Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative research approach that studies a culture, community or organization from the inside, through extended immersion and participant observation in people's natural settings. It shows what people do and why, in the context where they do it.
How it works
The method comes from anthropology, where fieldworkers lived in a community for a year or more. The researcher participates in daily life while observing it, takes detailed field notes, holds informal conversations and interviews, and collects artifacts. The word also names the written account produced from that work.
Business ethnography compresses the method: days or weeks of observation in homes, stores or workplaces instead of years. Its power is in revealing where stated habits and observed behavior part ways, and in surfacing habits and workarounds nobody would mention in a survey. Its cost is time, access and the skill to interpret what is observed.
A worked example
A kitchen appliance maker spends 2 days each with 10 families during weeknight dinners. The researchers note that 8 of the 10 use the oven as extra storage for pans, and remove them before every use. The next product line adds a warming drawer marketed as pan storage.
Related
Automate this in Pulse
An ethnographer can turn questions that arose in the field into a Pulse brief and test them with a wider group from the same community, keeping immersion for the depth.