Ethnography Matters

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Editor’s Note: This post for May’s Special Edition on ‘Talking to Companies about ethnography’ comes from Steve Portigal who has a new book out this month titled Interviewing Users. As someone who’s been in the trenches for decades now running his own successful consultancy, Steve has done a great deal of both ‘interviewing users’ and ‘talking to companies about ethnography.’ Below we take the opportunity to interview him! We at Ethnography Matters are also big fans of the ‘War Stories‘ series on his blog where interviewers report on the unexpected things that happen to them in the field.

Steve Portigal is the founder of Portigal Consulting, a bite-sized firm that helps clients to discover and act on new insights about themselves and their customers. Over the course of his career, he has interviewed hundreds of people, including families eating breakfast, hotel maintenance staff, architects, rock musicians, home-automation enthusiasts, credit-default swap traders, and radiologists. His work has informed the development of mobile devices, medical information systems, music gear, wine packaging, financial services, corporate intranets, videoconferencing systems, and iPod accessories. He blogs at portigal.com/blog and tweets at @steveportigal.

This interview is available en Español – Habitantes Experiencia Diseño Innovación

Image courtesy of Rosenfeld Media

Ethnography Matters: First all Steve, congrats! We are so excited to have a copy of your book. Before diving into the specific questions, we want to know what motivated you to write this book?

Steve Portigal: Thanks! I’ve wanted to write a book from the time I was a little kid. I didn’t imagine it would be non-fiction, though! A lot of folks in the user experience and design worlds were feeling the need for a good book about this and my name came up as the author they’d want to see something from. I had been talking with Rosenfeld Media for a while about writing something, but it seemed like a daunting commitment. But when your peers are asking for it, it’s pretty compelling!

EM: So which part of the book was the most fun to write? Which part was the hardest?

SP: There were creative and intellectual challenges and rewards all the way along. A lot of the writing process was taking topics I had been speaking about for years and crafting the kind of text that is appropriate for a practitioner book. It was fun to revisit familiar points and find a better way to convey them. And then once in a while I’d hit on something that I maybe would typically gloss over in a presentation and realize I’d better dig a little deeper into myself and find away to explain something. The details of some of those moments are lost to memory, but the part of the process where I was discovering something by articulating it was pretty wonderful.

Read More…

Editor’s Note: This post for the February ‘Openness Edition‘ comes from Jeff Hall, Elizabeth Gin and An Xiao Mina who discuss their project to facilitate personal storytelling by homeless youth from Jovenes, Inc. in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood in East Los Angeles. The team from the Media Design Practices/ Field Track program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California had so much success with the timeline structure that they’re packaging it for future use at Jovenes, Inc. and releasing it under a Creative Commons license so others can try it out in the field. This kind of repurposing of ethnographic tools is exactly the kind of sharing that we get excited about at EM and we encourage others to share their own tools and work processes in similar ways.

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Photo by the authors. All rights reserved.

Ethnography has a lot to offer design, as evidenced by the growing field of design and design-related research informed by the methods and practices of anthropology.  Within this emerging interdisciplinary space, the design community and the anthropological community now have an opportunity to ask the question – “If anthropology has offered so much for design – what can design offer anthropology?”

We explored this question as part of our work with Jovenes, Inc., a center for homeless youth in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood in East Los Angeles.  Our goal was to provide an opportunity for youth to tell their personal stories and experiences. These stories would assist the organization in learning more about its constituency and support applications for additional funding to improve its programming and services. We worked in the vein of Participatory Action Research, by Alice McIntyre, taking a collaborative approach to the design and storytelling process, ensuring that both the youths’ untapped creative abilities and our expertise and research were consistently utilized throughout the experience. Read More…

Editor’s note: In this guest post, James Robson discusses how he used Google docs as a platform to conduct a series of life history interviews with Religious Education subject teachers in which he would ask interviewees to write about their lives in response to a few questions and then build on their responses with requests for clarification over the period of about 2 months. James writes that this format benefited from what is often seen as a weakness of email interviews  (the ability of interviewees to tap into the stories that people told about themselves) and enabled him to build sufficient trust among interviews to request face to face meetings, where he was able to use the narrative documents that they had produced as a stimulus for further questions. 

