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258 CHAPTER 9 Ethnography

see or hear things that might be both very interesting and potentially sensitive.
Examples include comments about a coworker's (or manager's) incompetence
or discussion of children hiding certain behavior from parents. Although these
observations may be intriguing, fear of repercussions may lead you to be wary
of reporting them. How might you deal with this conflict between research
fidelity and the trust of your participants?

RESEARCH DESIGN EXERCISES

1. Imagine an ethnographic study of how college students use technology to work
on group projects. How would you go about designing such a study? You might
say that you will pick a class that involves group work, but this is only the
beginning—which courses would you consider? Which types of student? Which
roles would be appropriate? What sort of data would you collect? How would
your answer depend upon your status? In other words, would a college student
conducting this study use the same approach as a professor?
2. Conduct a mini-ethnography. Working in a team of two or three, observe a
group of people. You might observe students waiting outside a class on campus,
families at a playground, friends at a coffee shop, meetings of a student group,
or some other similar activity. (As this won't be a formal study, you probably
shouldn't interview participants or use other data collection methods, but
you can watch and listen in public places.) Write down your observations
individually and try to describe what you have seen and learned. Once all group
members have done this, meet and discuss your findings. Can you combine
your observations and individual models to build a consensus model? Build a
model that incorporates all of your conclusions and discusses differences in your
findings.

REFERENCES
Agar, M., 1980. The Professional Stranger. Academic Press, Inc., New York.
Angrosino, M., 2007. Doing Ethnographic and Observational Research. Sage, London, England.
Balka, E., Bjorn, P., Wagner, I., 2008. Steps toward a typology for health informatics. In:
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work.
ACM, San Diego, CA, USA, pp. 515–524.
Becvar, L.A., Hollan, J.D., 2007. Transparency and technology appropriation: social impacts
of a video blogging system in dental hygiene clinical instruction. In: Proceedings of the
2007 International ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work. ACM, Sanibel Island, FL,
USA, pp. 311–320.
Bell, G., Blythe, M., Sengers, P., 2005. Making by making strange: defamiliarization and
the design of domestic technologies. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
12 (2), 149–173.