What is ethnography, and how has it been used in the professional world? This article is a quick and dirty crash course for someone who has never heard of (or knows little about) ethnography.
Anthropology at its most basic is the study of human cultures and societies. Cultural anthropologists generally seek to understand current cultures and societies by conducting ethnography.
In short, ethnography involves seeking to understand the lived experiences of a particular culture, setting, group, or other context by some combination of being with those in that context (called participant-observation), interviewing or talking with them, and analyzing what happens and what is produced in that context.
It is an umbrella term for a set of methods (including participant-observation, interviews, group interviews or focus groups, digital recording, etc.) employed with that goal, and most ethnographic projects use some subset of these methods given the needs of the specific project. In this sense, it is similar to other umbrella methodologies – like statistics – in that it encapsulates a wide array of different techniques depending on the context.
One conducts ethnographic research to understand something about the lived experiences of a context. In the professional world, for example, ethnography is frequently useful in the following contexts:
- Market Research: When trying to understand customers and/or users in-depth
- Product Design: When trying to design or modify a product by seeing how people use it in action
- Organizational Communication and Development: When trying to understand a “people problem” within an organization.
In this article, I expound in more detail on situations where ethnographic research is useful in in professional settings.
Ethnographies are best understood through examples, so the table below include excellent example ethnographies and ethnographic researchers in various industries/fields:
| Project | Area |
| Computer Technology Development at Intel | Market Research |
| Vacuum CMarket Research Examples | Market Research |
| Psychiatric Wards in Healthcare | Organizational Management |
| Self-Driving Cars at Nissan | Artificial Intelligence |
| Training of Ethnography in Business Schools | Education of Ethnography |
These, of course, are not the only some situations where ethnography might be helpful. Ethnography is a powerful tool to develop a deep understanding of others’ experiences and to develop innovative and strategic insights.
Photo credit #1: Paolo Nicolello at https://unsplash.com/photos/hKVg7ldM5VU.
Photo credit #2: mentatdgt at https://www.pexels.com/photo/two-woman-chatting-1311518/.