James Robson is a DPhil student at the Department of Education at Oxford University who is interested in ICT and religious education. He is currently focused on the contribution ICT can make to secondary school Religious Education (RE) teachers’ aspirations for their subject and how RE teachers perceive ICT as an aid to forging subject meaning.

Check out past posts from guest bloggers. 

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There are a few issues that always seem to come up again and again in the context of digital ethnography, but one of the most prominent is the issue of how to study phenomena or groups that exist across online and offline contexts.  An increasing number of studies take such a focus, often using various forms of multi-sited ethnography as suggested by Marcus.  However, such an approach can involve issues of disconnection between sites when the ethnographer moves between online and offline contexts and disconnected data gathering methods.  This problem is exemplified by a common research design, much criticized by Boellstorff in his chapter in Horst and Miller’s recent book, Digital Anthropology (2012), where researchers conduct interviews in isolation, paired with analysis of text from online communities.  This raises ontological and epistemological concerns relating to the extent to which culture can be consciously known by those within it and risks becoming a disconnected light analysis of more expansive issues.

This was a major concern (although there were many more) that I grappled with when starting my doctorate – investigating teachers’ use of online social spaces, focusing particularly on how online engagement with peers influences the construction of their professional identities.  Now that I’ve finished my fieldwork, am writing up, and am (hopefully) in my final year, I want to share here how I came up with a solution to the online-offline issue since it worked pretty well for me. Hopefully it might be useful for somebody else.

From the beginning it was clear to me that my field constituted multiple sites, both online and offline since secondary school teacher identity, even if partially constructed through interaction online, is still rooted and negotiated in other spaces – most obviously schools, but also conferences and continuing professional development (CPD) activities (e.g. training afternoons).  Therefore, I knew that I needed a way of bringing the online and offline together in a meaningful and holistic way (without failing to note the inherent differences between them).  My research design was essentially based around participant observations in three main online social spaces and several offline settings (mainly conferences and schools) and life history interviews.  Therefore, in the first instance, in order to ensure my observations were properly linked with my interviews, I recruited interviewees online through my own participation in the relevant online sites.

I then developed a slightly modified method of life history interviewing which would take place in both online and offline ethnographic contexts and would enhance certain aspects of each.  Building on the life history approach where the interviewer is viewed as a co-constructor of the participants’ narratives, I set up an online collaborative document, in this case a Google Doc, for each participant.  In it were some basic questions eliciting their life story in relation their use of the online social spaces I was studying, but also going further into their stories of how they became teachers, descriptions of their schools and examples of how their online interaction fits into their daily lives.  Then as part of an ongoing iterative process, lasting around two months, I placed questions inside the text and highlighted sections that required more information or clarification.  As time went on, these documents grew and grew into lengthy co-constructed narratives that were incredibly detailed and rich. Read More…

Living with and witnessing first hand the culture / society you are interested in, the ethnographic imperative to immerse yourself in the field is a real logistical challenge. As the 18-months-in-the-field standard became a disciplinary right-of-passage, research predating the immersion imperative was downgraded (and denigrated) as “armchair anthropology.”

As ‘virtual ethnography’ has emerged, the possibilities of a genuine experience from the armchair have been, on some level, recovered. However, in ethnographies of online environments like Second Life (Boellstorff) and networked games like World of Warcraft and EverQuest (Nardi, Taylor), all participants presumably are operating from their armchairs (or office chairs, couches, etc).  Over at Savage Minds, P. Kerim Friedman suggested that the spill over of our field sites through the Internet creates a kind of “database of lived experience” that offers perhaps some greater legitimacy to forms of remote ethnography.

