Text Exploration
In this text, the author describes how a researcher might read and interpret an ethnographic research study properly. He describes a brief history of ethnographic research, and then provides practical questions one might ask (or avoid asking) as they work to make sense of ethnographic scholarly work.
Ethnography is “an approach to understanding cultural life…with the goal of understanding not simply what people are doing, but how they experience what they do.” Ethnographic research should strive to, as Marilyn Strathern offers, “generate more data than the investigator is aware of at the time of collection.” Data is generated, not discovered and collected, and to be steeped in data leads to thick descriptions of events and interactions. The ethnographer is not a remote and passive observer; they are “just another party to the scene.”
Ethnography emerged in the early 1900s from a scholar living with a group new to him, and documenting what happened. The documentation focused on language, religion, art, leadership, conflict—the “stuff of life.” Other researchers leveraged this approach to investigate urban life as well. Over time, a structuralist approach emerged that focused less on observing any single event to one that looked at a system of events, or from any one experience to the overall system of meaning in which the experience is embedded.
In the 1970s, a hermeneutic approach arose that emphasized interpretation of data. This approach shifts the view of a researcher from one that looks and then provides an answer, to one that offers an interpretation. Their understanding and lenses on the situation “count,” and their role is not simply to uncover some hidden truth. The interpretation is the “thick description,” and the goal is to “open up, not to close down the play of meaning.” The description should evoke multiple perspectives and interpretations, rather than try to offer a “solution,” as if there is a problem.
Reflexivity then emerged as an extension to the hermeneutic approach. This questioned what it means for one to write about someone else, as the writer typically makes assertions, and those assertions-as-facts reverts to a traditional view of an ethnographer cataloguing things they see; worse, it is argued, they also curate what they see, introducing a questionable power relationship.
The author then describes the connection between ethnography and HCI, with the intention to help HCI scholars understand and better respond to research that leverages this methodology. Ethnography “revels in particulars, and seeks to explain actual human occasions and circumstances.” This runs counter to most HCI traditions, which attempt to create abstracted models that remove anomalous specificity. Ethnographic work does offer generalizations, but through comparison and across observations. The content can be generalized in a broad level, through the development of a larger corpus of content.
When a researcher works to interpret and judge a text documenting ethnographic research, they should ask several questions. What are the empirical and conceptual claims of the work? What was the context in which the work was produced? And how does the output contribute to a larger understanding?
The author also identifies responses to common questions scholars who are unfamiliar with ethnography may ask. Perhaps the most common is asking if the sample selected is representative. The “concern for the ethnographer is to understand and account for what arises in the data.” There is no intent of making any statistical claims of significance or prediction. Another common response is to question if the participants in the study lied or provided accurate information. This question should be reframed to ask “what warrants that answer?” Why was the answer to the question the sensible thing for the person to say, at that time? Finally, the author challenges the need for ethnographic research to lead directly to design requirements or criteria. In the context of design, ethnography helps frame questions. It is not a tool or way of working that offers solutions.