The ethics of agile ethnography

Abstract

In this paper, we describe methods for evaluating the ethics of agile ethnographic research. The large variety of how the term ethnography is used and a lack of a clear scope of associated activities limits the capacity for communication design researchers to accurately and ethically conduct ethnographic field research in various settings. This paper discusses possible ways to conduct ethical ethnography by providing a common definition and case studies to support an agile, rich, iterative, contextual research process.