I recently embarked on a project with Janaki Srinivasan, a recent graduate of the ISchool PhD program. She is the lucky one who gets to actually do the fieldwork (on mobile phones and the fishing industry in Kerala, India). For me, it was an experiment to see how I might overcome my more limited opportunities to jet off for months or years.

What I’m attempting though is not remote ethnography, something I’ve heard of before and that usually seems to entail data garnered through sites like Flickr, Facebook (i.e. to learn about pop culture in India). This is rather read-along ethnography. Janaki writes notes, snaps photos, and then they appear through the magic of Dropbox. I try gamely to keep up, reading the documents as they come in, in chronological order. So far I would describe this attempt as a failure (on my part). We’re up to week 9. The struggle has forced me to think about all of the ways knowledge of a place and the people living there just doesn’t carry over in the field notes.

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A first time contributor to Ethnography Matters, Jay Owens shares her summer reading list with us in the Ethnographer’s Book List series. I became familiar with Jay through liking and reblogging many of her tumblr posts. I eventually wandered over to Jay’s website that had the byline: tech + culture: patterns, trends, lines of flight.  I soon found out that Jay is a social media research at FACE, a research and innovation agency in London. And like many of us who find our way to projects and friends online, Jay got her job through Twitter (@hautepop). Jay tells me that she wants to write an ethnography of teenage Tumblr. (We hope you start that project soon!) Previously Jay studied social anthropology at the LSE. You can learn more about Jay’s research on her twitter, tumblr, or her website. 

If you would like to contribute to the “Ethnographer’s Reading List,” send us an email! - Tricia

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As a commercial researcher I look somewhat enviously at the rhythms of the academic year, when the summer can be a time away from reading lists or teaching schedules allowing for – hopefully – some wider reading and exploration. Nonetheless, working at the intersection of qual & quant research, social media technology and online behaviour means there’s a lot of areas I need to read up on this summer – below is only a fraction of my to-read list.

Research methods are a crucial area: with little in the way of established methods in my field, rigorous thinking about data, analysis and epistemology is essential for producing robust results. Theoretically, too, working on contemporary Western society means I want to add ideas from media studies, geography and economics to the anthropological grounding I gained at university. Finally ethnography, bringing it all together and asserting the primacy of people’s lived experiences.

Methods

Recommendations here would be particularly welcome if you believe there are better books I should attend to in these areas first. But so far, these are the key three:

1. John Law, After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (Routledge, 2004)

This book proved essential during my Masters thesis on the cultural meaning of dust (!), offering a much-needed way to think about something really fundamentally messy and impossible to fix within any theoretical paradigm I examined.  Now, I’m really curious what its core arguments about indeterminacy and othering look like when read through my current lens of social media data. What’s more, Law’s argument that “methods don’t just describe social realities but are also involved in creating them” is a massive and necessary provocation for anyone working in this field. The work we do with for example public Twitter API data – performing analyses essentially inaccessible to the people creating the information – clearly, politically, this raises questions Law should help me to better address.

Donald Norman’s Living With Complexity may make a useful adjunct to pursue the complexity theme through to empirical implementations in user experience design.

2. Sarah Boslow & Paul Andrew Waters, Statistics in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (O’Reilly Media, 2008)

Call it the digital humanities or the ‘quantitative turn’ in social sciences research – knowing what to do with quantitative data is becoming essential for cultural and communications research. The social media data I analyse includes hundreds of different distributions, be they frequency of tweeting, number of people followed, or reblogs per photo – and I want to get a better grasp of how to model and analyse them. This book has two particularly attractive features: Chapter 6 on critiquing statistics and understanding common pitfalls, and an orientation towards uses and applications rather than mathematical proofs.

