By This article summarises the issues in conducting corporate ethnographic research in rural locations covering logistics to research dynamics. Rural communities are far from homogeneous.
Compared to more urban settings, rural dwellers tend to have a more polarised expectation of “outsiders” (The “outsider” label may be designated by any number of factors including nationality, skin colour, accent, place of birth, caste, the list goes on. (In Afghanistan “foreigners” can include anyone from outside their province). Interactions with locals will be framed by their touch points with outsiders—whether aid workers, missionaries, NGO staff, backpackers, television, and slowly but surely entrepreneurs. How might the dynamics of an interaction change if a local villager’s only experience with a blonde female came through Baywatch? For example, I’ve been in interviews where male perceptions of foreign women is shaped by their porn consumption. My principle is that the team only needs to find one person in a community to be able to build out a meaningful local network, so the only question is finding that one person. The research is rarely about finding statistically representative participants but rather people that that fit within relatively broad criteria. Leave room for interesting outliers. A good team knows how to turn the outsider status to their advantage (or at least minimise negativities) using this status to gain access.
Research doesn’t always flow well and it is natural course of events for interactions or requests for interview to be rejected. In urban centers there are plenty of opportunities to move the team to another location even in the same neighbourhood. In rural locations the ripples of rejection can spread tainting the team within the community, and forcing them to move on.
Rural locales tend to have lower levels of literacy and within this, females are generally less formally educated than males—if there is not enough money to educate all of children girls are the ones that receive less investment. Literacy can become an issue when it comes to data consent, since participants are being asked to sign something that is being communicated orally, putting a greater onus on the team to communicate appropriately. From experience this can seconds or take up to half an hour. By keeping the participant’s welfare a primary concern the team should devote whatever time is required to ensuring that the consent is understood to ensure consent is informed. My priority is participant’s first, team second, client third—and keeping to this eventually does the best by the client. Where a model release is being obtained (allowing external use of data including photos) the research team needs to exercise an additional moral pass to ensure that data (mostly photos) is used in the spirit in which the data was obtained.
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