Hi David,

Over the last 10 years or so I’ve been in a position to witness somewhat of a paradigm shift within corporate America with respect to the acquisition of knowledge.  When we started doing this work in the corporate setting, very few companies were doing ethnographic work.  Now, ethnography is firmly rooted as a staple in many corporate tool kits.  So, the first answer is, yes you should be familiar with ethnography and know when and how to use it.

Whether this should take the form of an in-house ethnographer or a relationship with a consultant (like Ethnographic Research, Inc.!) depends on the type of work you have to do.  My sense is that most often the types of ethnographic research projects that the companies we talk to require more than a single person to accomplish the project goals and timelines.  On the other hand, there are lots of advantages to having an in-house ethnographer.

Let me know if you would like to discuss further.  Good luck to you,

Melinda

Hi Jay,

Well, here at Ethnographic Research, Inc., we think doing ethnography for a living is the bomb! We have a hard time imagining what we would be doing if not for this. The best part about my job is that I get paid to talk to people and to learn about their lives.

There is a lot of travel involved and depending on who you are, that can be a good thing or a not so good thing. The downside of this type of work, especially when working for corporate clients, is the time pressure to get the work done quickly.

Good luck to you,

Melinda

Hi Holly,

Thanks for your question.

Here at Ethnographic Research, Inc we believe strongly that a graduate degree in Sociology and/or Anthropology is the best preparation for professional ethnographic work. It is important to gain a strong foundation in social science theory and method and to have the opportunity to practice especially when you are called on to do rapid ethnographic projects like some of the work we do. When data must be collected and analyzed more quickly than traditional ethnographic research, your methodological tool kit has to be sharp and well practiced. To my knowledge, most market research programs do not give much attention to ethnography.

Melinda

Hi SueAnne,

Thanks for the question. It sounds like you have a great start with some very interesting fieldwork under your belt! I think the best advice I can give you is two-fold: 1) Learn how to be an advocate for your skills and for ethnography. You probably won’t find a lot of job postings looking for ethnographers—but you CAN learn to be a really good educator and promoter of the benefits of ethnography to potential employers. If you learn to make a good argument for the use of ethnography, you will be surprised at how many people will be willing to hire you as an ethnographer! 2) Continue your education. It is hard to beat a graduate education in the social sciences for preparing a person to be versatile in the job market—plus it will give you a chance to practice your field technique in an environment where you usually have plenty of time and guidance.

Good luck to you,

Melinda

Hi Carole,

I am familiar with equalizing relationships between the researcher and those researched. I’m trained as a Community Psychologist and practice the tenants of Action Research. I think ethnographic research is one of the few research approaches that is truly a collaboration between the researcher and the research participants. Because ethnographers take an inductive approach to understanding, they depend heavily on their participants for guidance and direction. Good ethnographers assume they don’t know very much about “what is going on” and ask their participants to take an active role in guiding their understanding. The ethnographer enters into a collaborative process with the participant of gathering data, developing theory and checking that theory with more data. At the same time, participants are learning. Often when I’m finished doing fieldwork, participants tell me how much they have learned about themselves (or another household member) and how much they enjoyed the process.

Melinda

Hi Leland,

I’m sorry to be slow to respond.  This is a very good question.

ERI subscribes to the ethical principles of the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association.  Because ethnographic work requires that the researcher become much more intimately involved in the process of peoples’ lives, there is far more potential danger for harm than with other types of research methodologies.  We take our ethical responsibilities to clients and participants very seriously.

Thanks for the question,

Melinda

Hi Kamala,

Thanks for the questions.

I’m not an expert on focus groups, but I’ll do my best to try to answer your questions.

First, I want to say that ethnography is more than observational research. Participant and non-participant observation are important techniques used by ethnographers, but ethnography as an approach to understanding is so much more!

One of the most important differences between ethnography and focus groups is the context in which each happens. Focus groups generally occur in a research facility. Ethnography on the other hand almost always happens in the participant’s natural environment. This is important because one of the most important goals of ethnography is to understand the arena of interest within the context in which it occurs. For example, a focus group aimed at understanding how people eat breakfast would probably involve bringing a group of people into the research facility and talking with them about breakfast related topics. An ethnography would involve talking with participants about breakfast related topics, but would also involve spending time with people actually preparing, eating and cleaning up after breakfast.

The ethnography would be aimed at understanding not only what people say about breakfast, but how they behave in that moment, the other things/people/events involved in the process of breakfast.

I think focus groups are a fairly inexpensive and quick way of having a relatively open conversation with a group of people. Ethnography on the other hand provides a much more in-depth and intimate look at the topic at hand. Therefore, ethnography tends to cost more and take more time than focus groups. The pay off is a much deeper understanding.

Thanks again for the questions.

