Analyzing Ethnographic Data UrbP 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 MERC01 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, 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,NNnetworks, non-familial ID_SELF_ID, IS identity, self- identified 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?