3. Mark Newman, Networks: An Introduction (OUP, 2010)

Continuing in a quantitative vein, I also hope to make time for this comprehensive introduction to network theory and computational methods. Working in commercial research gives me the luxury of not having to run all the analysis myself – we work with a developer team – but nonetheless the more technical knowledge I gain, the more interesting questions I can ask. This book appeals for its breadth, bringing together network studies from biology, computing and physics as well as the social sciences.  In this way I hope it’ll offer more than a typical social sciences guide to social network analysis (e.g. Social Network Analysis: History, Theory and Methodology by Christina Prell, 2011) which seems a bit small-scale to speak to the million-message datasets we use in social media research.

Theory

4. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

Electronic communication is the very matter I research and yet I’ve never read McLuhan properly. Looking back to a classic from 1964 will hopefully cut through the distractions of much writing on contemporary social media  - all the books from 2011 claiming Google+ as the future, or those from 2007 heralding the era of MySpace – and demand some serious thinking about how the now fits into thousands of years of technology and information. (Failing that it’ll provide a lucrative source of quotations for Powerpoint presentations…)

5. David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (Verso, 2012)

In attempting to keep thinking about things post-university (I’m 26), as much as I’ve done so it’s been through two channels: Twitter and an urban politics reading group. The city provides a valuably approachable terrain for thinking about how power and systems interoperate – a way of fixing abstractions of capital or modernity into something familiar and tangible. As the recession double-dips and the financial crisis lurches on, Harvey’s book will – I hope – offer a way of thinking from a Marxist perspective that will feel practical, reasonable and actionable.

6. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, 2011)

Little needs to be said here other than a shame-faced confession that I’ve still not read it.

Ethnography

7. Suzanne Hall, City, Street and Citizen: The Measure of the Ordinary (Routledge, 2012)

A shame this has been published at university-library-only prices (£80!) – as an ethnography of south London’s Walworth Road, City, Street and Citizen could surely be of interest to many. Multiculturalism has become hugely devalued in British political discourse and yet it’s undeniably a lived reality in the capital. I’m fascinated to read Hall’s account of the micro-politics of relationship and difference, performance and exchange among small shopkeepers on this Southwark street – I think it’ll be a real case of making an area I know quite well both familiar and strange, as the best ethnographies should.

Suggesting comparison is Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong by Gordon Matthews (University of Chicago Press, 2011)  – an account of the most globalised building on earth.

The vision of an ethnographer physically going to a place, establishing themselves in the activities of that place, talking to people and developing deeper understandings seems so much simpler than the same activities in multifaceted spaces like Wikipedia. Researching how Wikipedians manage and verify information in rapidly evolving news articles in my latest ethnographic assignment, I sometimes wish I could simply to go the article as I would to a place, sit down and have a chat to the people around me.

Wikipedia conversations are asynchronous (sometimes with whole weeks or months between replies among editors) and it has proven extremely complicated to work out who said what when, let alone contact and to have live conversations with the editors. I’m beginning to realise how much physical presence is a part of the trust building exercise. If I want to connect with a particular Wikipedia editor, I can only email them or write a message on their talk page, and I often don’t have a lot to go on when I’m doing these things. I often don’t know where they’re from or where they live or who they really are beyond the clues they give me on their profile pages. Read More…

Rant this way ~ Photo by Nesster, CC BY-SA

Heather pointed out these comments by Bob Garfield from a recent broadcast of On the Media (“Sentiment Analysis Reveals How the World is Feeling“):

I’ve been arguing for years that qualitative research, focus groups and the like, are not research at all. They don’t generate data. It’s statistically insignificant, easily manipulated, and from my perspective just as likely to be exactly wrong as exactly right.

Garfield then adds:

But it seems to me that what you’re dealing with is something that deals with all of my objections, because you’ve got the world’s largest focus group.

