Ethnography Matters

Editor’s note: In this final post for February’s ‘Openness Edition‘, Rachelle Annechino takes us on a journey with her to the homes of her research participants and asks some really important questions about the wild “foreign languages” (legalese/medical-ese) that supposedly produces “informed consent”, about the genesis of our understanding and practice of informed consent and challenges us to think about how we might redesign informed consent in our own projects. 

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One open window (Chris Downer) / CC BY-SA 2.0

Today I’m interviewing a couple of people who participate in a free program offered through a local hospital. The program mainly serves older adults who are dealing with a range of health issues, like diabetes, cancer, and arthritis. Many of the participants belong to groups that are affected by health disparities (or “preventable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunities to achieve optimal health that are experienced by socially disadvantaged populations” as defined by the US CDC [1]).

After hanging out at the hospital for a bit to check out the program, I go to the home of a woman in her 60s who couldn’t come to the hospital today. We talk about the study, its risks and benefits. It’s a small exploratory study, some semi-structured interviews; the hospital IRB gave it an expedited review.

The benefits, I explain, are that this might help improve the program or keep the program going. There aren’t really any direct benefits to you though. We wish we had something to give you to thank you for participating. Basically what we’ll do is just sit here and talk. A risk is that some of the questions could be uncomfortable, but we can skip anything you want. If it’s okay with you, I will record the interview. We won’t put your name on the recording or use your name in reports on the interviews.

We have this standard consent form that the hospital uses, I say. It’s kind of long. We can go over what’s in it together, and please feel free to take as much time as you want to look it over…

Et cetera. As I’m saying this stuff, I’m cautiously drawing out the consent form.

Which is eight pages long.

And crazy.

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Judd and Tamar

Editor’s Note: Judd Antin @juddantin is a social psychologist and user experience researcher who studies motivations for online participation. In 2011, he was named an MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35. Prior to joining Facebook, he worked with Yahoo Research.  His educational background includes Applied Anthropology, Information Science, and training at the French Culinary Institute. One of my favorite papers of his is Readers are Not Free Riders: Reading as a form of participation on Wikpedia (pdf) [1].

Tamar Antin is a research scientist who uses mixed and especially qualitative methods to critically examine public health policies and narratives. She has several years of experience in public health research. One of her recent publications is Food Choice As a Multidimensional Experience [2].   Her dissertation [3] combining three papers on food choices and body image is excellent reading for any student of qualitative methods. 

I’ve known Tamar and Judd for several years now, and Tamar has been a mentor to me. Every time Tamar and I talk about research and ethnography, it never seems to last long enough; I just want to ask her more questions. And every time I see Judd, I want to ask him a million questions too. So a post for Ethnography Matters was a great excuse to get together with them for a chat on anthropology, Big Data and Small Data, and other interesting things.  -  Rachelle

P.S. This isn’t a straight transcript of our conversation but a sort of Frankenstein transcript made out of chopped up pieces sewn back together. 

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1. Two Ethnographers
2. What they’re working on
3. Stigma and hacking
4. Qualitative research as art, science and handmaiden
5. Big Data and Small Data

1. Two Ethnographers

What’s your background in anthropology?.

Judd: I have an undergraduate degree in anthro from Johns Hopkins, where I was one of seven anthropology majors I think, like in the whole university. It was a small department. I got interested in anthro primarily because of my adviser, who became our friend, Felicity Northcott. Coincidentally she also married Tamar and I. She was internet ordained and she officiated our wedding. She’s awesome.  She was just a very down to earth, foul-mouthed, passionate anthropologist.

Tamar: And for me, I have an undergraduate degree in anthropology also, from the University of Texas. I was having this conversation with the undergraduate adviser there at the end of my senior year, like okay now I have this degree, but I didn’t really know what to do with it. I went to the career center, and they had a list of all the jobs that you could do with certain majors, and I think the only job that was listed for anthropology majors was travel agent.

Judd: What?

Tamar: Oh yeah. I was thinking, well I don’t want to do that.

Judd: Travel agent?!

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Gabriella Coleman’s research on the enigmatic Anonymous network has provided unique insights and dispeled myths about the group. In a guest contribution this month, Coleman writes about tensions in her work and what it means to be implicated in “the dance between Anonymous and journalism.”

Our other guest contributor, Cisco’s Mike Gotta, writes about rethinking enterprise social networking (ESN) design processes and the value of qualitative research for building ESN systems.

Heather Ford addresses the value of qualitative research in another context in her reflections on a WikiSym conference dominated by quantitative analyses of English language Wikipedia.

And Jenna Burrell discusses the challenges of keeping up with fieldwork from afar in her post on read-along ethnography, in which she examines the possibilities and limitations of understanding a distant fieldsite through a collaborator’s notes and images.

• Bill Moggridge, inventor of the laptop and founder of IDEO, died in September. In case you missed it, check out this NYT tribute, and this Atlantic piece on the role of gender and class in the adoption of the laptop.
• A new digital anthropology interest group is forming within the American Anthropological Association. 

