Ethnotale: Up Close and Personal

I always tell clients that one of the benefits of an ethnographic approach is that you get really close to the action or the ‘thing’ that you want to learn about.  And I do mean REALLY close.  I often compare an ethnographic research study to a telephoto snapshot.  Imagine you are at a football game and you want to capture an understanding about what is happening in the stadium.  You have a couple of options at your disposal.  You can take a wide-angle photo and capture the entire stadium.  In this photo you will see EVERYTHING, but you won’t be able to see ANYTHING very clearly. Or you can take a telephoto picture and capture a specific area of the stadium.  In this photo you will see only a small portion of what is going on in the stadium, but you will see that in detail and with clarity.  The wide-angled photo is the kind of picture you get with large quantitative studies, and the telephoto picture is what you get with an ethnographic study.  Both representations of the stadium are accurate and useful. In fact, they are complimentary.  Ideally you would consult both before coming to any conclusions about what is happening at the football stadium.

I have a lot of respect for my statistics gathering colleagues (in fact I used to teach statistics).  I like to know what they are learning because it helps to provide context for my fieldwork and sometimes even provides a framework for project design or analysis.  But I really get excited about capturing that telephoto image.

Another way to think about this difference in perspective is to use the analogy of a frog’s eye view versus a bird’s eye view.  Statistics give us a high level view of what is happening, from far away.  Whereas an ethnographic approach gives us a frog’s eye view.  In order to get the frog’s eye view, you usually need to get down in the thick of things and that is why I love being an ethnographer.  I think it is so exciting to see things happen in real time and to be able to understand it all in the context in which it occurs.  Real life is often unpredictable, messy, exciting, and frustrating, and ethnography helps to bring all of this to life.  Over the course of my career I’ve had a frog’s eye view of so many interesting things and this has proven invaluable to me and my clients because it allows me to uncover insights and perspective that just can’t be obtained in any other way.  For example, there is just no better way to understand the world of teenage gamers than to hang out with them for a summer and to try to get into their world.  Yep, I got to do that!   Or to hear the first hand stories and experience the daily life routines and rituals of people who are living with chronic pain and literally SEE how their world has shrunk into their living room or kitchen.  Sure sometimes I get a little mud on me, but that is part of the experience and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.