When and Why to Use Ethnography

Table of links

Abstract

1 Introduction

2 Is an ethnographic study the right choice?

• The context of your research
• The kind of research questions you want to answer
• What ethnographic studies require from the researcher

3 Planning an ethnographic study

• Finding a site for field work
• Participant or non-participant observation
• Duration of field work
• Space and Location
• Theoretical underpinning

4 Implementing your ethnographic study

• Gaining access and starting up
• Handling your preconceptions
• During the study
• Going Native
• Leaving the field

5 From Data to Text

• Reflective and inductive analysis
• Writing Ethnography for Software Engineering Audiences - Reporting the Results

6 Ethnography and Research Ethics

7 Final comments, Further reading and References

7 Final comments, Further reading, and References

At the start of this chapter, we provided a simple answer as to why ethnography is different to other qualitative methods. Having read through the chapter and hopefully completed the exercises along the way, we hope that you have a clearer and more holistic answer to this question. Ethnography is characterised by focusing on the members’ point of view and understanding why things are the way they are. Understanding current practice helps to inform decisions about future practice, processes and tools. But it’s not the specific practice that is relevant; it’s the significance of that practice. Ethnography is good at answering “how” and “why” questions and makes certain demands of the researcher, such as focusing on everyday detail and writing thick descriptions. It has been used to address research questions in four contexts: investigations of social and human aspects, to inform tool design, to inform process change and to complement other research methods. So we invite you to consider this question again, this time for yourselves:

1. What are the key differences between ethnography and:

   a. Grounded theory

   b. Action research

   c. Case study

2. How might an ethnographic study complement a research programme that involves: a. Experiments b. Survey c. Systematic literature review

The following are suggestions for further reading on this topic:

Fetterman, D.M.: Ethnography: Step-by-step. Sage publications (2020)

This is a very practical book about ethnography and although written with a social science audience in mind, it is accessible to readers from a wide range of backgrounds.

Hammersley, M., Atkinson, P.: Ethnography: Principles in practice. Routledge (2019)

This article is written from a social sciences perspective, and aims to take an objective view of ethnography and its limitations. It deepens and problematizes some of the issues raised in this chapter and introduces some others

Pink, S., Horst, H., Postill, J., Hjorth, L., Lewis, T., Tacchi, J.: Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice. SAGE Publications Ltd, United Kingdom (2016)

This text provides an introduction to digital ethnography and how different media and technologies affect the ethnographic research endeavour, both through their effects on the world being studied and the opportunities that technology provides for the researcher.

Randall, D.W., Harper, R.H.R., Rouncefield, M.: field work for Design - Theory and Practice. Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Springer (2007)

The book presents a social science perspective on ethnography in the context of Computer Supported Cooperative work. It explains ethnography and how it can be brought to bear on design of software to support cooperation. Though this is different from using ethnography in software engineering, it supports the possibility to use ethnography in different disciplinary contexts and reflects on the challenges of doing so.

Zhang, H., Huang, X., Zhou, X., Huang, H., Babar, M.A.: Ethnographic research in software engineering: a critical review and checklist. In: Proceedings ESEC/FSE 2019, Tallinn, Estonia, August 26-30, 2019, pp. 659–670. ACM (2019). As research is progressing, new ethnographic studies are published continuously. This is one recent literature review:

Sharp, H., Dittrich, Y., de Souza, C.R.: The role of ethnographic studies in empirical software engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 42(8), 786–804 (2016) This article is a companion to this chapter. It introduces the role of ethnography in empirical software engineering through a set of ethnographic studies that have been conducted with software engineering as their focus.

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