick description of the culture or societal issue, often ending as a book. Because they immerse themselves in the culture, ethnographers often experience culture shock, feel awkward and out of place, are lonely, may experience considerable discomfort and occasionally personal danger, in addition to the constant pressure to maintain alertness as a participant observer.
Ethics Concerns
Ethnographers must pay special attention to ethics as they conduct their studies. Ethnographers often study sensitive cultures that are vulnerable to exploitation without safeguards. Ethnographers also study countercultures and workplace groups, requiring careful planning to avoid doing harm to the subjects. Lastly, but foremost, ethnographers bring their own experiences, prejudices and culture to the study; ethnographers must continually guard against interjecting their bias into the study, changing the culture by their presence, or failing to correctly disclose their bias in their reports.
Ethnography and ethnographic research have entered the management vernacular at many companies, to the point that they'll generate the same occasional eye rolls you'll see when mentioning Millennials or customer experience. However, despite being frequently misunderstood and ineffectively applied, ethnographic research is a powerful tool for technology leaders.
![Understanding Understanding](https://alexanderstreet.com/sites/default/files/products/ANTH_Series_Cvr.jpg)
So, what exactly is ethnography?
Ethnography solves the common problem of acquiring tacit knowledge: knowledge that's difficult to transfer by written or verbal communication. Ask someone how to write a poem, swim the butterfly, or write elegant and efficient code, and you'll probably get a collection of rules and tips, but not be able to execute the task yourself. By observing practitioners of a process, the ethnographer is able to identify the tacit knowledge and document it in a way that a non-practitioner can develop solutions to the practitioner's unarticulated problems.
More for CXOs
Ethnography is essentially the study of people and their interactions through observation. It was originally developed as a subset of anthropology, and used as a technique to determine the cultural and social norms of different peoples. You could imagine how ethnography might apply when discovering a long-lost group of humans in the Amazon rainforest or deep in the jungles of Indonesia: a researcher would attempt to observe the customs and interactions of this unfamiliar group, and determine how they lived, interacted, and related to each other and their environment.
Done well, ethnographic research is executed in a similar manner in a business context. If you were developing a new mobile app for your factory workers, an ethnographer would observe how they interacted with the tools they use, how they interacted with each other, and the norms and customs that defined how they performed their job. The researcher would abandon his or her own personal biases and knowledge of manufacturing, and try to get to the root cause of why workers performed in a certain way.
SEE: Smart office technology: What's working, what's failing, and what users want out of it (Tech Pro Research)
Why is ethnographic research relevant?
Continuing with the above example, armed with detailed knowledge about how our factory workers performed their jobs, you could develop tools and ways of working that immediately resonated with them, were readily understandable, and improved their jobs significantly. It's the equivalent of providing someone with a custom, carefully tailored garment that's designed for their climate, versus tossing them a one size fits all snow parka, never mind that they're living in a desert.
Ethnography extends the notion that the best products, whether they're a logistics application, pickup truck, tea kettle, or CNC machine, are designed with the end user in mind. Ethnographic research is often the starting point for design thinking or user-centered design, since it's critical to understand the end user before attempting to build a product for them.
If you use ethnography effectively, you're more likely to deliver applications and products that create maximum benefit for the end user, with minimal training and adoption costs. Think of tools or technologies you've picked up, and immediately understood how to use them to be more productive. Ethnography gives you the data required to create these types of tools more often.
SEE: Turning Big Data into Business Insights (ZDNet special feature) | Download it as a PDF (TechRepublic)
Tips for doing ethnography the right way
Perhaps the biggest challenge to doing proper ethnographic research is that the process and insights seem staggeringly simple to achieve. When I talk to companies, they'll often suggest we skip any ethnographic research, saying 'We've already done a couple of surveys and focus groups.' While surveys and focus groups can provide valuable data, they're not the right tool to identify tacit knowledge. The other challenge is that, superficially, ethnographic research seems like a simple task to perform. The assumption is that one could drop a couple of interns with clipboards and a video camera in a customer's house, and it should be just as effective as professional ethnographers, since the latter usually show up similarly equipped.
1. Observe what ethnographers actually do
Like everything from IT architecture to leadership, there is a complex set of skills and techniques beyond asking questions and videotaping, and if you decide to leverage ethnographers, I highly recommend joining them during some of their research. Seeing and hearing your customer group, and observing them in their 'native' environment, is powerful, and will help create a connection and understanding you may have previously lacked. Having some of your team members ride along with the pros can start to create this capability internally, but it's critical that you provide this training before unleashing any warm body upon your customers. Not only do you risk not gathering helpful data, but your ethnographers may be the most intensive interaction your customer segment has ever had with your organization, and it's important to make the experience positive and constructive.
2. Test the waters internally first
![Ethnography Ethnography](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Val_Mitchell/publication/279290849/figure/fig2/AS:613855348666379@1523365928219/Video-tour-screenshot-and-video-ethnography-in-progress-CLEEDR-Loughborough-University.png)
If you've never used ethnography, start in a relatively 'safe space,' either using professionals to execute external customer research, or experimenting a bit on lower-risk groups like internal users and employees. Unleash a few interested persons on your IT help desk or a similar internal process, and ask them to share any insights they glean through observation.
3. Share results within the company
Finally, if you go through the time and expense of doing a proper ethnographic study, make sure you maximize the value you achieve through the study. Invite other leaders to 'ride along' and observe customer interactions (without overwhelming the customer, of course), and publish and share the results with other parts of the organization, as there are likely others that would benefit from the knowledge you glean. If you do the study well, it will likely benefit dozens of projects within the company, and find that ethnographic research is a powerful tool that may require some unfamiliar spending on the front end, but results in a significant return on the overall end product.
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