I feel old. Ancient. Positively archaic. I am doing some ethnography research for a client in the area of technology. I am spending the day with Amy. Amy is 18, turning 19 and just received her A level results. Amy is confident and incredibly articulate for an 18 year old. I am asking Amy questions which she dutifully answers in a very text book way. She then mentions facebook and her whole face lights up. Amy comes alive at this point. She runs over to her Dell laptop and logs on to Facebook. She shows me she her 353 ‘friends’ on Facebook. She tells me that Facebook is as important to her as chocolate. Its an addiction. Its a craving. She wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks about what happened that day in Facebook. She asks me if I want to speak to any of her friends on Facebook.

This got me wondering, are social networks a much more effective and authentic way to research young people? Are online omnibus studies and traditional ways of researching teenagers less effective in an age where the currency of the ‘yoof’ is through the lens of Facebook?

Amy shows me today’s events. Jo has split up from Anthony (I am shocked that people put when their relationship ends on Facebook. Do people dump people by Facebook as well?). Emma has tagged her in her holiday photos. The guy she met in malia has written on her wall. Amy is organising a ‘results’ party for 200 people (she has just done her A-levels). She couldn’t organise a party without Facebook. I ask her if Facebook is a fad. She tells me undeniably its not. MySpace was a fad but now everyone has moved to Facebook. Facebook has the ‘durability’ factor. The ‘talkability’ factor. She has 33 friends online at this moment. I feed her questions to her friends. I get answers from her friends immediately. I then ask more questions. Its rich information. Its visceral. It is not pre-determined. Its authentic. Amazingly, its free.

I recently completed an online research study for the Future Foundation. Not only was it incredibly boring to complete (and I am a researcher by trade so god knows how boring it was for everyone else), if I am totally honest I felt compelled to write the ‘right thing.’ To write the ‘intelligent thing.’ Most importantly, to write ‘the expected thing.’ When I received the final report, many of the things I had said I actually disagreed with. To really go ‘one floor down’ as a pyschotherapist would say, surely we need to get that visceral instantaneous reaction which is not going to come from a online omnibus or a focus group? If you want to see how the tiger hunts, don’t go to the zoo. You need to go to the jungle. Or in this case, the jungle called Facebook.

Belinda and I were involved in a seminar a couple of weeks ago which looked at involved observational research in practitioner and academic settings. Here is a summary of the inspiring event.

The film Kitchen Stories portrays what many people think about observational research. In the film, the researcher tries to find out how kitchens should be designed and to do so he sits on a high chair and observers and takes notes of the object of his research, a single man in his kitchen. The researcher is as neutral, scientific and invisible as possible and is not allowed to talk to the researched. However the inevitable happens and the researcher develops a friendship with the researched.

An Economic and Social Research Council funded seminar, organized by the Lehman Brothers Centre for Women in Business, shows that ethnographic research, full of observations and interviews, has moved away from such clinical assumptions. The seminar, which took place at London Business School on 5 June 2008, is part of an ESRC seminar series on emotions and embodiment, and was the third seminar in the series, organised by Dr Elisabeth Kelan. The seminar was entitled ‘Gender, Power, Embodiment in Research’.

The seminar brought together academics and practitioners with an interest in ethnographic research. The rationale for which was to explore the differences and similarities in approach and to learn from one another.

The keynote speakers were Professor Catherine Cassell (Manchester Business School) who talked about how interviewees and interviewers co-construct one another and Professor Mats Alvesson (University of Lund) who addressed the issue of reflexive methodology and taking multiple perspectives to the material generated in research.

Dr. JK Tina Basi. Director of Mehfil Enterprise and freelance researcher with Intel’s Digital Health Group in Ireland, discussed the role of identity in shaping the research process and outcomes. Her talk, entitled, ‘Identity at Work and Play: Conducting Ethnography for Commercial Enterprise’, looked at the way in which research design could better include and make space for the co-construction of both the researcher and the research participants’ identities. Drawing upon a range of feminist academics (Haraway, 1991; Stanley and Wise, 1993; and Wolf, 1996), Dr. Basi pointed towards the feminist epistemological critique of positivism and ‘value free’ research, which argues that the subjective/objective dichotomy is false, and that objectivity is simply a name given to male subjectivity.

“Interviewing is the art of construction rather than excavation; thus the task is to organize the asking and listening so as to create the best conditions for constructing meaningful knowledge (Mason, 2002). Research cannot be ‘hygienic’, and knowledge is best created as a co-production between the interviewer and interviewee (Collins, 2000), as two intersecting dialogues: dialogue number one is the ethnographer’s interviews with informants or the observations of people’s lives; dialogue two is between the ethnographer’s written work and the readers (Smith, 2002: 20) or the clients. Such an approach paves the way for greater reflexivity, which isn’t just about presenting the self and being reflexive about the self, it is about exposing power relations and the way in which these relations shape knowledge – a much more authentic way to conduct research, yielding sharper insights and deeper meanings. ”

Dr Basi presented two examples from Intel’s research in the healthcare sector to show the strength of a dialogic approach to data collection. Intel’s research work on transport and mobility in rural Ireland was designed in part by the Rural Transport Programme and the research on social care services in England was heavily influenced by the experiences of elderly people using the services provided by Age Concern.

“Ethnography is just as much about the interview as it is about the setting, it is about building a rapport, yet you do more than just talking. You see things that people cannot articulate, what they don’t know they are trying to articulate. Ethnographic research provides a view of the rituals, practices, markers, and triggers in intimate settings and important environments – the situatedness of ethnography however, calls upon the researcher to become vulnerable in the process too.”

Belinda Parmar, a Planning Director of Saatchi & Saatchi and author of Lady Geek

http://ladygeek.org.uk, presented two case studies where Xploring, a Saatchi research tool, was used to discover insights that overturned stereotypes long upheld by traditional research techniques.

“I apply theories and methods of ethnography to the corporate realm. I take a unique participant-observation approach where I immerse myself in people’s lives to discover meaning about real people’s lives in the real world on their terms. I develop relationships based on mutual trust and move from an ‘outsider‘ looking in, to an ‘insider’ uncovering truths about human behaviour and gender differences. I am concerned with the wider aspects of people’s lives and their eco-systems”

The results: practical and actionable insights that have developed into award winning ideas for clients.

The product: stories, films, books that tell the stories in rich and colourful detail to stimulate brand ideas.

Overall, the seminar has shown how to take research into a real life context and depart from the view that the researcher is an impartial researcher by exploring this question from an academic and practitioner side. Please also see London Business Schools‘ news section and Putting People First blog for views on the event.