Ethnography 101: What makes it an Ethnography?
March 4th, 2010
7. Field notes are coded and analyzed for themes and key variables, and are edited to communicate a perspective.
Ethnography typically results in a massive set of rich data, from which researchers extract meaning, and hopefully, a well-founded direction. They develop a coding schema to summarize what was learned across the entire dataset and draw connections, corroborations, and conclusions. In the business of design, ethnographic research findings should include not only design recommendations, but conceptual designs that can be supported by and traced to specific data.