Individual methods which are available within an ethnographic study include: participant observation, interviews and surveys. All of these ethnographic methods can be very valuable in gaining a deeper understanding of a design problem.

Regardless of how carefully you plan your academic studies, you may still be faced with a need to write a large paper in just one night. First of all, keep calm. Writing a 10-page essay overnight is nothing supernatural. You can do it if you properly organize your working process.

Generally, an ethnographic study involves a researcher observing behaviour either in person or via cameras pre-installed in participant homes, work places, etc. Think of the show Gogglebox where viewers observe the reaction to other people watching TV – that’s ethnography.

For example, through ethnographic research, a healthcare product manufacturer is able to understand the needs of the target market and this will, in turn, influence the product’s design.

Ethnographic methods are a research approach where you look at people in their cultural setting, with the goal of producing a narrative account of that particular culture, against a theoretical backdrop.

Ethnography is a study through direct observation of users in their natural environment rather than in a lab. The objective of this type of research is to gain insights into how users interact with things in their natural environment.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Case Studies

• Case studies allow a lot of detail to be collected that would not normally be easily obtained by other research designs.
• Case studies tend to be conducted on rare cases where large samples of similar participants are not available.
• Within the case study, scientific experiments can be conducted.

There are many strengths to grounded theory. For one thing, researcher bias is less likely to affect the outcome of a grounded theory study. Sometimes, researchers can unintentionally change the outcome of an experiment because they already have a hypothesis, and they try to fit the data to that.

‘ Strengths: The phenomenological approach provides a rich and complete description of human experiences and meanings. Findings are allowed to emerge, rather than being imposed by an investigator.

Phenomenology is commonly described as the study of phenomena as they manifest in our experience, of the way we perceive and understand phenomena, and of the meaning phenomena have in our subjective experience [11]. More simply stated, phenomenology is the study of an individual’s lived experience of the world [12].