Empirical Research

How Ethnography Helps Startups to Understand Users

Ethnographic field study

The first part of this series gave an overview how qualitative data and customer development go hand in hand. There are different methods to gather qualitative data. In most books and articles about customer development, the authors (implicitly) describe the method of conducting semi-structured interviews – as I did in the first part of this series. Another possibility to gain qualitative data is through ethnography. Ethnography is not merely an additional option. It is considered to be the hour of birth of qualitative research. Originally stemming from anthropology, Conklin (1968: 172) defined ethnography nearly a decade ago as:

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