Transcript The role of ethnographic work in CSCW

Etnography
Agenda
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Ethnography - definition
 Greek:
1.
ethnos = nation;
2. graphein = write;
 Writing a culture;
 An approach/ research method to allow one to gain an
understanding about the informant’s point-of-view;
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
The main focus is on the informant’s point of view. What
is and is not important, relevant, interesting, painful,
exciting to the informant. Not to the researcher.

The researcher aims to gain this understanding and write
about it. Writing is as important as everything else.
Ethnography - definition
 “Ethnography
comes out of anthropology.
Anthropology would be the study of people and
culture at a pretty broad level. Ethnography is
about trying to make sense of people, not as
individual personalities, not in a psychological
sense, and not as societal movements, but as
people embedded in what Clifford Getz used to
call "webs of significance." It's thinking about
people from the multiple ways in which they
identify themselves, in a very holistic way.”
(Genevieve Bell, May 2004).
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Ethnography – Why should we care?
 In fact, the very last question I 
ask people is, "What do you do
with your computer?" The first
question I ask people is, "Tell
me what you did yesterday."
You'll get to technology,

because it's in everyone's
lives, but you'll want to make
sure you understand the kinds
of lives in which it is
embedded. You can't work out
what someone does with their
mobile phone unless you know
how they care about their
family. (Genevieve Bell, May
2004).
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Why we should care?
 To design, develop,
build, evaluate (and
sell) solutions that
are useful.
Ethnograohy allows one
to understand the an
informant’s culture
including his values,
beliefs, power relations,
myths, and, what is
relevant to us, work
practices.
 Ethnography's hallmark is this notion of
participant observation, the idea that you
learn about other people's cultural practices
by going there, being there, and by doing it
with them. Most traditional anthropologists
who would consider themselves to be
ethnographers have spent years living in
other cultures with people, and not just
watching what they do, but actually doing it,
too
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Ethnography - History
 1915 - Bronislaw Malinowski’s
“Argonauts of the Western
Pacific”
 The modern approach for
field studies. Field studies
should be in the field, not in a
library as done before;
 Ethnography is the
complementary approach for
field studies.
 Focus on exhotic, “primitive”,
cultures, on understanding
institutions, costumes and
daily life;
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Ethnography - History
 Chicago School of Sociology – 30’s to 60’s
 Broad research program focusing on urban northamerican life [Dourish, 2004 pag. 60];
 Lead to several studies of
 marginalized [sub]-cultures : drug addicts, prisioners, etc.
 Specific aspects of work including medical school students,
nurses, policeman, teachers, etc.
 This is relevant because it introduced a concern with
work practices, with how work is carried out by social
actors. This eventually lead to the adoption of
ethnography in the study of use, design, development,
and deployment of computational tools [Dourish, 2004
pag. 60].
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Ethnography - History
 In HCI / CSCW,
Suchman’s “Plans and
Situated Actions”
(1987)
 A critic to the AI
planning model;
 The planning model
was embedded in the
design of
computational devices
(in the UI);
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Examples of Ethnography in HCI/
CSCW
 John Hughes, Bentley,
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Randall, Rodden, and
others from Lancaster: airtraffic controllers;
Julian Orr (1996): copymachine technicians;
Bowers, Button and
Sharrock (XXXX): printing
machines;
Nardi (XXXX):
spreadsheet users;
Grinter (1996): software
developers;
And several others.
Examples of Ethnography in SE
 Grinter (1996): software developers and their
usage of configuration management tools;
 Staundenmayer
 Sharp (2004???): agile software development;
 Ducheneaut (2005): open source software
community;
 Dittrich (XXXX): ?????
 De Souza (2004): software developers and
their usage of API for coordination;
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Duration of an Ethnographic study
 A traditional ethnographic study (in Antropology) has
usually a 1-year duration (Nardi, 1997, pg. 363) for 2
reasons:
 In primitive cultures, one needs to learn the language,
adapt to life conditions (health, hygiene, etc). The
researcher can even get sick!
 In the academic system, one year is enough so that the
student can graduate at some point 
 In CSCW / HCI, the focus is on work practices
 1 year is not necessary;
 6 weeks is enough to get good results, sometimes even
less than that.
 It depends on the context and research question;
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Ethnographic Resarch
 Data Collection methods
 Participant [and non-participant] observation;
 Unstructured and semi-structured interviews;
 Less common:
 Videos;
 Data collection; and
 Diary studies.
 Data Analysis
 Grounded theory;
 Quality assurance
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 Yvonne has written about this somewhere 
Interviews
 A summary about interviews here...more details in
another set of slides
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Observation
 One of the main tools of an ethnographer. In fact, it
is a almost a requirement for ethnographic research:
 Triangulation: is what people saysreally what they
actually do?
 Types, according to the researcher engagement:
 Participant: the researcher acts as the informants:
writes code, attends meetings, discusses solutions.
Sharp et. al. (2004)
 Non-Participant: the researcher only observes the
informants. De Souza et. al. (2004);
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Observation (2)
 Fieldnotes
 A description of events, people, interactions,
tool usage, things listened, heard, experiences,
impressions;
 Be as detailed as possible, i.e., write down the
higher number of details possible;
 Separate observations and quotes from the
informants from impressions and comments
from the researcher;
 A private document that can only be shared
within the research team;
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Example of field note <here>
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Data Analysis: Grounded Theory
 Authored by Glaser and Strauss in1967;
 It does not require a prior theory about the
data, that is, a set of hypothesis to be tested.
 Instead, the goal of grounded theory is
precisely to generate theory grounded
exclusively on the existing data.
 In other words, it aims to develop a theory or
explanation about what is going on in the field,
or more specifically, what is available in the
data collected.
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[Glaser & Strauss, 1967] and [Strauss & Corbin, 1997]
Grounded Theory: Overview
 Grounded theory is based on Coding, which is
the analysis of the data;
 Field notes and transcriptions of interviews are
coded to identify concepts and categories:
 A concept names a phenomenon. It
abstracts an event, object, or action/interaction
that is significant to the researcher [Strauss and
Corbin, 1998; pg. 103].
 Categories are grouping concepts put together
under a more abstract high order concept
[Strauss and Corbin, 1998; pg. 113].
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Grounded Theory: Overview
 Open coding
 data is micro-analyzed (line-by-line) to identify
categories
 Axial coding
 categories were broken into subcategories. Whereas
categories stand for phenomena, subcategories answer
questions about the phenomenon, such as when,
where, why, who, how, and with what consequences;
 Identifies relationships between categories;
 Selective coding
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 the most important categories are selected to be core
categories, that is, the categories that will be used to
describe the emerging theory
Grounded Theory: Open Coding
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Aspectos Práticos
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