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248 CHAPTER 9 Ethnography

important (or perhaps not-so-important) details, they'll let you know. This sharing of
draft reports may not be appropriate in some circumstances, including (but not lim-
ited to) studies that involved complete participation (participants who weren't aware
of the research might be somewhat upset at seeing the report) and situations in which
participants might be interested in “slanting” the contents of the report to meet their
(real or perceived) interests.
Finally, like case studies, ethnographic research reports often raise questions of
privacy and confidentiality. When possible, consider anonymizing location details.
The hospital study discussed at the beginning of the chapter might be described as oc-
curring in a “large urban hospital,” instead of providing the hospital name. Uniquely
identifying details might be suppressed or used only with permission of the groups
and individuals involved.

9.5 SOME EXAMPLES

Ethnographic methods have a rich history in the social sciences. However, they have
only recently come to the forefront in the area of HCI. A number of studies have
utilized ethnography methods to understand the context of technology usage. Most
often, these ethnographic studies take place in homes, workplaces, educational set-
tings, and virtual settings. While ethnographic research is not limited to those four
types of setting, they are the ones that seem to garner the most attention and exami-
nation in the HCI world. Studies of mobile devices have also started to come to the
forefront.

9.5.1 HOME SETTINGS
One important area of technology usage is people's homes. To separate out and ex-
amine the technology in a sterile lab would be to miss the rich context of home
usage. One specific series of ethnographic studies of homes and technology use in
different countries provides a baseline for understanding the challenges (Bell et al.,
2005). The bottom line is that country, culture, and religion have a great impact on
how technology is used in homes. While not specifically an article on ethnography,
Chavan et al. (2009) report on examples of home technology products that failed
because designers didn't understand the context of usage. For instance, in southern
India, clothes washing machine sales were awful for Whirlpool, because traditional
southern Indian clothes, using very thin fabrics, were often getting caught and shred-
ded in the washing machines.
There are also, in many cases, gender issues to understand. In many countries,
even though women put in an equal amount of work in the workplace, women also
perform a majority of domestic household tasks (Blythe and Monk, 2002; Rode et al.,
2004; Bell et al., 2005). In one ethnographic study, it was noted that while men may
not do an equal share of the household work, they often feel guilty about this (Blythe
and Monk, 2002). This ethnography study noted that many domestic technologies