Missing Fieldwork: Why “Virtual Ethnography” is Not Human-Centric
Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, the commercial research and innovation consulting industry has switched their work largely to remote means. So did applied ethnographers. Research moved from the analog field on the ground straight to virtual space, enabled by the likes of ZOOM, WebEx, MIRO, and Mobile Ethnography Apps. While it was hailed as the next logical step in the digital transformation, it is time to conclude one-and-a-half years later – virtual ethnography is a scam and anything but human-centric. In fact, it is only a second-class substitute that manages to barely fill a knowledge gap during the state of exception this pandemic poses. As I argue in this article, virtual ethnography with its remote methods is incapable of fulfilling several methodological key qualities that allow qualitative researchers to gain a deep understanding of human behavior, everyday life, and how people experience the world. Keep reading if you are looking for arguments why we should return to fieldwork as soon as the global health situation allows it again.
Pandemic life in transformation
For the past one-and-a-half years, the COVID-19 pandemic has managed to decelerate a highly globalized world. It put a remarkable halt to the postmodern experience of living higher, further, faster. Most people were forced to change substantially how they move, interact, organize, relate, and communicate with each other in their day-to-day. Both the professional and private sphere have been thoroughly transformed in unprecedented ways by hard local lockdowns, the closing of international borders, the wide adoption of social distancing practices, the enforcement of public hygiene techniques, remote work from home, and the switch to digital collaboration tools.
No more in-person ethnographic fieldwork for now
As in many other industries, these restrictions brought commercial ethnography to an immediate stop. Ongoing fieldwork phases had to be aborted in mid-March of 2020, clients put qualitative research projects on halt indefinitely; and many ethnographers lost their capability to execute their work: Venturing to another city or country, visiting members of a group of people in person, or shadowing them for the day became logistically and morally impossible, as the health risk was deemed too high both by agencies and paying clients. Key methods of ethnography commonly employed during fieldwork could not be practiced anymore, such as participant observation, semi-structured in-person interviews, and context-exploring group discussions. An industry that takes pride in human-centricity and deep cultural immersion was thoroughly disturbed in its basic ability to embrace physical and relational proximity to its respondents.
Adopting remote qualitative research methods as a viable alternative
Many commercial research agencies switched to remote, supposedly “human-centric” research methods in an effort to offer clients an alternative during the pandemic while keeping everyone safe – often dubbed as “virtual ethnography.” Phone and video interviews, online diaries, virtual community forums, and digital device-assisted auto-ethnographic techniques have been adopted all over the industry by even those who would not have touched them with a ten-foot-pole before. Some of those remote methods attempt to emulate their face-to-face, analog counterparts; others open up different methodological opportunities made possible by digitalization. As a disclaimer, I am deliberately excluding the methodology of “netnography” (Kozinets, 2019) and the practices of observing the online behaviors of internet culture, social media, and members of virtual communities from a distance (see e.g. Costello, McDermott, & Wallace, 2017) in this article. These are not the practices that involve remote interviewing etc., which would be a different debate.
Supposed benefits of virtual ethnography
Justifying the adoption of virtual techniques, some agencies planted the illusion of methodological equality. They proclaim to have found an adequate replacement in remote qualitative research methods that still allow a “deep understanding” of the human condition. Many agencies are also emphasizing the logistical and financial benefits for cost-cutting clients: Remote research significantly reduces travel cost, travel time, and carbon footprint; a single researcher may cover more digital encounters with respondents per day than when on the ground in field, which dramatically decreases the total time of fieldwork – often the most expensive phase in a commercial research project. Remote methods provide a great degree of flexibility on both ends of the computer screen – respondents and researchers may be in different time zones and locations for their virtual encounter, as long as the internet connection is stable and no technical problems emerge. Remote methods allow particularly vulnerable groups of respondents to participate from a safe distance, such as people with autoimmune diseases, social anxieties, or other conditions who would usually not meet with a strange researcher in person. Vice versa, vulnerable ethnographers do not get into sketchy situations that might compromise their physical safety, as they do not have to leave the comfort of their office chair. Last but not least, if no paper and pen are involved, digitally enabled methods lend themselves to have their qualitative data output digitized quicker, which speeds up the analytical process.
Most of these logistical points are valid arguments in the commercial research space. Some people might even say that the days of well-financed insights projects are over. Considering that the length and incisive depth COVID-19 pandemic keeps changing established practices for good, we can expect that our professional lives will not return to the pre-pandemic status quo as we understood it in 2019. While the entire world eagerly awaits a post-pandemic period, people are slowly coming to grips with the idea that COVID-19 and its many mutations may not disappear any time soon. With that in mind, many have gotten used to the ever-changing new realities brought upon us by the pandemic – that life can be in constant flux. More importantly, some newly acquired working practices – including remote, virtually-conducted research – can be expected to stick with us for a long time.
