A Review of Digital Ethnographic Methods with Implications for Engineering Education Research

Abstract

Full Paper: Digital transformations are reshaping engineering practices with implications for conducting engineering education research. Given the paucity of discussion of digital methods within engineering education research, we believe it is important to examine and present to the community an overview of how digital technology is changing research practices. In this paper we focus on digital ethnography as it has implications for studies of technical education and work, which necessarily involve using, and observing how others employ digital data sources, tools, systems, methods, etc. In this paper we report preliminary results from an in-depth literature search and review. To select the papers for the review, we first examined prior meta-review papers that identified new ethnographic methods appropriate for digital contexts (e.g., network ethnography, trace ethnography, rapid ethnography, connective ethnography, focused ethnography, etc.). We then used these as keywords to search for papers that were representative of these methods and selected the 100 most cited papers from this corpus, with further screening resulting in a final collection of 91 papers. We then conducted free/open coding of the articles followed by thematic coding to identify six categories and dived deeper into one of the categories, focused on different approaches to ethnography, to further explore the various types of ethnographic methods mentioned in the collected literature. We close by discussing how emerging techniques in ethnographic field research can be applied to engineering education research with engineering work practices as an exemplar.