Hasta La Ideas

By Anne Lacey, antedote

The first time I drove across the United States, I couldn’t help but be struck by how different each state and region feels. Even so, I saw that there were clear commonalities that tie together to make the U.S. a single nation. The closest I’ve come to gaining a grasp of what makes that nation tick has come from examining both the commonalities and differences between all its people and place. It’s been the project of a lifetime to develop anything resembling a coherent and comprehensive of picture of just this one country.

Over time, this personal journey to understand the United States led me to examine my professional career, identifying consumer insights for innovation—how can I do qualitative research that enables me to spend time to understand what really motivates people and that gives a more representative picture of the country?

Over the last couple of decades, ethnography and qualitative research have become distilled into short dips of a couple of hours into peoples’ lives, often in popular research cities such as Chicago. This type of research relies primarily on self-report by the consumer rather than observation or behavioral analysis. This has made it increasingly difficult to ascertain the kinds of new insights about fundamental shifts in people’s needs and motivations that make the work truly valuable.

To gain to new insights and opportunities, we need to think and approach research differently. Digital ethnography can fuel new ideas and research approaches, as my colleagues at antedote and I have seen in the years since we designed and built a mobile and online tool for studies from the ground up. Although digital ethnography has become an umbrella term for a great many online qualitative research tools, we use it specifically to mean a lengthy study (a week or two to several months) with consumers via computer and/or mobile phone, comprised of a blend of observation, live experience-alongs, interviews and user-generated content. Though these elements are common to it, each study has custom elements to it, premised on one big idea: using cutting-edge technology to restore some of the original intent and benefits of ethnography.

Interestingly, the longer we’ve worked with it, the more we’ve identified practices that enable digital ethnography to provide an ideal complement and enhancement to other qualitative and quantitative methods. One of the key guiding rules we’ve found is to gather research based on the strengths of the technology rather than trying to directly translate other research methods to digital.

These are some of the guiding principles we have identified and apply:

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