Is Your Ethnography Truly Ethnographic?

Maybe you’re not a PhD in anthropology but chances are if you give Linked In a cursory glance every now and then you know — from all the debate and discussion among those who do have the degree — that there’s more to ethnography than your consultants might be delivering.

If you’re looking to figure out if those consultants and their claims to conducting ‘ethno’ are legit or not, the difficulty is that it can be a real challenge determining if their version of ethnography is truly ethnographic. For most consultants these days, ethnography is generally used as a synonym for interviews. Send the ‘ethnographer’ to the home of the target someone — a consumer, a user, a patient etc. — talk with them for an hour or two about the target behavior — shopping, surfing, taking meds etc. — and voila, ethnography has happened, right?

Wrong.

Ethnography isn’t a synonym for interviews. Nor is it about doing something with people or observing those people doing that something. It is so much more than talking to or observing people for a couple of hours, coming back to the office and writing some so-called insights into a PowerPoint deck.

The first thing that defines ethnography is that this practice (and a practice is what it is) is composed of two parts: ‘ethno’ and ‘graphy’. This means that most of what occurs in a project, including that which occurs far away from those target someones, is actually a part of ethnography. In the same way that traditional anthropologists typically (but not exclusively) understand ethnography as occurring over a somewhat protracted period of time, ethnography in the context of business begins the moment that the ethnographer is first introduced to the client.

Here, ethnography should be understood as a way of ‘being there’. That is, it is an immersion in the business challenge of the client, the business itself, its actors, its consumers, users and/or patients and beyond. As such, it is a reflexive mode of analysis where the ethnographer is very much concerned with her role in the time and place of the study. What reflexive mode means, is that the ethnographer has to understand their place and how they affect what is available to study. There is no such thing as an unbiased study, since simply observing or asking questions is actually changing what is going on slightly. The ethnographer has to be “reflexive” and think about how their presence changes things and make alterations in their analysis to accommodate their interventions.

Finally, ethnography is an act of double translation: experience, understand, translate for yourself, and then translate what you know to others so they can benefit from your experience and newly accumulated understanding of others without having to be there. This is the ‘graphy’ of the practice — ‘graphy’ meaning writing. Traditionally, the writing part of the process is the set of decisions you make to communicate that experience to those who were not there, like a client. Choices like what medium to use, how to express the ideas, how much to explain, and how to make sure these ideas land are all part of the process and method of ethnography.

The reason why ethnography has entered business research is because it is the only way to get access to certain answers. It is also because it is the most empirical thing you can do when studying human behaviour. Numbers may provide a kind of objectivity, but only ethnography lets you be there and see it for yourself. However, this empiricism is lost if you do not fulfill the promise of ethnography by analyzing what you saw and translating it with honesty and rigour for the final audience. The analysis and storytelling is just as important. Done properly it relays the truth of a situation and allows your audience to understand more than just basic observations about what people think, do, and want.

As a process, ethnography is an antidote to the methodological failures of many traditional business research practices. It is the only way to undo the damage done by focus groups — methods that were designed to eliminate context. Focus groups were a practice developed over seventy years ago to provide laboratory conditions to isolate responses. The idea was to eliminate the “noise” of people’s real lives. Since we have now figured out that real life is what we should be studying, focus groups should no longer be used. Humans are not lab rats, and we learn very little about consumer needs in conditions designed to isolate individual behaviours.

Ethnography does not include focus groups. So, if there is a one-way mirror and an observation booth, it isn’t ethnography. This doesn’t mean focus group contexts are bad, they are just designed to study very specific things. They should be left to studies that need to understand a few very specific questions, like usability issues. If someone offers focus groups to understand behaviours and desires, it’s best to ask if they are using the right tool, because they are trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver.

There is another problem with how ethnography is presented today. It comes from design thinking’s attempt to “democratize” the process. Ethnography is not something that just anyone can do. It is something that is both a process and a skill. This means it must be learned, practiced, and honed by specialists. DIY approaches to ethnography are good experiences for the practitioners but usually lack the rigor that it takes years to develop. Without this rigor it can often lack the detailed data collection and analysis needed to make the kind of insights that good strategy depends on.

On top of this, not all ethnographic training programs are the same. There is a large gap between a semester-long course in design ethnography and degree that requires multiple field experiences or a year or two of fieldwork and a dissertation to complete. This skill gap has nothing to do with process. Because ethnographic fieldwork, analysis, and reporting are about taking the chaos of real life and turning it into a productive story — that can both explain, interpret, and predict — training and experience can deliver more nuance and push an insight beyond simple observation into grounded, empirical interpretation. The latter is what business needs now. We have been relying on the former for too long.

So that’s ethnography. If this isn’t how your consultants are talking about it then chances are they are not doing it. And this is too bad, because it is the best way to understand behaviour, business challenges, and potential connections between them.

Questions to ask:

• Who are your ethnographers and what was their training? Who will actually be doing the research?

• How do you ensure that your insights are always grounded in what the people said?

• Are you using design ethnography, anthropological ethnography, sociological ethnography, or non-specialist ethnography? (All of these yield different results.)

• Why are you still using focus groups?

• How will you make sure that your insights speak to our internal audience?

• Will you use a moderator/translator or can your ethnographers actually speak the language and capture the nuance we need?

• How much time will you spend on analysis? Can we participate?

• How do you develop and test hypotheses as part of your process?

• What is an insight and what do they tell me?

• Is a ppt deck really the right way to communicate these insights to my team?

Written by Dr. Morgan Gerard and Dr. Paul Hartley