Using POSTA framework for observation in the field
As part of a team I contributed towards two ethnographic research projects, ‘exploring the work patterns of mobile workers’ and ‘how multi-person households do grocery shopping’. The challenges I faced in documenting ethnographic research for design ethnographers were mainly concerned with ‘communication’. In order to communicate well, design ethnographers’ doc
umentation, such as interview transcripts, field notes, and hot reports, need to make sense not only to the researcher him/herself but also to other design ethnographers both within and outside a team. The clearer the documentation, the easier the data and obtain actionable insights.
Before the research takes place, we, design ethnographers, need to first make sure we, along with the client, formulate the right research question. Once the research question is set, we should then put our empha
sis on the communication within the team. When documenting a fieldwork, our writings about the people and culture we are studying undoubtedly makes sense to us, what we write doesn’t necessarily make sense to other design ethnographers and vice versa. One way to solve the problem is to create a certain protocol for observation and interviewing to structure the research in team situations; adopting frameworks is specially useful. Frameworks allow us to communicate with ourselves, making sure we stay on the right track while in the uncertainty of the field. Moreover, they provide us the tools to make sure our documentation is transferable to other design ethnographers. For instance, in the research on ‘how multi-person households do grocery shopping’, our team used the POSTA framework to observe the five categories, person, objects, situations, time, and activity in different types of households. As far as interview framework is concerned, the DECA (see footnote) framework, meaning description, exploration, context and action, encourages design ethnographers to document as much background information as possible with ‘description’ and ‘context’, facilitating the understanding between design ethnographers and the synthesis and analysis process.
Though frameworks provide structure, guidance and solid found
ations for design ethnographers to make sense of data, the validity of ethnographic research is worth of discussion, as the qualitative data we produce in the field are not purely objective. How we trust each other’s documentation is thus a challenge. In ‘Problems of Reliability and Validity in Ethnographic Research’, Margaret D. LeCompte and Judith Preissie Goetz remark that different academic trainings of ethnographers lead to perceptual biases. To combat biases, LeCompte and Goetz note an often-used self-monitoring process of ethnographers, c
alled ‘disciplined subjectivity’. This is a process in which ethnographers keep questioning and re-evaluating all the attributes of the process and make sure the documentation as trustworthy as possible.
Documenting ethnographic research is not an easy task, but we definitely can reduce the lev
el of difficulty by adopting tools like protocols, frameworks and self-monitoring technique. With those, our documentation can then facilitate the communication between design ethnographers and others. And, with actionable materials to work with, we can then gain more actionable insights.
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It is my understanding based on the projects I have done in the course. It will be nice to hear what challenges you face and what processes you use to facilitate the transfer of materials in team situations.
Footnote: DECA is a framework designed by Catriona Macaulay used in the course of Msc. Design Ethnography at the University of Dundee.
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Li-Chuan Chiang
http://www.linkedin.com/in/lichuanc
@brilliantrish
I SO agree – it’s such a different experience working solo on a project working in teams with other ethnographers and often non-ethnographers too. For me documentation is an ongoing problem, how to make it valuable in our working contexts, how to make it useful in future of we are working in environments where that may be the case (and that brings with it ethically issues around who owns the data, what participants have ‘signed off on’ etc.).
Not sure there are any easier answers but talking about it is important, thanks for raising it!
Lichuan, I think this is a very valid issue and one that I have thought about throughout our past few projects also. I think the challenge is finding ways to not loose all the data that has been gathered (and then made-sense of) by many different ethnographers and researchers. So your question of “how can we trust each other’s documentation” is an important consideration for the field of Design Ethnography. How do we take the large amounts of data, then condense them to one coherent message for the target audience/client, but also maintain all the information so it can be used by future researchers. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this topic, I really liked the way you framed your message at the end: “And, with actionable materials to work with, we can then gain more actionable insights.”
Hi Lichuan, I think this is a great conversation for us to have and I like that your focus here is about communication rather than finding a ‘correct’ standard for us to abide by. I agree that we should be looking to use tools that will help us communicate in a team (and outwith), such as protocols, frameworks etc. and the challenge is also how much and when to communicate with who?
With so much data it’s difficult at the early stages to digest this and think about what is relevant – generally this comes later. Much like our recent strategic info design project, the message we’re sending to people (even our team) needs to be well thought out and there really is no way to achieve this when out in the field and gathering data. The onus is on us, as researchers, to record and document in a way that we can then later translate for others – I think the translation is the hardest part. Both in ‘making sense’ within a team, and then communicating insights to a client.
Dear Cat, Lena, Fiona,
Thanks for the comments and glad to listen to your point of views. The word, ‘communication’ seems to stand out from the comments. I agree that communication is the basic and yet the most important element during (ethnographic)team work. In Experience Research I, Cat showed us a triangular diagram where ‘communication’ is the basis, followed by management, balance and insight. I think no matter if it is documenting ethnographic research or transfering our documentation to other researcher/team members and the client, the basic core is ‘communication.’ So, tracing back to the beginning, if each individual researcher is documenting the research as in detail as possible, the communication with others later on will be more effective.
This post made me think about the way we do docummenting in the project. I haven’t try much of doing this within one kind of protocol, but from what you just said, I thought I may try to do this next time within team, for the reason that we sometimes found it was hard to intergrate the findings from different team members. Besides, I think, based on some tools, we may save some efforts on digesting other peoples’ materiels, it usually takes time for us to share and thoroughly understand each other’s documents.
Similiar with Lena, another concern of mine about documenting is, how to keep the ‘thickness’ of one piece of ethnographic research until the very end, that’s both about documenting and communicating with others. Perhaps telling a whole story as final deliverable is a good way? I am very impressed with the ‘communication’ role documents plays brought by you, would like to discuss further on this topic.