Sigh. This is wrong on so many levels, and anyone who is interested in ethnography already knows why, but just to touch on some of the problems:

• Qualitative research can generate data. The tweets used in Johann Bollen‘s [1] sentiment analysis (the subject of this OTM episode), interview transcripts, field notes, photos, audiorecordings, visual recordings: all data. Some research within the qualitative tradition also generates numeric data [2] by, for example, calculating measures of intercoder reliability, or in the analysis of card sorting tasks.
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• There is a lot more to statistical testing than statistical significance (and some controversy among statisticians about overuse of significance testing). There is also more to quantitative analysis than statistical testing. Bayesian inference, for example, could be thought of as quantitative analysis that is not necessarily statistical testing.
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• Similarly, qualitative research cannot be reduced to “focus groups and the like”. The purposes, strengths and weaknesses of focus groups are very different from those of other qualitative methods such as [participant-]observation and one-on-one interviews [3].
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• Using statistical testing as a marker for what is or is not research omits work that has formed the backbone of the sciences such as classical experimentation, disconfirmation by example, comparative methods for creating typologies and analyzing artifacts, etc.
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• “Easily manipulated”? Yup, research findings in general can be manipulated. Statistical testing is really easy to manipulate.

Garfield’s statement also suggests either ignorance or dismissal of mixed methods research, which, I would argue, is increasingly becoming a gold standard for research in some fields, such as public health.

There’s a hint at why mixed methods have become so important in public health research in Garfield’s comment about “the world’s largest focus group.” Bollen’s use of a large collection of corpora is well-suited to his purposes, but other purposes can require different or additional kinds of work.

Let’s say I do a giant public health survey. If a minority in my sample doesn’t interpret a word or phrase in the same way that the majority interprets it, if some questions make no sense at all from their perspective, if people writing the survey have no idea what minority members’ concerns or experiences even are much less how they’re relevant to health, then the survey results will be meaningless for that social group.

There is no such thing as a survey that is not culturally informed. Without ethnographic work and awareness, surveys, public health information and campaigns, etc., will likely be culturally informed by those who are most powerful and/or in the majority. Qualitative research is indispensable for addressing structural health inequities affecting the less powerful. Should ethnographic work focused on these inequities be patted on the head and assured that it’s nice, but it’s not-really-research? Fortunately, the NIH does not think so.

Sometimes I wonder if people miss how widespread and useful qualitative work is because it can be invisible (see Tricia‘s related post about the ‘Invisibility of Ethnography‘). A couple recent episodes of On the Media may clarify the kind of research that Garfield is dismissing here, while at the same time (perhaps unknowingly?) depending on it.

On Nov. 4th, Garfield spoke with social media researcher danah boyd about “Parents helping kids lie online.” The paper [4] behind this interview presents quantitative summaries of survey data — “real” research, perhaps, to Garfield.  But hmm, how and why was this survey designed?

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reblogged from Cultural Bytes:

For a long time, I’ve wanted to understand how ethnographically driven research is different from market research.  While I intuitively understood the differences between the two, I didn’t take the time to fully sort it out.

I finally found someone who not only clearly explains the differences, but provides greater clarity and depth to my understanding of design research.

I love the way Panthea Lee of reBoot  contrasts market research and design research in, Design Research: What Is It and Why Do It? Panthea explains that the primary difference is that market research treats people as consumers – wage earners with an income to dispose on a product or service, while design research treats people as users  – humans who are trying to fulfill everyday needs through what means they see as possible.

“Market research identifies and acts upon optimal market and consumer leverage points to achieve success. Its definition of success is not absolute, though metrics are often financial. Design research, on the other hand, is founded in the belief that we already know the optimal market and consumer leverage points: human needs. Unearthing and satisfying those needs is thus the surest measure of success. Through this process, we earn people’s respect and loyalty.”

Panthea’s essay doesn’t put a value judgement on market research, rather it makes the boundaries between both types of research more explicit. This clarity allows researchers the space to be explicit about when they are wearing the market research or the design research hat. Sometimes a project needs to be considered from a market and a design perspective. So this is when this chart below becomes super useful! Read More…