This extraordinary period has revealed both the possibilities and limits of remote qualitative research. The COVID-19 pandemic forced us to employ remote qualitative methods in the most intense and rigorous manner imaginable, because it allowed us to stress-test virtual ethnography when no alternative was available. On the positive side, many of the aforementioned benefits held true. It is, indeed, possible to employ remote methods in ways that produce good outcomes, given the circumstances. On the negative side, good is not always good enough, and cultural depth can only go thus far from a distance.
Will the industry return to in-person fieldwork?
When COVID-19 ends, the question thus emerges how the vast majority of players in the commercial research and innovation consulting industry will continue methodologically once it is safe (and allowed) to travel and meet other people in person again? Will agencies attempt to revive the “good old days of fieldwork”? Will clients be willing to pay for on-site fieldwork if they deem the outcomes of cheaper and faster remote research as sufficient? And, most importantly, will agencies choose to ignore the methodological limitations of virtual ethnography when pushed for budget and logistics.
These questions are legitimate concerns for someone who values high quality research, loves being in field and exploring the world beyond our doorstep. The past one-and-a-half years have proven that people can collaborate effectively across time zones and space for an extended period almost exclusively via digital tools. However, not all types of remote work are created equal. Some things make sense to conduct virtually from a distance; others should not be substituted if it can be avoided, because they require a high degree of proximity and close (analog) human interaction.
Ethnography is of the latter category. In fact, “virtual ethnography” is a contradiction in terms and an expression of commercial researchers misappropriating the halo that accompanies the original toolset. If it is virtual, it is barely ethnography, and thus we need to consider it as a different, lesser form of qualitative research. Countering the overall enthusiasm for new digital tools and the virtual human interactions they enable, we must therefore point out the drawbacks of remote qualitative research and call out those who pretend otherwise. We have to consider what it does not manage to achieve and recall the unique selling point of on-site ethnographic fieldwork in the face of recent methodological experiences.
Proclaiming human-centricity in remote qualitative research is bullshit
First off, any agency which claims that their remote qualitative research is just as good as on-the-ground fieldwork – and that there is no considerable difference in outcome quality – is dubious. In fact, this statement is not just wrong, but it would be a marker that they were sub-par qualitative researchers in first place. From personal experience, the entire commercial research industry – market research in particular – is full of individuals and organizations who are completely unaware of their own methodological limitations due to a lack of formal social-scientific training. Our previous article by Morgan Gerard makes a case in point why one should never, ever use focus groups.
In that sense, being radically “human-centric” is impossible if one exclusively sticks to remote qualitative research methods. Getting to know the day-to-day lives of a group of people – be it a real-life community or a sub-segment of individual target customers – can be done by proxy at best when solely relying on phone and video interviews, online diaries, virtual forums, device-assisted autoethnography techniques, and the like.
I am afraid, this lack of rigor and self-reflection in commercial qualitative research and the prominence of methodological ignorance is part of a bigger problem:
Commercial “ethnography” is often far from ethnographic
Just because a self-proclaimed qualitative researcher conducts a semi-structured interview with a customer at home does not automatically make it “ethnographic.” For it to reach that quality, there is a methodological mindset to it – a procedural way of generating data about people with the help of certain methods that are embedded in a more-than-a-century old discourse. Ethnography is about analyzing people’s behaviors, meanings, and sensemaking processes by harnessing certain anthropological concepts. And ethnography involves a particular style of representing these people in writing. Human Futures Studio’s own Paul Hartley already wrote about that.
Hence, ethnography is not just a set of social scientific methods through which data is gathered; it is also an epistemological matter of methodology. As a refresher, the term “methods” denotes “technical rules that define proper procedures” of research, while “methodology” entails a dimension dealing with the “broad theoretical and philosophical framework into which these procedural rules fit” (Brewer, 2000, p. 2). With that in mind, ethnography is an elaborate “style of research that is distinguished by its objectives, which are to understand the social meanings and activities of people in a given 'field' or setting, and an approach, which involves close association with, and often participation in, this setting” (Brewer, 2000, p. 52). Ethnography presupposes an epistemological perspective referred to as “the ethnographic imagination” (Brewer, 1994, p. 236). Both the ethnographer and the audience are expected to adopt a set of premises based on the authority and explanatory power of ethnographic data. Following a strand of “subtle realism” (Hammersley, 1990, as cited in Brewer, 2000, p. 48), they build upon the central belief that ethnographers are, in fact, able to analyze, understand, and represent the greater social worlds of people through selective observations of micro events and conversations with their inhabitants in their natural settings (Brewer, 1994; cf. Geertz, 1974).
