1. How long does your typical
project take?
Typically, projects last a couple of months, but project lengths vary because
the structure and the scope of projects vary. Start to finish, projects can
be as short as six weeks and as long as a year or more.
2. How do you choose research participants?
It depends, usually we try to use multiple methods of recruiting so we can put together a diverse sample. If we are in a place where we have done research before, we might
use some of the people we have used in the past to point us in the right directions in the community. If we don’t know a soul,
we’ll either snowball and have a primary informant or
contact who will point us to people we can talk to, and/or we’ll just go
out in public spaces and find people to talk to—and yes, we’re always
surprised at how many people will take us home with them! When the business arena (and research question) is more narrow
in scope, we may choose research participants based on a screener--administered
in the usual ways or in rather ethnographic ways--like asking people “do
you know someone who [fill in the blank]” and snowballing from there.
In a really hard to find population, we might rely on a recruiting firm.
3. Do you do surveys?
No, we don't, but team members, especially the sociologists among us, have had experience in the design, implementation,
and analysis of surveys so we can work in conjuction with more quantitative work your team is doing.
4. Do you do focus groups?
No, we focus on ethnography and just ethnography.
5. What is ethnography good for?
Ethnography is good for finding those "a-ha" findings that other market research methodologies cannot. We work inductively, we enter the field with open minds and open research protocols. This helps break down the boundaries of what we can find, and we end up finding things that we, or our clients, could never dream of finding.
Ethnography is good when you have a problem, but you don’t know
where to even start to understand the problem (or its solution). Ethnography
is exploratory, but it can be tactical, too, it can tackle very specific problems
and meet very specific goals.
6. What is ethnography not good for?
Product testing and ad testing: if you have a product you want to test, focus
groups are cheaper. If you want to find out the answer to a highly specific
question about a well-defined kind of person, and if the answer requires a
means-based statistic, larger-scale sample surveys may be best.
Ethnography is not good for answering questions where everyone is already
quite certain they already understand what makes things tick. This is because
ethnography usually discovers some aspect of the ticking that had not been
accounted for in the past, some variable that does not vary by it self the
way it should, or some set of questions that could be asked but had not yet.
So ethnography is not good when questions are set in stone, when knowledge
about variables smells more like religion than science.
7. How are you qualified for this work?
Our long and extensive backgrounds in the social sciences, in academia and
applied to the business world, have made us strong ethnographers. We all at least have Master's degrees in the social sciences.
8. How can I find out more about ethnography?
At your college library! If you have a particular subject area in mind and have exhausted other sources, send us an email, maybe one of us can recommend a book.
9. How have businesses implemented your findings/suggestions?
With new product ideas, new sales strategies, and new marketing plans. New
consumer packaged goods, new consumer electronic products, new B2B relationships,
and new advertising plans.
10. What is your usual sample size?
We don't like to talk about sample sizes in terms of "number of people talked to" since we sample contexts and behaviors in addition to human beings. So an ethnographic field visit with one person might be the equivalent of giving a survey to twenty people or a thousand people for that matter. That's because each visit contains the potential for a vast army of data points and data sources. The better question might be "does your ethnographer know how to utilize this vast army of rich data points?"
That said, social researchers and consumers of social research like to think in terms of head counts and so our smallest project included only six primary participants (along with the people in their social network and the contexts in which the fieldwork took place.) We like to work with larger data sets. Large projects might involve 60 field visits (with long interviews and participant observation).
11. Do you dig up bones?
No, those are archaeologists (they dig up people and their things) and paleontologists
(they dig up dinosaurs and other critters). Once though, Steve was digging
a hole, and he found an old skeleton key. He meant to clean it off or throw
it away, but it is still in his office, caked with mud.
12. How much does it cost to do a project?
The cost depends on the scope of the work. A project with a solid data set runs from $70,000 to $100,000. Larger scale projects can run $150,000-300,000. We’re good about explaining your options, and
we’re also good about not selling you a river when all you need is a
cup of tea.
13. Have you guys ever heard of Paco Underhill?
Yes and for those that haven’t, he wrote a best-selling book called
“The Science of Shopping.” He videotapes/watches people while
they shop and then methodically analyzes the tapes. While it's great geography,
and great observational research, it’s not quite accurate to call
it ethnography. We differ from Paco because we talk to people AND we watch
them, but we aren’t so covert about watching. Our way of “doing
retail” has more depth and is oodles more personal—Paco’s
way, though quite useful and rather exciting is not typically ethnographic.