NEXT MONTH

• Music ethnographer, Wendy Hsu will guest contribute a series of articles on digital and computational methods in doing ethnography and field research
• Erik Bigras from The Asthma Files, an experimental ethnographic project, will tell us about how they work with the medical community to collect ethnographic knowledge about asthma.
• Nicolas Nova will share a series of posts about his new book, CURIOUS RITUALS: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday.

Would you like to be our next guest contributor? Ethnography Matters is your space. you can feature a project/paper/book/syllabus, provide a fieldwork update, or share your thoughts. Here are some more ideas for how you can participate. We’d love to hear from you. Email us at ethnographymatters[at]gmail!

Jenna’s post on ethnographic monographs inspired us to start an ethnography reading group. (You can join our Ethnographic Monograph group on Mendeley here.)

For our first experiment in reading together, we’ve picked Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, by Nancy Scheper-Hughes.

Death Without Weeping is based on Scheper-Hughes’ fieldwork in a rural village in Northeastern Brazil in the 1980s, and her decades of contact with the community there.  The book centers on maternal love in a context where scarcity and child death are the norm. Along the way, Scheper-Hughes explores conflicts between academic reflection and activism, and what it means to be an ethnographer:

The ethnographer, like the artist, is engaged in a special kind of vision quest through which a specific interpretation of the human condition, an entire sensibility, is forged. Our medium, our canvas, is “the field,” a place both proximate and intimate (because we have lived some part of our lives there) as well as forever distant and unknowably “other” (because our own destinies lie elsewhere). In the act of “writing culture,” what emerges is always a highly subjective, partial, and fragmentary — but also deeply felt and personal — record of human lives based on eyewitness and testimony. The act of witnessing is what lends our work its moral (at times its almost theological) character. So-called participant observation has a way of drawing the ethnographer into spaces of human life where she or he might really prefer not to go at all and once there doesn’t know how to go about getting out except through writing, which draws others there as well, making them party to the act of witnessing.

It’s gorgeous. Go get it! We would love to hear what you think of it. You can share your thoughts, your favorite quotes, your blog posts, etc. on twitter with the hashtag #ethnobookclub, or send us an email at ethnographymatters[at]gmail.  We’re still experimenting with formats, but our current plan is to post thoughts on the book every week or so starting in November.

Screen capture from dictionary.com

I work at a research center that studies the use of various legal and illegal drugs, generally with a focus on preventing “misuse.” It can be an awkward topic of conversation socially. The whole notion conjures up images of Mr. Mackey from South Park and terrible anti-drug propaganda.

And honestly, not without reason. Research funders have agendas, and a funder’s concept of misuse is not always the same as what a community sees as misuse — which can make ethnographic research complicated.

So many messages about alcohol and drugs seem fueled by moral panic,  but I don’t think it’s an ethnographer’s business to judge people’s consumption. Panics over drugs remind me of panics over technology and the things it “makes” us do.  This trailer for the 1936 anti-drug movie Reefer Madness reads like technological determinism (material determinism?). People don’t just use marijuana in Reefer Madness, but they are used by it:

What can make sex crazed zombies of us all?
What can force us to kill?
What is the most despicable danger facing our children today?
The reefer! The reefer! The reefer!

Also, Google is making us stupid, and Facebook is making us lonely. Read More…

San Francisco, by Katie

My main field tools are: smartphone, paper, pens. And when I can, colored markers and a sketchpad.

The smartphone part can be touchy… Tricia noted in her post on Writing Live Fieldnotes that she used to carry around a beat-up Nokia feature phone in China because it was less distracting, but that eventually not having an IPhone became more distracting. In the US too there are situations where a smartphone can pose a divide between a researcher and a researchee (okay that’s not a word, but I hate the word “subject”). From my pov in Northern California, the smartphone divide seems less relevant every day, but it can still be an issue.

At this point though I choose the smartphone in all its tricorder glory over carrying around a bunch of other stuff.  I use it to take pictures, record audio and occasionally video, make notes — sometimes I even use it as a phone. To try to break down potential divides, sometimes I let my (genuine) awe at my smartphone show in an interview, and fuss a bit over whether it’s working right.

For recording interviews, I use an Android app, Tape-a-Talk. It’s free and it works. I’ve used other digital recording gadgets and apps too — meh, pretty much all of them have seemed fine to me, but I’m not looking for super clean sound or for audio that I can sync with video. I just want a recording that I can understand. If you’re looking for more from a recorder, the public radio and new media site Transom is a great resource.

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Fool hu-mans, there is no escape!

The Wall Street Journal did a piece last week on drones that decide whether to fire on a target, provocatively titled “Could We Trust an Army of Killer Robots?”