Melinda

Hi Tommy,

There have been a lot or empirical studies and even more theorizing about the nature of play. Unfortunately, we have been too busy working to read them all! What we do know is that play serves a number of functions. For example, it acts as a means of socialization. This is easy to see when you watch kids play. Kids learn a lot about gender roles, acceptable rules for behavior and potential jobs. Although it is less evident to the untrained eye, play continues to act as an important agent of socialization for adults. For example, a plethora of rules for acceptable behavior are taught and practiced through the game of golf (being quiet, being patient) or through attending cocktail parties (how to make small talk, how to interact with strangers, etc). In other words, play often gives us the opportunity to practice our social skills and to act out our assigned roles in a less threatening environment than a serious work setting.

Play also serves important functions around stress relief and the generation of creativity—which goes a long way in explaining why it has not been weeded out by evolution.

Historically, play has served some interesting functions around perpetuating and calling out class differences as certain types of leisure activities were expensive and/or obtainable only by those who had a good deal of expendable income. So some have argued that the real function of play was not relaxation, but class division.

If you would like to learn more about play, check out George Herbert Mead’s classic work: Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934.

Thanks for the question,

Melinda

Hi Marichit,

Thanks for the question. Your question is one that comes up quite often, especially lately. I think in order to answer your question it is necessary to make a distinction between “ethnographic techniques” and “ethnography.”

There seems to be a good deal of confusion around exactly what ethnography is. I think much of what is labeled as “ethnography” is often in-context interviewing. And although in-context interviewing is an essential component of ethnography, it is but one component. True ethnography is a very systematic and iterative process of data collection and analysis that involves a good deal of social theory and understanding. Ethnography is a specialized skill that takes a good deal of time to learn to do correctly both in the field and in the analysis and we’ve found that a graduate degree in anthropology or sociology seems to do the best job of preparing ethnographers.

On the other hand, there are a number of companies that seem to have incorporated good ethnographic techniques (things like in-context interviews, observation, etc) into their tool kits without being full blown ethnographers.

So, the short answer to your question is yes, we think you have to have graduate training in the social sciences AND a good deal of experience in conducting ethnographic work in order to call yourself an ethnographer. There has been a tendency for those outside our field of expertise to offer “ethnography” without the proper training and over the past few years, we’ve found ourselves often defending our work to clients who have had experience with others who offer ethnography but who deliver in-context interviews or video without attention to analysis.

Melinda

Hi Stacey,

No offense taken, in fact I answer questions like this all the time. Interestingly though, it is usually me trying to defend the use of the word ethnography from those who we believe stretch the definitional limits. I guess this is a question that’s answer is a matter of perspective. We work with the definition, which we think is fairly common, that ethnography is a process and a product—that it is at once the method of ethnography (participant observation, open-ended, in-context interviews, inductive data collection and analysis, etc.) and it is the output (an ethnographic work).

And that the time an ethnography takes (within reasonable limits) is not a factor in its status as an ethnography. Many ethnographies take less than a year, it seems that more and more ethnographies are being done in smaller time frames, particularly since applied anthropology is becoming more common in both the business world and the academic world in situations where results are needed quickly. This discussion reminds me of the debate about the difference between “statistical” significance and “practical” significance. With the cut off for statistical significance being somewhat arbitrarily assigned and over time becoming reified as the measure of significance. I think there are a lot of measures of what makes a good ethnography and depending on the question you are trying to answer, time spent in the field can certainly be one of them—but by no means always the most important factor in determining a good ethnography.

Just as one who spent five years in the field might be offended by a month long ethnography, someone who did ground breaking work (and we think we do!) might be offended if their labor of love is labeled something other than an ethnography just because it took six months instead of 12, or six weeks for that matter. Ethnography would be a dying art and science if one needed a year to do it, the practicalities of life often prohibit such long field periods. The types of projects we do range in scope and time commitment in the field—again depending on the type of question we are trying to ask. We are careful to design projects that meet our clients needs for quick answers while at the same time remaining true to the rigorous demands of a good ethnographic approach.

We cope with our clients need for quick results by doing team ethnography. We have multiple teams collecting data at once. We can collect an astounding amount of data in a short period of time and say our work is ethnographic, with pride.

Melinda

Hi Maria,

I don’t think there is any one recipe for the design of ethnographic research. In fact, I like to say that ethnography is more an approach to understanding than a particular methodology. The two elements that seem to need to be present are that it really needs to take place in the natural environment—where the action is occurring; and it needs to be inductive—you need to start the project without a preconceived notion of what you will find. Usually a variety of methods have to be used during any particular research project. We tend to use participant and non-participant observation, open ended interviewing, context mapping and archive collection in most of our projects. Still, ethnographers must be flexible in their approach to project design, data collection and analysis. They have to be prepared to use whichever methodology helps them to best approach their research question inductively, knowing that the needs of their research may change at anytime as they are immersed in real life and real life is rarely linear or predictable.

Melinda

Hi Jim,

Thanks for the very good question.

Here at Ethnographic Research, Inc. we try really hard not to give the impression that ethnography is a panacea. It is one type of research a large toolkit of methods, each to be used whenever the research objectives call for them. I think about these methods as existing on a continuum, rather than being divided into strictly “qualitative” and “quantitative.”

