Ethnography

Ethnography is a hard concept to interpret. It is essentially a recording or sampling of different social settings. I found it interesting how ethnography is becoming more prevalent in the more recent forms of technological and social settings. Ethnographers have to try to understand their external settings, and make sense of everything that confronts them. I found interesting how one of the articles stated that ethnography is not a sufficient practice for software engineers. It said that we aren't ready to perform ethnographic studies in trades like that, because it is a fairly new field that is still going through its stages of infancy. Basically this field lacks experience that other fields typically have.  Another thing that struck me was the time involved. Ethnograpy is best when sufficient time is given, and the number of participants is generally small. It is a long process that generally looks for qualitative data--over quantitative data-- within a study. Ethnographers typically want the most in-depth information that they can get their hands on. That is why they will always take quality, over quantity.