Since much of the pseudo-ethnographic commercial work before spring 2020 did not even become true to the “ethnography” label, “virtual ethnography” leaves even more to be desired. This is why we need to remind ourselves of the unique advantages proper in-person ethnographic research has to offer in the field.
Unique selling point of in-person ethnographic research
Methodologically speaking, ethnography offers a set of qualities most other qualitative research styles cannot achieve. Ethnographic interactions are direct and unencumbered by technology. Ethnography allows to engage in empathetic relationships and establish rapport with respondents; it enables researchers to discover the non-obvious; ethnography creates depth through context; it allows for a high flexibility of adapting to the situation. Ethnographic sensemaking takes places via embodied experience; and ethnography has the capacity to make for fun times and excitement. As you will see, “virtual ethnography” cannot be considered proper ethnography if it does not fulfill aforementioned qualities, which I will discuss in further detail now.
Direct interactions unencumbered by technology
Ethnography is a style of research that is highly immersive thanks to its direct and interactive character. The point of ethnography is visiting people in their own environment and social setting – be it at home, work, or on the road. While the presence of strange researcher always changes and un-naturalizes the social situation to a degree, fieldwork allows you to be present in the moment; you see and hear the people you scrutinize in your immediate vicinity, while these people also see and hear you. Communication between researcher and respondent is face-to-face – unmediated via technology, apart from recording devices in the background that might capture the interaction. More importantly, interaction is immediate and synchronous. It does not need to be mediated via technology.
In contrast, virtual ethnography is remote and indirect by default. It generates an artificial interaction barrier between respondent and researcher – imposed by a technological user interface, such as a Zoom / Webex / Teams client, a moderated forum platform, or an analog phone line. The researcher is only virtually present and visible on a screen or audible via audio. The researcher cannot physically enter the respondent’s space, which automatically generates distance. Technology is not in the background but in the perceivable foreground. Just recall your own failures to communicate that you have experienced in remote work over the past 18 months. Likewise, online diaries, online forum posts, and chat responses are mediated, asynchronous representations by the respondent. Even during a synchronous live video call, remote virtual interactions rarely occur without any technological issues. Respondents may be tech-unsavvy users who struggle with their devices; the audio may cut out every once in a while, the framing and image quality of the camera may be suboptimal, pixelated artefacts may appear on screen due to a slow internet connection, which makes the entire situation appear even more artificial and distant.
Establishing a relationship & rapport
Key to ethnography is the ability to establish a relationship with one’s respondents that is marked by trust and their willingness to share their perspective with the researcher. While the comparably short fieldwork phase of commercial ethnographic research projects rarely gives time to form long-lasting relationships with respondents, there are various techniques that facilitate quasi-personal relationships.
By giving cues in the form of open-ended questions and short encouraging remarks, the objective is to entangle informants in a seemingly informal conversation, which elicits elaborate explanations of their daily practices, their underlying world logics, and narratives about life. In order to establish rapport, it requires a step back on the natural floor of speech and augment one’s listening skills. Informal conversations are usually asymmetrical; ideally, respondents reveal more than the researcher provides in exchange. At all times, it demands a positive, affirmative, and understanding attitude which signals that the researcher does not restrict, evaluate or judge any statement, but remains a relatively neutral party with an open ear. It is of utmost importance to demonstrate a high degree of responsiveness to keep the narrative flow running, and commit to a flexible (rather generous) handling of time (cf. Girtler, 2001).
All of these techniques are significantly more difficult to employ when in a virtual research situation. Technologically speaking, the input lag and transmission delay of audio and video alone sometimes make it difficult to provide affirmative verbal cues and facial feedback just in time. Common practices of hospitality that make a situation with strangers more comfortable for both sides, such as offering a guest a seat in one’s home, preparing a cup of tea or a biscuit, are virtually non-available, since one does not share the same room. A performative aspect arises from someone watching themselves talk on screen. Human interaction is reduced to, and framed by, what is visible on screen and audible via microphone. The relationship between respondent and commercial researcher is more likely to remain transactional, similar to what one finds in a question-answer situation traditional market research generates.
