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244 CHAPTER 9 Ethnography

studies rely on interviews, case studies, and documents or other artifacts as their
primary sources of data.
Interviews in ethnography serve many purposes. Unlike traditional interviews
(see Chapter 8), in which a researcher has a single meeting with a study participant
for a limited period of time, an ethnographic interview is often part of a longer,
ongoing relationship. In the early stages of a study, interviews may be informal dis-
cussions aimed at building trust and understanding broad parameters. As you may
not know what you're looking for at first, your early interviews are likely to be very
open-ended and unstructured (Angrosino, 2007). In fact, these informal interviews
may not even feel like interviews. You might be asking questions as people show you
around, discussing issues of concern as you interact with group members, and other-
wise participating in seemingly ordinary interactions. Although these conversations
might not feel like interviews, they can be useful data collection techniques. A com-
monly used technique in ethnographic interviews involves presenting participants
with items—known as “probes”—designed to provoke reaction and spark conversa-
tion (See Chapter 8 for a discussion of probes).
The goal of these informal interviews is generally to get people talking. As they
say more about the environment that you're studying, your informants increase the
breadth and depth of your understanding. Appropriately asked questions can be very
useful in this regard. If they describe an interesting situation, you might ask how
often it occurs. Leading questions present a viewpoint that invites either agreement
or dissent: “Is this tool really that hard to use?” Other questions might invite com-
parisons, contrasts, or detailed explanation (Agar, 1980). The challenge of planning
questions like these in the course of ongoing conversation may seem substantial, but
you might find that your curiosity as a researcher takes you a long way. If a comment
piques your interest, find a respectful way to ask for more detail.
Not all of your interviews will be completely informal. More structured tech-
niques, such as life histories (Agar, 1980) (see the Design for Alzheimer's Disease
sidebar in Chapter 7) and time diaries (Chapter 6), can be informative components
of ethnographic studies. As your data collection and analysis leads you to build a
deeper understanding of the group that you're studying, you may find it useful to
conduct slightly more formal interviews with group members with whom you've not
previously interacted. These discussions can help you validate models or conclusions
derived from earlier interactions with other informants.
Observation is easier than it sounds. Just stand back and watch, right? If only
it were that simple. Unfortunately, several factors work against us. As much as we
might like to think that we're objective observers, we're not. By necessity, we fil-
ter what we see and hear, and interpret our observations through the lenses of our
own history, experience, expertise, and bias. The goal of ethnographic observation
is to shed this baggage, in the hopes of seeing things with “new” eyes, perhaps as a
stranger would (Angrosino, 2007). Of course, this is easier said than done, particu-
larly if you are in a situation that is somewhat familiar. A clear distinction between
observation and interpretation might be helpful in this regard (Angrosino, 2007). If
you only record what you see (“the user opened the help facility and searched for