In real life, ethnographic interviews are above all the art of listening. Ethnographers first observe the participant, listen to them to get a feel for their views and penetrate levels of reality not expressed in conventional interviews.
These interviews encourage participants to express themselves freely on various topics by re-enacting real-life scenes, using projective exercises to convey their state of mind and feelings via open-ended questions based on looser discussion guidelines.
Participants are instructed to enter all the information in a Diary that they are to complete alone during the week building up to the interview. Then, they will be asked to share their Diary entries with the ethnographer in a long interview with guidelines that the ethnographer adjusts to the specific case at hand.
In Healthcare Market Research, we use ethnographic interviews with patients:
- Both to better understand their views, attitudes and expectations,
- And gain more in-depth understanding of their state of mind with regard to their disease, their treatments and rapport with HCPs.