Guide to Advanced Empirical
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| 5.4. Ethnographies Ethnography is a form of research focusing on the sociology of meaning through field observation. The goal is to study a community of people to understand how the members of that community make sense of their social interactions (Robinson et al., 2007). For software engineering, ethnography can help to understand how technical communities build a culture of practices and communication strategies that enables them to perform technical work collaboratively. An ethnography might focus on abroad technical community (e.g. java programmers in general, or a small, closely knit community (e.g. a single development team). One notable feature of ethnography is that it avoids imposing any preexisting theories, but instead focuses on how the members of the community themselves make sense of their social and cultural setting. The researcher explicitly considers his/her own preconceptions and how they influence understanding of the studied community. For example, the researcher might focus on phrases used by the community that seem strange to him, to discover how community members use language to create categories that are meaningful to them. The result of an ethnographic study is usually a rich description of the community being studied that helps to build a detailed picture of that community’s culture. The preconditions for an ethnographic study include a research question that focuses on the cultural practices of a particular community, and access to members of that community. Because of the focus on members own categories the precise boundaries of the community to be studied might not be known in advance, and indeed the very notion of membership, and the idea of becoming a member, maybe important things to investigate. Using chain sampling, informants within the community are asked to identify representative members of the community, who identify other members of the community, and so on. As an example, consider the results of the survey that Joe conducted in the previous section. One conclusion from his study is that people don’t seem to use UML in the way Joe expected. An ethnography would allow Joe to understand more about how developers use and share UML. He identifies a development team that allows him to observe design meetings for several weeks. He supplements his notes on what he observes with a series of individual and group interviews to further explore how well UML tools match the team’s design practices, and why some groups in the company do not use UML. A special form of ethnography is Download 1.5 Mb. Share with your friends:
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