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The Ethnographic Explorer: Help Pages

CONTENTS

How it works

  1. Background
    1. Free usage, technical support & subscription
    2. Privacy
    3. Copyright and Limitation of Liability
    4. Origins and Acknowledgements
  2. Use settings
    1. Online: One-to-one interviews, using a shared screen view
    2. Live workshops, using a projected screen view
  3. The three stages of an EE exercise
    1. Sorting
      1. Types of cases to include in a sorting exercise
      2. Types of sorts
      3. Guidance on how to do it
      4. Problems and how to resolve them
    2. Comparing
      1. Types of comparison questions
    3. Contrasting
      1. Types of contrasts
      2. Relationship measures
  4. Downloadable outputs
    1. Structured text data files detailing all outputs generated by each stage
    2. Screen shots of trees and scatter plots

Use cases

  1. Ethnography: The process of sorting can be used as a means of understanding people’s view of the world. There are three types of use:
    1. Identifying the contents of the distinctions: What people see as relatively important. And the consequences / implications of these differences.
    2. Identifying the limits to people’s knowledge: When further differences cannot be identified.
    3. Identifying the direction of attention and learning: Where further differences can be identified.
  2. Planning and evaluation:
    1. Through the use of comparison questions, identifying differences
      1. In degree (more vs less) and differences in kind (categorical) in
        What might happen and what has happened
    2. Through the contrasting of comparison responses (rankings) about
      1. Different kinds of assessments e.g. Plans vs results
      2. The same assessments by different people
      3. The same assessments over different periods of time
  3. Other more specific uses
    1. Configurational analysis
    2. Measurement rubrics
    3. Value for Money
    4. Stakeholder analyses
    5. Portfolio reviews
    6. MSC content analyses

Keep informed

  1. The Ethnographic Explorer Community of Practice on Google Groups
  2. MandE NEWS page on Hierarchical Card Sorting
  3. For more information contact rick.davies@gmail.com