A lack of mess? Advice on undertaking video-mediated participant observations

IF 0.9 Q4 MANAGEMENT

Journal of Organizational Ethnography Pub Date : 2021-12-24 DOI:10.1108/joe-07-2021-0037

Ea Høg Utoft, Mie Kusk Søndergaard, Anna-Kathrine Bendtsen

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

PurposeThis article offers practical advice to ethnographers venturing into doing participant observations through, but not about, videoconferencing applications such as Zoom, for which the methods literature offers little guidance.Design/methodology/approachThe article stems from a research project about a BioMedical Design Fellowship. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Fellowship converted all teaching activities to online learning via Zoom, and the participant observations followed along. Taking an autoethnographic approach, the authors present and discuss concrete examples of encountered obstacles produced by the video-mediated format, such as limited access and interactions, technical glitches and changing experiences of embodiment.FindingsChanging embodiment in particular initially led the authors to believe that the “messiness” of ethnography (i.e. misunderstandings, emotions, politics, self-doubts etc.) was lost online. However, over time the authors realized that the mess was still there, albeit in new manifestations, because Zoom shaped the interactions of the people the authors observed, the observations the authors could make and how the authors related to research participants and vice versa.Practical implicationsThe article succinctly summarizes the key advice offered by the researchers (see Section 5) based on their experiences of converting on-site ethnographic observations into video-mediated observations enabling easy use by other researchers in relation to other projects and contexts.Originality/valueThe article positions video-mediated observations, via e.g. Zoom, which are distinctly characterised by happening in real time and having an object of study other than the online sphere itself, vis-à-vis other “online ethnography” methods. The article further aims to enable researchers to more rapidly rediscover and re-incite the new manifestations of the messiness of ethnography online, which is key to ensuring high-quality research.

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缺少混乱?关于进行视频媒介参与观察的建议

本文为民族志学家们提供了实用的建议，他们可以冒险通过视频会议应用(如Zoom)进行参与者观察，而不是关于视频会议应用。这篇文章源于一个关于生物医学设计奖学金的研究项目。随着COVID-19大流行的到来，该奖学金将所有教学活动转变为通过Zoom进行在线学习，参与者的观察也随之进行。采用自我民族志的方法，作者提出并讨论了视频媒介格式所遇到的障碍的具体例子，例如有限的访问和交互，技术故障和化身体验的变化。尤其是化身的变化，最初让作者相信人种学的“混乱”(即误解、情感、政治、自我怀疑等)在网上消失了。然而，随着时间的推移，作者意识到混乱仍然存在，尽管以新的表现形式存在，因为Zoom塑造了作者观察到的人的互动，作者可以进行的观察以及作者与研究参与者的关系，反之亦然。本文简要总结了研究人员根据他们将现场人种学观察转化为视频媒介观察的经验提出的关键建议(见第5节)，以便其他研究人员在其他项目和背景下易于使用。原创性/价值本文将视频媒介观察(例如Zoom)与-à-vis其他“在线人种学”方法进行了对比，视频媒介观察的明显特征是实时发生，并且具有在线领域以外的研究对象。本文进一步旨在使研究人员能够更快地重新发现和重新激发在线人种学混乱的新表现，这是确保高质量研究的关键。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of Organizational Ethnography MANAGEMENT-

CiteScore

1.90

自引率

37.50%

发文量

期刊介绍： The Journal of Organizational Ethnography (JOE) has been launched to provide an opportunity for scholars, from all social and management science disciplines, to publish over two issues: -high-quality articles from original ethnographic research that contribute to the current and future development of qualitative intellectual knowledge and understanding of the nature of public and private sector work, organization and management -review articles examining the history and development of the contribution of ethnography to qualitative research in social, organization and management studies -articles examining the intellectual, pedagogical and practical use-value of ethnography in organization and management research, management education and management practice, or which extend, critique or challenge past and current theoretical and empirical knowledge claims within one or more of these areas of interest -articles on ethnographically informed research relating to the concepts of organization and organizing in any other wider social and cultural contexts.