Having said that, there are a lot of differences between a more quantitative and more qualitative approach to understanding. However, I don’t think objectivity is one of those differences. I think the objectivity that is often attributed to more quantitative research is really a fallacy. The focus of ethnographic research can be on a person or a small number of people, but often the focus is on an action or an experience, read on for more on this.

In a very general way, there are a few primary differences between these the two approaches. These differences are probably best understood in the context of research goals. In other words, a researcher must first identify her/his research goals and then pick the method that will best meet those goals. Although this will not be an exhaustive list, I’ll summarize some of the differences between the two approaches. First, they provide a different type of snapshot of what is going on. The more quantitative approaches provide a wide angled picture of a phenomenon, while the more qualitative approaches provide a telephoto picture. This should not be confused with the quantitative approaches serving up more data points. It is just that the data points are of different types. A good ethnography will provide hundreds if not thousands of data points. Second, while quantitative approaches are usually better at answering very tactical questions, qualitative approaches are often better at answering more strategic, open-ended questions. I always say that ethnography is really good at answering questions about things that you couldn’t have predicted or hypothesized about—it is really good at uncovering new things. Michael Agar says that the beginning question of all ethnographic research is “What is going on?” Third, the more quantitative approaches are better for providing information that can be neatly plotted on the bell curve and succinctly summarized in an executive summary. Ethnographic findings are often messy and not easily summarized because the goal of most ethnographic work is to understand the context around a “thing” rather than just isolate the “thing.” I think this helps to explain the preference you have observed for quantitative data.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have additional questions.

Melinda

Hi Kristi,

Thanks for the question. My advice is to hit the ground and spend time with people. As a company that is just starting out, you are in a great position to tailor your website tone and messaging to resonate to potential customers. So, ask yourself the following questions: Who is my potential customer? Where can I find her? Then go out and spend some time with her in the moments of her life that make the most sense—those moments that will help you understand her needs/wants/ideas/values/beliefs around your product offerings.

Then listen to her story!

Good luck,

Melinda

Hi Erica,

The first thing you need to do is decide what your research question is—what is it that you hope to learn? You have to know that before you can decide who you are going to talk to/observe and where you are going to go. So, map out your research question first and then decide which methodology will help you to meet that goal. If you are doing a good ethnographic study you should always spend some time talking to people AND watching people. How many bars you go to, whether you divide your observations by gender and age, etc. will all depend on your research question. Good luck to you. Let me know if you have additional questions.

Melinda

Hi Loretta,

Thanks for the question. I don’t know much about this topic, but when doing a good ethnography, it is always a good idea to do a couple of things: 1) Begin by immersing yourself in the field and finding out as much as you can from the point of view of those you are trying to understand—so just start out by having people tell you what they think about the topic and show you how they behave. 2) Keep an open mind—-be prepared to learn things that are very different from your assumptions.

Good luck to you, let me know if I can help you further.

Have a great day,

Melinda

Hi Elizabeth,

A classic ethnographic account in the field of medicine isBoys in Whiteby Howard Becker. It is about medical students. We have recently spent a good deal of time with nurses for a project and there are some very interesting issues around power and how nurses conceptualize their job responsibilities.

Good luck to you,

Melinda

Hi Stacey,

Thanks for your question.

I would suggest doing a combination of unobtrusive observation/mapping AND participant observation and interviewing with shoppers as they shop and navigate the store. If you have the time and the budget, I would also suggest following a number of customers from home to the store and back home again. You will learn things during the trip to and from the store and at their home that will enrich your understanding of their needs/preferences/ideas and beliefs.

I think it would also be important to spend time talking with and observing employees and vendors to understand things from their point of view and the challenges/obstacles that they face—from their perspective.

The most important thing is to keep an open mind and begin your research without thinking you already know the answers! Be prepared to see the store from the eyes of those who spend the most time there and recognize that their priorities and understandings may be different from those who are charged with planning the redesign. Be open to the possibility that you will learn things that radically alter your understanding of the “ideal” design.

Good luck to you,

Melinda

Hi Jon,

Thanks for your question.

My first piece of advice is to narrow your research question a little bit—what aspect of the media/television are you most interested in? Depending on your objective—then you should begin thinking about where you need to go and who you need to talk to in order to begin to develop an understanding of your topic. For example, if your question is to understand the experience of those who watch television/are influenced by the media, then you would start with creating a list of all of the types of people you want to understand and the different contexts you would need to be in to help enrich your understanding. On the other hand, if your question is to understand those who produce media—then you would need to talk to a very different set of people and visit a very different set of contexts.

Still, no matter what your research question, in order to take an ethnographic approach, you would need to make sure that you conduct your fieldwork in the places and during the times that allow you to get a well rounded understanding of your topic. You want to be there in the moments when people experience the thing you are trying to understand and you would want to get a sense for the cultural variables that impact the who/when/how/what of your topic. You will also want to make sure that your fieldwork is inductive. Ethnography is a process that combines a very open ended approach to data collection with an iterative generation of theory/understanding.

The types of questions you ask depend on what your research objective is, but no matter what your question, interviewing should be conducted in a way that encourages your participant to tell you a story!

Good luck to you,

Melinda