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9.4 Conducting ethnographic research 245

several different terms”), you run less risk of misinterpreting or injecting bias than
you do if you interpret what you see as it happens (“the user became frustrated when
she was not able to find help with the feature”). You might try to regularly challenge
yourself to broaden the scope of your observation: ask yourself, “is there anything
I'm missing? Is there anything that I think doesn't look interesting?” If you force
yourself to examine all aspects of a complex situation, you may get a broader, less
biased picture of what is going on. That said, it is worth noting that observation is a
skill that might require significant practice to develop.
Taking appropriate notes from ethnographic observations—and, to a lesser ex-
tent, informal interviews—is a daunting challenge. You might be advised to record
relevant details such as time, place, identities of people present (perhaps anonymized
to protect their privacy), and descriptions of the context, behaviors, and interactions,
and include word-for-word transcriptions of conversations (Angrosino, 2007).
Although such information would undoubtedly convey a detailed picture of the situ-
ation that you have observed, there are significant practical problems involved with
overly detailed notes. You will soon become overwhelmed, as the quantity of data
will quickly become enormous. Furthermore, it's virtually impossible to record that
much data and to observe at the same time: as you take notes, you simply miss out on
what is happening (Agar, 1980). Audio or video recordings can help, but analysis of
these records can be a tedious, time-consuming chore in itself.
Deciding what is interesting enough to include in your notes, and understanding
how to describe it, may become somewhat easier once you have passed the initial
stages of your work. When you first start out, you may not have much idea of what
is interesting: you're in an unfamiliar context and everything is fair game. As you
begin to build some understanding, you may work your way towards an understand-
ing of what is interesting and what is not. Once you have this baseline, you might
think of your field notes as recording observations that describe familiar events in
terms of patterns that you've identified, while noting unfamiliar events that may be
worthy of consideration. You might also make note of questions that arise: if you
see something that you don't understand, it may be an appropriate subject for future
investigation (Agar, 1980).
Timing is also a challenge in recording notes from observations and informal
interviews. You might try to be prepared to record observations at all times, but you
never really know when something interesting is going to happen. You might hear an
interesting discussion or witness a relevant interaction just when you least expected
it. In this case, the best that you can do might be to remember as much as possible
and write notes as soon as possible. This is, of course, a highly fallible process, as
you are likely to forget important details and misremember others (Agar, 1980). You
would be well advised to seek out additional validating evidence for any observations
that are recorded long after the fact.
Documents, archives, and artifacts can also be useful sources of information.
Records that describe past activities: pictures, letters, e mails, deliverable documents,
and even tools; can provide information about how a group works and what the
dynamics are like. An ethnographic study of a software engineering group might