Discovering the non-obvious
The general aim of ethnography is to understand ‘What is going on here?’ To reach such as understanding, it is necessary to look beyond what is obvious and embrace the coincidental. Kelle and Kluge (2010) see the main quality of qualitative research in the circumstance that researchers “get to experience unusual things in the research field, that they become witness to unexpected events” (p. 32). A central technique for that is called “nosing around” (Lofland, 1980, as cited in Gobo, 2010, p. 19). By picking up cues in the respondent’s social setting (e.g. a framed picture that points to family relationships or a military past) and stumbling upon random signals when walking through the respondent’s home (e.g. FOX news running on the kitchen TV), we tend to discover things that had previously not been in research focus yet.
Quite differently, virtual ethnography tends to narrow down the researcher’s perspective, reducing it to the small vignette that is captured by the respondent’s camera, microphone, online diary entries, or forum posts. One could obviously ask a participant to remotely conduct a little house safari or switch camera perspectives every few minutes, but the casual, non-intrusive character of nosing around gets lost this way. In virtual ethnography, the need to spell out what part of life the researcher wants to see from the research subject kills most of the coincidence that is required for genuine exploration and discovery.
Depth through context
One of the key goals of human-centric research is the deep understanding of the social and cultural context in which people’s behaviors are situated; and ethnography shines at that – unmatched by any other style of research. Generally speaking, context denotes the social and cultural environment (or the frame) in which a phenomenon – be it an act, a relationship, a role, an event, a statement – is situated (cf. Dilley, 2002). Context contains all these human elements that are needed to interpret and understand the local meaning of the phenomenon from the research subject’s perspective, including aspects such as race, age, class, identity, language, the political and economic situation, local norms, values, beliefs, and other variables. Ethnographers are experts at assuming a broad, holistic view of the field, observing individual phenomena and miniscule details within the greater sociocultural scope of things.
In-person fieldwork on the ground allows us to decode that context and paint a rich picture of the environment in which our respondents lead their lives. Much of it is about the acquisition of insider cultural knowledge. Another important side of it can be silently explored on the sidelines by observing the material dimension of culture. Exploring the neighborhood in which a respondent’s house is located right before an in-home visit, observing the lawn decoration, picket signs, motor vehicles, looking at the respondent’s home interior design, paintings, framed family pictures, and other everyday objects, an ethnographer may gain an initial sense of the local context at hand.
All of this is highly compromised – if not impossible – in virtual ethnography. Sure, virtual ethnographers could try to explore the respondent’s neighborhood via Google Streetview, try to stalk them on their Facebook profile page to get a better view of their likes, dislikes, and group affiliations, or run queries for local grassroots initiatives the respondent might participate in. However, this is often not possible when recruiting agencies anonymize all personal contact details beforehand, making it difficult for the ethnographer to observe and explore the respondent’s context before or after the limited virtual interaction. In virtual ethnography you cannot touch your surroundings, hear noises, smell odors, and soak in the vibe. The breadth of sensory stimuli is highly reduced when the only input comes from what respondents perform on screen. It is considerably more difficult to observe how things affect each other, scrutinize the interrelations of seemingly unrelated factors, and understand the factors that impact a situation.
High flexibility of adapting to the situation
As the scholars Buchanan, Boddy and McCalman (1988) so aptly put it, “Fieldwork is permeated with the conflict between what is theoretically desirable on the one hand and what is practically possible on the other” (p. 53). Fortunately, adapting to a live research situation is significantly easier in person than it is from a distance. The ability to read the room, recognize a person’s attitude, and respond to it accordingly with micro-gestures and little notions that insinuate familiarity is highly important to establish ongoing rapport. Moreover, life sometimes gets in the way of research, or, in fact, enriches it. A family member might burst into the room and requires attention, the respondent may get a call and suddenly needs to disappear, or they might remember that they still need to feed the dogs. All of these events might require the researcher to switch roles from an active interviewer to a passive observer. These situations are not necessarily a disturbance but allow us to observe how research subjects behave in their day-to-day, deal with conflict, juggle their numerous responsibilities, and prioritize what is important to them.
Role-switching – especially when it involves participant observation – is extremely difficult when done remotely. When something is happening behind the camera that distracts the respondent, there is very little one can do to interfere. Joining the distracting situation is virtually impossible apart from what little remains visible and audible on-screen. Researchers are often excluded from these situations as they can be muted both on video and audio. Just imagine, while in field at a respondent’s home, someone suddenly equipped you with a blindfold and a pair of earplugs for 5 minutes while they had to resort to private matters. The ability to adapt to the situation and to observe what happens outside what was intended, however, is highly important to decode the complexities of the sociocultural context.
