I’ve been a student of anthropology for over a decade now so I *might* be a little biased, but I think anthropology offers some of the most effective, and important, research methods. What incites me to say this is that anthropological theorizing doesn’t begin from abstract models or logical assumptions but from the ground, in the thick of empirically experienced evidence. Anthropologists try to develop a fine-grained sense of what’s going on in the material world.
As I’ve ventured into industry, I found that few people know much about anthropology, that an understanding of anthropological approaches hasn’t extend far beyond the walls of academia. While great researchers, it seems that anthropologists are not well versed at self-promotion or explaining to outsiders what it is that they do. To this end, I’d like to provide — in industry speak — three value propositions anthropologists can deliver to the world of industry research.
Anthropologists don’t use the term empathy. Instead, they rely on reflexivity, which begins by reflecting on one’s own positionality in a research space. They might ask: What assumptions do I carry with me? What impact do I have in the field and on my informants? What are the implications of my presence and of my research output? I often see in industry an approach to empathy that is only about research subjects and about how to get to know them better, but this approach fails to consider the researcher themselves. Empathy is not strictly about other people but about our relations with others. If we don’t consider ourselves in the research process, then we’ll overlook what we bring to the table and generate biased research. Anthropologists practice reflexivity at every point in the research process, which is the most effective way to reach for — though never realistically achieve — the proverbial “you are not the user” objective [we can never fully remove ourselves from the research process].
Long term ethnographic field research requires that anthropologists throw themselves into a context that they do not yet understand. They go to a place to soak up as much as they can about their informants within and beyond the scope of a specific research question. This means that they don’t see themselves standing above their informants, under the impression that they have greater or more accurate knowledge about the world than their informants have, but rather the other way around. Anthropologists approach their informants as full-fledged theorists, and construct an analysis in relation with them. In their attempts to understand the world of others on their terms, anthropologists develop an acute sense of reflexively-informed empathy.
Anthropology begins with the assumption that the online and offline world overlap in diverse ways. An app, for example, is not used in isolation but is part of a broader ecosystem of apps, devices, habits, rituals, beliefs, norms, frameworks, circumstances, a whole array of factors that appear as externalities to an app but in fact traverse it through and through. Similarly, a simple decision — why and how a user does this or that — is never an isolated event but rather brings into its scales a constellation of factors. That is, a decision, like an app, is embedded into a broader world. To understand and fully appreciate the technologies we daily surround ourselves with, anthropologists venture into and navigate this broader world to find the often invisible connections and patterns that provide potent explanatory weight to why and how users do what they do.
Anthropologists think expansively. They are comfortable juggling the immediate interactions users have with a digital product, how this product is recruited into daily routines and journeys, and the overall customer experience a user will have with this product’s ecosystem. Since anthropologists are apt to see the continuity between seemingly disparate things, they can intuitively seek out connections between a user’s basic interaction on the ground — at the product end — and a company’s longterm strategy — at the business end. In anthropological thinking, that is, the online component of digital technologies is one of several points of interest.
An anthropological approach aims to link microscale lived experience — how people make the world — with macroscale processes — how people’s lives are structured and enabled. While the discipline privileges on-the-ground research, ethnography is informed by a whole array of large-scale factors, such as political trends, historical events, statistical indicators. Anthropologist are not typically trained to produce quantitative research but they are rigorously trained to think and develop analyses with it. Anthropologists recognize that without the macroscale, ethnography would be reducible to a series of anecdotal occurrences, and without the microscale, statistical analysis would not provide the empirical evidence to remove itself from abstraction.
To consider macroscale factors, anthropologists are trained to gather and peruse large amounts of secondary research to find ways to link these literatures to the lived experiences of their informants and uncover specific ways in which both the micro and macroscale are mutually constituted. In this way, anthropologists can take fleeting, seamingly insignificant ethnographic moments, quickly dissect them, and come up with a plethora of insights that productively link up to broad-ranging, statistically-relevant trends and processes.
There you go: three ways industry research can benefit from the contributions and insights of anthropologists. I hope too that the value propositions I’ve laid out above indirectly shed some light on the contours of this discipline.