Calling it “retail ethnography” is a misnomer--his research
method is quantitative, does not triangulate, and is thus not as holistic
as “ethnographic research” tends to be. His firm, Envirosell,
doesn’t call it ethnography, but a lot of people confuse their work
with ethnography. For that matter, a lot of people think ethnography means
“observational research.” It means that, and more.
14. Don’t people act different when you poke
a camera in their face?
Yes, they can, but we don’t poke! People almost always get used to
the camera in a matter of minutes, and partially because we are inconspicuous
about its use. We usually hold it at belly-level, or otherwise out of
the way, which is not only easier on our arms, it keeps the camera out
of the way. The camera isn’t in the participant’s line of sight
and face-to-face communication is unhindered.
If people seem to be unable to get over the camera's presence (which happens
just once in awhile and is surprisingly obvious when it does happen),
we'll put it aside and be fast and furious note takers. As an alternative,
we'll just use the camera to record audio.
15. If you are in the room hanging out, doesn’t
that have an impact on what is happening?
Yes! But bias is a question to be answered, not something we can pretend
to erase. Researchers without exception affect the outcome of the research
and bias is everywhere and in everything—that’s old news.
Photo-diaries and their brethren are not an exception, though often cited
as one. To bring in a little Foucault, the people participating in self-administered
research, realize that what they write, what they photograph, will eventually
be read and judged—that they are indeed being watched even though
no one is there at the moment when the action described actually happens.
Likewise, in a focus group, people understand there is a moderator and
that big mirror isn’t there just so the moderator can primp his hair
between sessions. And on top of the mirror and the moderator, they also
realize they are being watched by their peers, who having just met, are
still sizing everyone up.
The thing is that our ethnographers are skilled in making people feel
comfortable, they are skilled at becoming a seemingly natural part of
the environment. Its easier because we work in “natural” environments:
living rooms, kitchens, workplaces. With other methods where the researcher
isn’t present or is hidden, the participant doesn’t have the
opportunity to feel comfortable with the researcher. There isn’t
the sort of opportunity to feel at ease that can be the result of effective
rapport building. The participant can never gain trust of someone they
haven’t laid eyes on or shared a joke with.
16. Why not just use a focus group?
Focus groups don’t cut the mustard—they don’t have the
depth, the color, and the humanist touch of ethnography. Doing the interview
in places where people feel at home is important. To observe our participants
in real life and “the thing-under-study” in real life is so
important. And not having the constraints of a focus group is important:
the lack of privacy, the time limitations, and the dead environment: those
cold, cold walls. Focus groups give you the opportunity to hear
what people say they are doing, ethnography gives you the opportunity
to hear what people say they are doing and see what people are actually doing!
17. Should I do this before or after the large-sample
survey?
It is always helpful to use what you’ve learned in one piece of research
to aid you in another or to use one piece of research to validate another.
So, doing them simultaneously isn’t a great help unless time is an issue. It depends on what
you want out of each piece of research—talk to us about it, we can
help you come up with the best strategy.
18. Is this just for exploratory work, or can you
“test” things?
Yep. Cognitive anthropology and psychology developed methods to systematically
identify cognitive cultural patterns. How do people who share a similar
cultural view of the world categorize breakfast food, or pets, or soap?
These are venerable anthropological questions that straddle the fence
between discovery and testing. We’ve applied these methods, which
are both open-ended enough to be sure that you learn what the culture
thinks (not what you and your questionnaire designers think) yet systematic
enough to provide statistically well-grounded results.
19. How easy is it to do qualitative research, I’ve not had any training,
can I do it?
It’s a heck of a lot of hard work, long days, longer nights, tons
of transcripts, and then, plenty of theory-driven analysis. We’ve
been doing this for years and before that we went to school so we could
do this. If your company wants to build the capacity to do ethnographic
research in-house, we can help you understand ethnography better and how
to use ethnography better. We can even refer you to some ethnographers
who are looking for work, but we cannot teach you to be good ethnographers.
It takes years.
