Having said that, and as pointed out by Randall et al. Its chief characteristic, supposedly, is the researcher's (prolonged) immersion in the setting, and the detailed observation of circumstances, practices, conversations, and activities that comprise its 'real world' character. It is the ability of ethnography to understand a social setting as perceived by its participants (for HCI, the archetypal users) that underpins its appeal. The intention of ethnography is to see activities as social actions embedded within a socially organised domain and accomplished in and through the day-to-day activities of participants. (This, of course, has the added advantage (as the old joke goes) that when you do eventually come to speak your mind, you're a mile away. mindful of the Native American adage that one should 'never criticize a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins.' It is, as Fielding suggests,Ī stance which emphasized seeing things from the perspective of those studied before stepping back to make a more detached assessment. Ethnography seeks to present a portrait of life as seen and understood by those who live and work within the domain concerned, what it terms an 'appreciative stance', through the direct involvement of the researcher in the setting under investigation. Perhaps the main virtue of ethnography is its ability to make visible the 'real world' sociality of a setting through detailed descriptions of the 'workaday' activities of social actors within specific contexts. See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below. Copyright terms and licence: Unknown (pending investigation). See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below.įigure 31.1: 'Going native', as the ultimate form of ethnographyĪuthor/Copyright holder: Courtesy of Paul Dourish. In addition, of course, although ethnography proper is associated with anthropology and sociology, 'fieldwork' can be traced just as easily through cognitive science, Swedish and German work science, and so on.Īuthor/Copyright holder: Unknown (pending investigation). It has been put to the service of any amount of theoretical work, including feminism, Marxism, actor network theory, activity theory, distributed cognition, symbolic interactionism, grounded theory, and so on ad nauseam. See Hammersley 1990), though it has often been presented as a methodology of last resort - used for obtaining information about deviant groups and cultures - sometimes characterised as 'nuts, sluts and perverts' - that are impossible to investigate in other ways. These early anthropologists were convinced that only through living with and experiencing 'native' life could a researcher really understand that culture and that way of life, changing the perception of anthropology from being mere 'strange tales of faraway places.' Ethnography also has carved a place within sociology (e.g., the Chicago School. The move towards naturalistic observational methods in anthropology is generally attributed to Malinowski and popularised by other anthropologists such as Boas, and, more controversially perhaps, Margaret Mead (see Freeman 1999 Shankman 2000). The ethnographic approaches currently used in HCI clearly have their origins in social anthropology. 31.1 What is ethnography?Įthnography is a qualitative orientation to research that emphasises the detailed observation of people in naturally occurring settings. We conclude by considering some recent developments in ethnographic techniques - especially with regard to 'auto-ethnography' - and a range of problems and complexities in the use of the method in HCI that have arisen in recent years. We begin by discussing ethnography in general and its use in design before going on to focus on one particular variant of ethnography - ethnomethodologically informed, or inspired, ethnography - that has become commonly used as a method (though not as an analytic approach) in CSCW/HCI research.
In this chapter we attempt to describe ethnography, its evolution, and how it has been used in human computer interaction (HCI) and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) research. The way it is done is everything it can consist of and imagined descriptions cannot capture this detail. It cannot be imagined but is only actually found out, and just in any actual case. The concern to balance detailed documentation of events with insights into the meaning of those events is the enduring hallmark of ethnography.
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