The word “ethnography” derives from Greek word “ethnos”—a group of people—and Latin word “graphia”—a description.   Thus, ethnography, at its core, is a description of a group of people.

Ethnography, as a social scientific methodology, originated along with the rise of American cultural anthropology and British social anthropology as academic disciplines in the early twentieth-century.

The central enterprise of the cultural or social anthropologist is to provide a holistic and “thick” (Geertz 1973) description of a group of people and that complex thing that unifies them most—their shared cultural system.

Anthropologists recognized that the most effective way to provide an accurate and a meaningful description of people’s distinctive cultural system was to immerse themselves physically and socially within this system as a part of a core methodology known as “participant-observation.”

Participant-observation involves occupying and oscillating between two seemingly conflicting roles—the role of a participant and the role of the observer in a cultural system—over an extended time-period (often 1-3 years).

By participating in a cultural system, the anthropologist learns and understands that system from the more meaningful native’s point-of-view.   Anthropologists also refer to this as the “emic” or “experience-near” (Geertz 1973) perspective.

On the other hand, the anthropologist intermittently switches to the observer role.  While natives tend to treat their cultural system as a taken-for-granted everyday reality, the anthropologist as observer recognizes it as a particular symbolic configuration of social reality that is different from their own and many others.

The observer’s outside perspective also allow them to identify certain patterns in the cultural system that the natives / participants / insiders do not.  Anthropologists also refer to the outside observer’s perspective as the “etic” or “experience-distant” point-of-view.

“Ethnography,” in this sense, is often lumped together—and reasonably so—with the participant-observation methodology that enables the most accurate, rich, and meaningful capture and description of a group of people’s cultural system.

The trend to use an “ethnographic” research methodology in the corporate world—among market research companies, advertising firms, brand strategists, and design firms—gained momentum in the early to mid-1990s.

User experience (UX research)—now a full-fledged professional field—largely originated from this initial interest in using more immersive ethnographic methods to understand better how people (users) interact with the various products in the here-and-now, including the extent to which the products satisfy their needs, goals, or desired outcomes.

In the corporate setting, it is certainly not reasonable to try to simulate the 1-3 years of participant-observation research that anthropologists spend to learn and describe a cultural system.

As a leading ethnographic market research company, Ethnographic Solutions aims to maintain certain ethnographic principles when designing and conducting market research studies.

We find, for instance, that many companies incorrectly equate “unobtrusive observation” with ethnography.  This is the concept of the researcher as the “fly on the wall”—placing themselves in a discreet or invisible position to capture how behaviors naturally or pristinely unfold without the introduction of researcher bias.

While “unobtrusive observation” is certainly a useful methodological approach, it is only half of the “participant-observation” approach that constitutes the core component of ethnography.

Companies that predominantly focus on “unobtrusive observation” are not realizing the full insight potential of a truly ethnographic approach.

In an ethnographic market research setting, the “participation” half is achieved by having the ethnographer spend extended time in the setting in which they have on-site, real-time conversations with respondents about their experiences, behaviors, perceptions, and decision-making.

The participation component allows the ethnographer to probe to understand what they have observed and what is guiding and motivating people’s behaviors.

Our distinctive approach to HCP-patient interaction research involves interviewing patients and doctors right after their in-office visits with one another.

As the ethnographer has had the benefit of listening to the encounter live (unobtrusively from an adjacent room), they can then ask relevant questions about the doctor-patient conversation while the visit is still fresh in the patients’ and doctors’ minds.

Without the ability to interview the patients and HCPs, it is not possible to understand the holistic context of the conversation that provides for a substantially more meaningful analysis of that HCP-patient interaction.

Additionally, our academic training in psychological anthropology makes us sensitive to the distinction between “representational” and “operational” models of thought (Caws 1974).

“Representational models” refer to how people tend to frame and represent their thoughts and behaviors.    Sometimes people provide accurate explanations or representations of their behaviors and mindsets, but often they do not for a variety of reasons (e.g., they cannot recall how they were thinking at the time, they want to provide an explanation that they assume the audience will interpret as logical and sensical, they want to justify their actions as reflecting good and decent intentions).

Operational models of thought are those ideas that are more directly tied to people’s operative orientations in everyday life—they guide their interpretations, reactions, and decision-making in the here-and-now.  As these ideas can occur at a more implicit level and resist consciousness, ethnography should aim to interview respondents soon after their actions are observed to help respondents explicate their operational models of thought that are at play in those observed encounters.

In our ethnographic approach to sales force effectiveness research, we spend 1-2 days with each of several sales representatives, observing their various sales encounters with customers.

In between each of those sales encounters, the ethnographer somewhat informally interviews the sales representative about their interpretations of the preceding customer visit and what implicit thoughts were guiding their approach to that sales call.

In sum, while observing behaviors and interactions is a highly useful methodological approach, market research firms far too often do it in isolation.  It is important that ethnographic market research companies couple the observation of interactions with respondent interviews while respondents’ recall of those interactions are fresh.  

This approach not only provides for a more precise understanding of the situational context that meaningfully informs and explains those interactions, but it also helps to capture the operational models of thoughts that more immediately guide and motivate people’s behaviors.

Written by Nicholas Kottak, PhD

References

Geertz, C.  1973. The Interpretation of Cultures.  New York, NY.  Basic Books.

Caws, P. 1974. Operational, representational, and explanatory models.  American Anthropologist.  76(1):1-11.