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230 CHAPTER 9 Ethnography

also a bit concerned that your questions might fail to address certain key issues.
Interviews might help, but they suffer from similar problems. Talking directly with
potential users might be helpful, but is also prone to potential omission of important
topics. Besides, you don't know if your questions would be culturally appropriate—
you don't want to offend anyone.
Having reached this point, you might (perhaps not so reluctantly) conclude that
you need to take a trip to observe workers in this environment in person. You decide
to learn what you can about hospital workplace practices and general cultural back-
ground that will help you understand how things are done “over there.” You talk to
your clients to identify a hospital where you can observe potential future users work-
ing in the intensive-care unit. You ask them if they can introduce you to a trusted
partner who can show you around. You talk to this person to get some basic under-
standing. You then observe the health-care workers in action and talk with some of
them in detail. You might spend several days “shadowing” some of them, following
them around as they attend to various tasks and concerns.
As you go through these various steps, you begin to understand how these pro-
fessionals work and what they need. You use this understanding to begin working
towards lists of requirements and elements of proposed designs. As time goes on,
you'll discuss these artifacts with your potential users, looking to them to either
approve your suggestions or to suggest revisions that might correct mispercep-
tions. As your ideas become more fully developed, you travel to another hospital
in a different city to determine whether or not your ideas are appropriate for this
second group of users.
This combination of observation, interviews, and participation is known as eth-
nography. Ethnographic research projects use deep immersion and participation in a
specific research context to develop an understanding that would not be achievable
with other, more limited research approaches.
This added insight does not come without a substantial cost: ethnographic re-
search can be very challenging. Participation in a specific context can help you un-
derstand how to build tools for that situation, but effective data collection requires
well-developed skills in observation, conversation, and interpretation. Ethnographers
must take significant care in deciding with whom they should be talking and how to
reconcile contradictory data.
This chapter provides some background on ethnography and its use in human-
computer interaction (HCI) research. We discuss the steps involved in an ethno-
graphic research project: selecting groups to study, choosing a form of participation,
making initial contact, building relationships within the group, iterative data collec-
tion and analysis, and reporting results.
We discuss the use of ethnography in a variety of HCI projects, including exam-
ples from homes, workplaces, schools, and online, with a goal of understanding when
it is appropriate for HCI research and how it might best be conducted. Although one
chapter in a textbook is obviously no substitute for years of ethnographic research
experience, we hope to provide an introduction that helps you make the most of this
powerful technique.