Although the title goes for the sci-fi jugular, the article balances questions about robot decision making with concerns like those of Georgia Tech’s Mobile Robot Lab director Ronald Arkin:

His work has been motivated in large part by his concerns about the failures of human decision-makers in the heat of battle, especially in attacking targets that aren’t a threat. The robots “will not have the full moral reasoning capabilities of humans,” he explains, “but I believe they can—and this is a hypothesis—perform better than humans” [1]

In other words: Do we trust an army of people?

Drones might make better decisions in some contexts. Whether drones can be trusted is a whole ‘nother question. Read More…

Some sort of weird IPA chart ~ CC BY-SA Nickshanks, Grendelkhan, Nohat

For research projects that incorporate transcripts, the transcription process can feel like a necessary evil that you have to get through in order to move on to “real” analysis. Transcribing recordings yourself can be a revelation and a great way to get close to your data, but at the same time there’s a wall of tedium people hit, when transcription would be gladly traded for a less painfully tedious task, like maybe plucking your own eyelashes out using two playing cards as tweezers. (If you blink you have to start over, but at least you don’t have to transcribe anything.)

Even hiring transcription out can be tedious. Everyone seems to hit the tedium wall eventually, and transcripts trickle in slowly.

Last week I saw a list message from an anthropologist looking for someone to transcribe interviews with speakers of an Appalachian variety of English — which reminded me of a project I worked on that included interviews with speakers of a non-standard (and often stigmatized) flavor of American English [1]. One of the most interesting things about the project for me was seeing how ideas about language and representation surfaced during the transcription process.

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(Old School) Sony Voice Recorder ~ CC BY-SA Stilfehler

Interviews are one of my favorite things in the qualitative toolkit. They weren’t always.

Working at a research institute I’ve gotten to hear a lot of interviews, and they have pretty much always been fascinating — but I was  uncomfortable with conducting them myself.  I’m not exactly a social butterfly, and the thought of being an official interviewer asking official questions of research participants was a bit unnerving. You have to sort of lead (really more like guide) a conversation, and you may have to recruit strangers to participate, sometimes without being able to compensate them for their time. It seems like a job for an extrovert who loves talking to people. I’ve known qualitative researchers who were geniuses at talking to people (among other things), and have always envied them. But barring the right (or wrong?) combination of alcohol and setting, that’s not my skill set.

What I figured out eventually though is that interviewing is not so much about talking to people as it is about listening to them.  Not to say that talking doesn’t play a role in getting to the listening  — the Talking Geniuses (still jealous) do great work with their combined talking and listening skills.  But being an introverted type can also be made into an advantage.

Below are some interviewing concepts that I’ve found useful to keep in mind when doing interviews, along with some practical suggestions that might work especially for those of us who aren’t gifted talkers [1].

1. Don’t put words in people’s mouths. In fact, talk as little as possible. A pause that’s a bit longer than a pause would be comfortable in everyday conversation can work wonders in provoking further insights from a respondent. It signals that you’re waiting for them to say more, and gives them time and space to think more deeply. (See? Awkward pauses aren’t a reflection on your social skills. It’s a research technique.)

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Walking home from the downtown Oakland BART station a couple weeks ago I passed a young man standing on a street corner next to his bike. He was dressed all in black, and wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. Kind of like this guy:

Occupy PDX Anonymous ~ Image in public domain

I was freaked out and even vaguely offended by the mask, which seemed a bit hypocritical of me. I’m a big supporter of masks [1] of a sort online: the use of pseudonyms, multiple identities, and some forms of anonymity — and here was a guy wearing a mask linked to a group actually called Anonymous. So why was his  ‘real life’ mask disturbing? In a chapter from Communities in Cyberspace, Judith Donath observes:

In the physical world there is an inherent unity to the self, for the body provides a compelling and convenient definition of identity. The norm is: one body, one identity. Though the self may be complex and mutable over time and circumstance, the body provides a stabilizing anchor… The virtual world is different. [2]

Maybe I was freaked out by an implicit violation of the body as “stabilizing anchor” in the physical world?

But there are so many forms of media that extend people beyond their bodies. People write books (sometimes under pseudonyms), circulate tales through oral traditions, and are captured on audio and video and in photographs.

There’s something unsettling about not being able to see someone’s face, though.

My reaction to the guy in the mask reminded of Google+ Chief Architect Yonatan Zunger’s recent comments on a change in Google+’s policy on pseudonyms. Following several months of backlash (#nymwars) against the lockout of  G+ users suspected of using names they aren’t commonly addressed by in the “real” world, the policy was modified to prohibit names that aren’t “name-shaped”. Pseudonyms are acceptable, but the nym has to look like a “real name” (or “wallet name,” i.e., a name on official identification in your wallet) to Google [3].

Yunger explained this policy as an attempt to avoid “culture clashes,” writing:

Generally, if you know at least one person who has an unusual name, you’re likely to know a lot of such people; i.e., people with unusual names travel in tightly-connected clusters. That’s largely because these names tend to be tied to particular subcultures. The problem we’re really encountering here is of culture clashes: people from one culture absolutely freak out when they encounter people from a very alien culture.

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