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Etnography. Agenda. Ethnography - definition. Greek: ethnos = nation; graphein = write; Writing a culture; An approach/ research method to allow one to gain an understanding about the informant’s point-of-view;
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Ethnography - definition • Greek: • ethnos = nation; • graphein = write; • Writing a culture; • An approach/ research method to allow one to gain an understanding about the informant’s point-of-view; • The main focus is on the informant’s point of view. What is and is not important, relevant, interesting, painful, exciting to the informant. Not to the researcher. • The researcher aims to gain this understanding and write about it. Writing is as important as everything else.
Ethnography - definition • “Ethnography comes out of anthropology. Anthropology would be the study of people and culture at a pretty broad level. Ethnography is about trying to make sense of people, not as individual personalities, not in a psychological sense, and not as societal movements, but as people embedded in what Clifford Getz used to call "webs of significance." It's thinking about people from the multiple ways in which they identify themselves, in a very holistic way.” (Genevieve Bell, May 2004).
Ethnography – Why should we care? In fact, the very last question I ask people is, "What do you do with your computer?" The first question I ask people is, "Tell me what you did yesterday." You'll get to technology, because it's in everyone's lives, but you'll want to make sure you understand the kinds of lives in which it is embedded. You can't work out what someone does with their mobile phone unless you know how they care about their family. (Genevieve Bell, May 2004). Why we should care? To design, develop, build, evaluate (and sell) solutions that are useful. Ethnograohy allows one to understand the an informant’s culture including his values, beliefs, power relations, myths, and, what is relevant to us, work practices.
Ethnography's hallmark is this notion of participant observation, the idea that you learn about other people's cultural practices by going there, being there, and by doing it with them. Most traditional anthropologists who would consider themselves to be ethnographers have spent years living in other cultures with people, and not just watching what they do, but actually doing it, too
Ethnography - History • 1915 - Bronislaw Malinowski’s “Argonauts of the Western Pacific” • The modern approach for field studies. Field studies should be in the field, not in a library as done before; • Ethnography is the complementary approach for field studies. • Focus on exhotic, “primitive”, cultures, on understanding institutions, costumes and daily life;
Ethnography - History • Chicago School of Sociology – 30’s to 60’s • Broad research program focusing on urban north-american life [Dourish, 2004 pag. 60]; • Lead to several studies of • marginalized [sub]-cultures : drug addicts, prisioners, etc. • Specific aspects of work including medical school students, nurses, policeman, teachers, etc. • This is relevant because it introduced a concern with work practices, with how work is carried out by social actors. This eventually lead to the adoption of ethnography in the study of use, design, development, and deployment of computational tools [Dourish, 2004 pag. 60].
Ethnography - History • In HCI / CSCW, Suchman’s “Plans and Situated Actions” (1987) • A critic to the AI planning model; • The planning model was embedded in the design of computational devices (in the UI);
Examples of Ethnography in HCI/ CSCW John Hughes, Bentley, Randall, Rodden, and others from Lancaster: air-traffic controllers; Julian Orr (1996): copy-machine technicians; Bowers, Button and Sharrock (XXXX): printing machines; Nardi (XXXX): spreadsheet users; Grinter (1996): software developers; And several others.
Examples of Ethnography in SE • Grinter (1996): software developers and their usage of configuration management tools; • Staundenmayer • Sharp (2004???): agile software development; • Ducheneaut (2005): open source software community; • Dittrich (XXXX): ????? • De Souza (2004): software developers and their usage of API for coordination;
Duration of an Ethnographic study • A traditional ethnographic study (in Antropology) has usually a 1-year duration (Nardi, 1997, pg. 363) for 2 reasons: • In primitive cultures, one needs to learn the language, adapt to life conditions (health, hygiene, etc). The researcher can even get sick! • In the academic system, one year is enough so that the student can graduate at some point • In CSCW / HCI, the focus is on work practices • 1 year is not necessary; • 6 weeks is enough to get good results, sometimes even less than that. • It depends on the context and research question;
Ethnographic Resarch • Data Collection methods • Participant [and non-participant] observation; • Unstructured and semi-structured interviews; • Less common: • Videos; • Data collection; and • Diary studies. • Data Analysis • Grounded theory; • Quality assurance • Yvonne has written about this somewhere
Interviews • A summary about interviews here...more details in another set of slides
Observation • One of the main tools of an ethnographer. In fact, it is a almost a requirement for ethnographic research: • Triangulation: is what people saysreally what they actually do? • Types, according to the researcher engagement: • Participant: the researcher acts as the informants: writes code, attends meetings, discusses solutions. Sharp et. al. (2004) • Non-Participant: the researcher only observes the informants. De Souza et. al. (2004);
Observation (2) • Fieldnotes • A description of events, people, interactions, tool usage, things listened, heard, experiences, impressions; • Be as detailed as possible, i.e., write down the higher number of details possible; • Separate observations and quotes from the informants from impressions and comments from the researcher; • A private document that can only be shared within the research team;
Data Analysis: Grounded Theory • Authored by Glaser and Strauss in1967; • It does not require a prior theory about the data, that is, a set of hypothesis to be tested. • Instead, the goal of grounded theory is precisely to generate theory grounded exclusively on the existing data. • In other words, it aims to develop a theory or explanation about what is going on in the field, or more specifically, what is available in the data collected. [Glaser & Strauss, 1967] and [Strauss & Corbin, 1997]
Grounded Theory: Overview • Grounded theory is based on Coding, which is the analysis of the data; • Field notes and transcriptions of interviews are coded to identify concepts and categories: • A concept names a phenomenon. It abstracts an event, object, or action/interaction that is significant to the researcher [Strauss and Corbin, 1998; pg. 103]. • Categories are grouping concepts put together under a more abstract high order concept [Strauss and Corbin, 1998; pg. 113].
Grounded Theory: Overview • Open coding • data is micro-analyzed (line-by-line) to identify categories • Axial coding • categories were broken into subcategories. Whereas categories stand for phenomena, subcategories answer questions about the phenomenon, such as when, where, why, who, how, and with what consequences; • Identifies relationships between categories; • Selective coding • the most important categories are selected to be core categories, that is, the categories that will be used to describe the emerging theory
