Ethnotale: Up Close and Personal

Analysis is a sacred and labor-intensive element of our work at Ethnographic Research, Inc. Sometimes we hear about ethnography timelines that have reporting slotted just a couple of days after the end of fieldwork and we aren’t sure how that is even possible. Ethnography is about bringing people and culture to life; it gets to the heart of what’s really going on with a depth that is simply impossible to achieve in a couple of days. Good ethnography offers what Clifford Geertz called “thick descriptions.” More than just reporting some top of mind ideas, it goes much deeper into context and culture. To get there, we rely on (1) analytical rigor, (2) theory, and finally, (3) years and years of experience.

1.    Analytical rigor

Doing analysis right takes a lot of work and a lot of time. We spend around six hours doing analysis for every hour of video we collect, and we collect tons of video. We often provide some “early insights” to clients who need something to work from immediately, but to do a complete analysis that makes the most of the data? That takes time.

Still, it doesn’t matter how much time you spend doing analysis if you don’t spend it wisely, so we use methods like Glaser and Strauss’s Grounded Theory, an inductive approach to analysis where data is coded and categorized until insights begin to emerge. People tend to picture analysis as this magical process where a wild-eyed, crazy-haired social scientist is thumbing through notes and watching video until some brilliant idea pops in their head. And yes, there are “Eureka!” moments (and sometimes crazy hair), but in reality, we follow fairly structured steps. If we didn’t, those big ideas might never show up and if they did, we wouldn’t be sure that they were trustworthy.

2.    Theory

Our team is academically trained in ethnography, and we learned that using theory to help inform research is not only helpful, it is required. It just makes sense. Brilliant minds have been wrestling with similar topics for years. It would be silly not to take advantage of that, and although we’re all sociologists by training, we also use theory from anthropology, psychology, and sometimes economics and philosophy.

Our use of theory has a meaningful impact on our results. It is vital in making sense of data, and it helps so much in understanding the social and cultural drivers behind the behaviors we observe. Research that ignores culture comes out flat. For social scientists, by definition, if you want to understand people, you have to look at the society and culture they live in: the people they interact with, the institutions they are a part of, the information they consume, and any other outside influence that shapes the way they see the world. Theory provides the scaffolding for organizing and understanding all of that data.

3.    Years of experience.

Ethnographic Research, Inc. opened its doors back in 2001, long before the iPhone, long before Facebook. Back when we started, ethnographers didn’t do in-homes, they did in-caves.

We’ve been observing people in-context for nearly twenty years, and we’ve picked up a few things along the way. This gives us a leg up whenever we start a new project—we go in with a strong understanding of how households have evolved over the last couple of decades and can use this to give projects an analytical jumpstart. We can approach new topics with a certain maturity and sophistication that would have been impossible were we just starting out. For instance, we do a lot of work studying how illnesses impact people’s daily lives. We’ve studied the daily lives of people with cancer, heart disease, arthritis, chronic pain, lupus, epilepsy, and many others. When someone comes to us wanting to learn about the patient experience of a condition we haven’t studied, like multiple sclerosis, we have all of this past work to help us learn, right away, what is unique and different about living with MS.

This experience is just as helpful for our other projects too. We have years of experience watching people shop, work, cook, groom, clean, play, parent, travel, and more. This allows us to place our research topic into a much larger database of insights into daily life habits and rituals. It helps us in every aspect of the journey that is ethnography. We can avoid common pitfalls in sampling and recruiting, we can get the most out of our in-home visits, and our analytical processes are refined and streamlined. We have also learned that it is our analytical processes that add the most value for our clients. All of the time and rigor we give to analysis are absolutely necessary when your research aims for deep, rich insights.