Ethnography 101: What makes it an Ethnography?
3. Interviews are used to clarify what is observed and to gain a deeper understanding of behavior.
After period of observation in the field, we use intercept or in-depth interviews to elicit explanations of terminology, decision factors, perception of what’s most important, motivations and beliefs behind behaviors, and other variables of interest. The interviews may be with participants that we have observed, or may be with “informants” who understand behaviors from an insider perspective, and who collaborate with us in a structured way. The informant may be a salesperson who has just finished interacting with a customer, or may be a manager or gatekeeper in other business settings. Interviews may be unstructured or semi-structured. A snowball or chain sampling method may deployed if the interviews are unstructured, but in commercial settings it is more common to screen participants on the basis of a set of pre-defined criteria.
Copyright 2009, Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (http://www.usography.com)
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