Analyzing Ethnographic Data Urb P 298 Beyond interviews

Analyzing Ethnographic Data Urb. P 298

Beyond interviews What are the different kinds of qualitative data? Interviews (unstructured to highly structured) and….

Data • What people say – interview transcripts, notes – Audio Recordings – Visual material collected by them • What people do – Field notes – Photographs (collected by you) – Other visual data (movies) • What people leave behind – Ephemera (brochures, websites, blogs) – Archives, documents, letters

Two Examples • Work, Identity and Community in Silicon Valley – 175 people, three interviews, including maps of work spaces and network “maps, ” contextualized observations, organizational ephemera. N. S. F. funds used for transcription and coding. – Product--reports, academic publications.

[WICSV MERC 01 Working Spaces Drawing]

Personal Health Ecologies • Institute for the Future • Multi-year, varying sampling strategies • Interviews, network maps, health time lines, photographs of spaces and objects, observational notes • Participant-observation

Project Dynamics and Purpose Guide Analysis • Team analysis sessions – construction of persona (for client workshops) – Theories of embodiment (for contribution to knowledge) • Product: Professional report, client workshops, input into forecasting map of global health economy

Data Management • Stay on top of the data • Copies, copies • Organization and filing (electronic and physical) – Type (photographs) – Source (sampling) – Category (disease status) • Research journals are vital! • Team communication! Project management goes beyond data collection

Theory-Method • Theory shapes your analytical purpose – What are the structures of work, how is work done, across various organizational forms? – What are the organizational implications for trust is relationships given job mobility and globally distributed teams? – What are the sources of power in shaping a reputation? – What are the forms of social capital that flow through egocentric networks? – How can we infer meaning, as people articulate “what is health? ”

Basic Analytical Techniques • Reading, looking, thinking (sorry, no help from computing here) – How do people talk? – What are people doing? • Sorting, big piles to littler ones • Iterations of theme discovery, reworking of data (ex. Quantified and qualified self)

When do you do Analysis? • In the field • Just after you “come back” • Upon reflection or several projects later (re -mining data)

Coding • Tight coding, analytical codes imbedded in hypotheses, codes abstract • Indexing, analytical codes in English, easier to handle, but cannot take on complex correlations (color coding, flagging, cut and paste)

[coded transcript being readied for data entry into Ethnograph] WK_JOBDESC, WJD work, job description NET_NONFAM, NN networks, non-familial ID_SELF_ID, IS identity, selfidentified culture (list)

A Note on Technology • • One note Ethnograph Egonet Atlas. ti

Triangulation • Analysis of qualitative data does not mean lack of rigor • Cross-check, do not be seduced by colorful outlying examples • Return to the field and do ground truth

Validity Revisited • Internal validity—did the data do a good job of reflecting the field? • Construct validity—do the techniques used really “get at” what we think they did? • External validity—can the data collection techniques and constructs be used in other studies?