Doing Ethnography the Neighbourly Lab way
By Marnie Freeman
Neighbourly Lab prioritises balancing authentic and open communication with residents, with research rigour and tangible, practical recommendations. We have therefore developed the following 2 part approach to listening to residents, that ensures excellence in method and outputs:
Part 1: Immersion in Place
Part 2: Immersion in People
We never interview people in a vacuum.
We are always looking for links and connections to thread their experiences together with our wider work, this helps them feel listened to as it demonstrates that we understand their experiences. More meaningful insights and analysis are generated this way.
Part 1: Immersion in Place
This includes a mix of the following:
A. Physical immersion- where we spend time in the local area, to familiarise ourselves with what contributes to residents’ experiences of living in a place.
We’ll do walkabouts and explore the social infrastructure that is in place, map the community assets such as community centres and green spaces, and establish an understanding of street level connections, as well as subways and transport links.
We also look at community notice boards, outside public buildings, in town squares, or in shops. We explore the various social and cultural networking groups online to understand how community life is supported through local digital infrastructure.
As part of this place-based immersion, we spend much time having informal chats with a diverse range of residents and observe the micro interactions between them. The whole place is a stimulus that helps us to uncover rich insights about the influence of a place on its communities.
B. Partner immersion-outreach and interviews with people who are embedded in the area- officially and unofficially, such as VCSFEs of different sizes, sports clubs and schools, health and public health partners, and local businesses, building out contacts and context. These interviews lead us to meeting more partners, and they act as a catalyst to meeting residents
C. Public data immersion– we contextualise our ethnographic insights with data science, using economic and neighbourhood data, to provide a rich and relevant story about local places.
Part 2: Immersion in People
We carry out deep ethnography and authentic qualitative research in two stages. The following process guides how we work with residents on a range of topics:
A: Context immersion.
Once we have immersed ourselves in places, we spend time in communities, to understand the rich mosaic of people living there. We do this in a targeted way, absorbing ourselves in the natural rhythms of people’s community life. We spend time doing outreach, listening and talking to people, exploring specific topic areas through their lenses.
This phase also includes building relationships with organisations working with communities. They are the people whose voices can be seldom heard but need to be listened to, to effectively inform policy and praxis changes in the systems developed to serve them.
B. Lived experience immersion.
This is the deep listening phase of our research technique, whereby we spend quality time authentically and radically listening to residents. We go to the residents in places they use, and by entering their worlds, not expecting them to come to ours.
We understand their experiences and with them can surface opportunities for change. We may meet at a local café, the library, their home or a community centre.
We set people up for success, by making our time together feel relaxed, having meaningful conversations, so they feel able to share experiences openly and honestly and we often use creative and participatory techniques to help talk around topic areas.
Some of our guiding principles:
- Our aim is to always leave people better off than before the session, so that people feel they have benefitted from taking part and know they have contributed.
- We may not record the sessions, if people don’t want the conversations captured on audio, we want their participation to be comfortable and on their terms.
- We don’t tend to use photos of people, this helps people feel at ease.
- We always incentivise generously for people’s time and input.
- We offer signposting information as and when it is relevant.
If you would like to learn more about our ethnography work and how it might support your team, please get in with touch Marnie – marnie@neighbourlylab.com