Research Methods – Page 2 – Ethnography.com

An HTS Debate

Posted on March 9, 2009March 28, 2009 by Jennifer

An experience I’ve been meaning to share since the end of December concerns the Human Terrain System (HTS). Dr. Henry Delcore at California State University, Fresno, invited me to act as a judge for a class debate. The question of debate was, “Should the American Anthropological Association (the main professional organization for anthropologists in the US) discourage anthropologists from working in the Human Terrain System program?”

The debate was part of their final requirements for passing the course, and I thought it was a new and interesting method of engaging the students.…

Personas

Posted on March 1, 2009March 28, 2009 by Jennifer

I had the opportunity to attend the 2008 EPIC conference in Copenhagen, Denmark last October. A hot topic there was the use of “Personas” in usability research, with the idea that it was an effective and quick way to communicate the results of the research to the client. Personas are fictional characters developed as a representative of the research subjects as a whole in order to identify the characteristics/patterns of the subjects and as a way to “get to know” the company’s “typical” customer on a more intimate level so that the company may make better operational decisions to fit the majority of their customer’s needs and wants.…

Interdisciplinary Project Update

Posted on January 23, 2008March 29, 2009 by Jennifer

As I described in one of my previous blogs, I am part of an inter-disciplinary research team at Fresno State University. Our team is comprised of three computer engineering students, a business student, and myself, an anthropology student. As part of their senior project, the engineers are developing a proto-type piece of technology. Our team is developing a voice-activated remote control and part of our research efforts are focusing on how to differentiate our product to make it more desirable and user-friendly than those already on the market.…

Inter-disciplinary Teams

Posted on October 25, 2007 by Jennifer

This is the first semester of the Engineering for Peoples and Markets Program at Fresno State. The program consists of two teams. Each team consists of two or three engineer majors (computer and electrical), an entrepreneurship major, and an anthropology major. The purpose of our team is to work together on the creation, design, and marketability of a piece of technology created by the engineers for their senior projects. It has been interesting discovering each of our roles within this project, and the experience of working with people trained in different fields has been valuable. …

Teaching Anthropologists to count

Posted on March 15, 2007 by mark

Ok, maybe not just anthropologists, but there should be something here for about everyone. The Social Science Statistics Blog is a collective blog from the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. They are described as a “series of hallway conversations on the site, and it is a pretty range of topics ranging from what makes a good peer reviewer to reviews of people coming to speak at the institute.…