Sensemaking via embodied experience
Ethnography lives from participant observation whenever possible. Applying the terminology of Waddington (2006), an ethnographer commonly acts as a “participant-as-observer, who forms relationships and participates in activities but makes no secret of an intention to observe events” (p. 154). Through personally lived and physically embodied experience it becomes possible for the ethnographer to get a hold on details, emotions, and sensations – what makes a visceral experience – that are not comprehensible through mere observation from a distance or second-hand accounts. In more practical terms, only if you have felt the brutal acceleration, breaking power, and lateral G-force of a fast motor vehicle going around a race track, you will comprehend the thrill a motorsports aficionado encounters when piloting a sportscar in practice. In this way, what a respondent feels beyond what he or she expresses becomes graspable for the researcher. Gaining these embodied experiences is important for the researcher to be able to make sense of the phenomena under scrutiny and uncover the deeper meaning that people ascribe to it.
On the virtual front, embodied experiences are difficult to convey. That is why watching a live concert on YouTube rarely manages to elicit the same sensations as standing in front of a stage with a live band performing. Talking to a nurse about her day-to-day struggles at work via webcam does not convey the same sense of urgency and stress as observing her rush through an intensive care unit, while patients are moaning, and countless devices are beeping. In this respect, the lack of embodied experience is what deprives virtual ethnography of its ability to be truly human-centric.
Fun times and excitement make for a delightful job
One of the best things of ethnography is the fun and excitement of being in field, visiting interesting people in new places that are outside one’s regular habitat. Live encounters with inspiring strangers make for remarkable memories. It allows us to learn about the world outside our doorstep. Most commercial ethnographers I know thrive on the excitement of being in field – whether that is in the passenger seat of a muscle car zipping through a Californian canyon with a sports car aficionado, or observing the working practices of nurses and doctors in a German intensive care unit. Fieldwork gets us out of our comfort zone; we get to explore foreign cultures; and it provides direct access to strange people’s lives we might never encounter privately. It is this kind of exposure to the breadth of human experience that makes commercial ethnography a delightful job outside of academia for those who remain insatiably curious.
If one loves being in field, virtual ethnography comes along as a buzzkill. Regardless of how well mediated it may be thanks to novel technology, it can be utterly unexciting and physically unengaging. Remotely held conversations with respondents tend to blur with one another if the few things that change are only the participant’s face, voice, and video background. Sure – ethnography does not necessarily view “the field” as “a ‘pre-given natural entity’ but ‘something we construct both through the practical transactions and activities of data collection and through the literary activities of writing fieldnotes, analytic memoranda, and the like” (Atkinson, as cited in Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2010, p. 354). Nevertheless, commercial ethnographers often constitute “the field” by an actual physical setting into which we dive – be it a particular country as a market, a group of target customers in a specific city, or a professional workplace in a distinct industry. From a virtual distance, we do not get to experience the diversity and immerse into the richness that physical field has to offer. Work life as a virtual ethnographer is considerably less fun and exciting when people are confined to their desks and computer screens at home or at the office.
Conclusion
“Virtual ethnography” is better than conducting no commercial research at all in a global state of exception, as currently imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. If you cannot visit people and join their lives in person, it makes sense to employ video and phone interviews, collaborative online forums, connected device-assisted autoethnography tools, and the like from a distance. However, it is important to remain cognizant of the limitations of remote qualitative research, which is why it should only be considered as a second-best option when in-person methods are not possible du to access restrictions. They lack the depth, contextual awareness, and naturalness of direct human interaction. Therefore, “virtual ethnography” should never become the default choice when a research approach claims to be human-centric.
Will all research agencies see aforementioned methodological discrepancies as a genuine problem once the pandemic is over? Probably not – because they had not been conducting high-quality commercial ethnography in the first place. But only if agencies manage to acknowledge, lay open, and wage both the benefits and shortcomings of particular research approaches, methods, and methodologies, and choose the most suited option in a self-reflexive, critical manner, then the commercial research and innovation consulting industry will be able to become truly human-centric.
These methodological considerations are not merely an academic exercise meant to gatekeep an established research discipline. They are meant to push certain quality standards in this industry towards the better because they have full-blown business implications. At the Human Futures Studio, we believe that great strategic decision-making depends on deep, cultural insights that manage to robustly represent the Whys, Whats and Hows of human nature in radical ways. If a client opts for sub-par quality in commercial research and innovation consulting that is just dressed up like “ethnography” but does not manage to deliver its full insightful breadth, the outcomes might send the company into the wrong direction – regardless of how supposedly “human-centric” they may seem on the surface. Making things worse, betting on a lame donkey instead of a race horse might eventually compromise a company’s future viability in the competitive race for success and sustainability.
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