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Qualitative Research Rules – Using Qualitative and Ethnographic Methods to Access the Human Dimensions of Technology
Abstract
This chapter has been written strategically for those who are interested in, or involved with, the application of new technologies in the rail industry. It is intended as an introductory guide for those who are largely unfamiliar with qualitative research methods. Qualitative research is particularly suited to understanding human behaviour within the social, cultural and local context. Within this context, behaviours, attitudes, beliefs, etc. acquire particular cultural meaning which is reinforced and negotiated through social relations with other humans and non-humans (such as technology). Given that the success or failure of new technologies in the rail industry occurs within a cultural context and through social relations, qualitative research is particularly relevant and useful.
Despite the double entendre or double meaning of the title, I am not interested in developing an argument for qualitative methods over quantitative methods. Neither am I interested in prescribing a rigid or rule-bound formula for conducting qualitative research. Rather, I prefer to work from a flexible ‘horses for courses’ or ‘what works best when’ approach which is driven by aims and outcomes. To help people make informed choices about when qualitative research might be most appropriate, this chapter provides discussion and guidance on the topics of what qualitative research is, what its benefits are, when it should be used, how it can be used alone or in association with other methods and how it can be used to evaluate human factors issues of new technologies in the rail industry. From a practical perspective, I discuss how to conduct qualitative research, how to collect data, how to analyse it and how it can be presented.
... Ethnography is a qualitative research method where the minutiae of daily interactions and practices of the studied group or community are observed and recorded (Taber, 2010;Thompson, 2013). To complement external observations, autoethnography was used as a tool for the researcher to self-reflect on their personal experience to better understand their cultural experience (Denzin, 2014;Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011). ...
... To explore why the observed behaviours occurred, and to better understand passengers' experiences, a series of semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 49 passengers (59% male, 41% female), aged between 20 and 73 years, was held. The combination of participantobservation and interviews was designed to understand what passengers say they do, as well as what they are seen to do (Hirsch & Thompson, 2011a;Thompson, 2013). The duration of interviews was between one and two hours. ...
Crammed together in tight folds of humanity, the suburban rail passengers of Mumbai, India, experience the most densely crowded trains in the world (Basu & Hunt, 2012). Whilst the immediate physical descriptors of crowdedness in Mumbai are well understood (Hirsch, 2016), there is little knowledge of the effect this has on the multitude of passengers. This is an important omission, as the effects of crowding on passengers impact their attitudes, travel behavior, and travel decisions. This paper therefore seeks to discern the physical, emotional, and behavioural effects of rail passenger crowding in Mumbai, India. To achieve this, a qualitative methodology, including 49 face-to-face interviews and 48 hours of ethnographic and autoethnographic observations in Mumbai were conducted. Mumbai is an ideal place to study these effects as it has high-density crowding, the likes of which are not experienced elsewhere. Additionally, there is a limited understanding of the effect of crowding on passengers in non-Western societies. With increasing rail ridership worldwide, the experiences of Mumbai's passengers within high densities may align with the future experiences of passengers in other Western and non-Western countries. For academics and service providers, understanding the specifics of the crowd, such as the density, passenger perceptions, and culture is important. With that knowledge, strategies to improve the experience of crowding would be more effective.
... Ethnography is a qualitative research method where the minutiae of daily interactions and practices of the studied group or community are observed and recorded (Taber, 2010;Thompson, 2013). It was particularly useful for a study on the risks and security issues associated with crowded travel as it allowed the researcher to be open to the nuances that influence passengers' experiences. ...
... Throughout data collection, observations were supported by a series of in-depth, semistructured interviews with 45 rail passengers and 4 non-rail users (59 per cent male, 41 per cent female), ranging in age from 20 years to 73 years. The combination of participant-observation and interviews was designed to understand what passengers say they do, as well as what they are seen to do (Thompson, 2013). The duration of interviews was between 1 and 2 hours. ...
Mumbai's (India) suburban rail system has the world's most densely crowded trains (Mumbai Railway Vikas Corporation Ltd, 2013) and risks to passengers' safety and security are high. While a number of papers and reports analyse threats to passenger security from a government or policy perspective, there is a dearth of literature about the impact of hostile intent on the individuals who form the crowd. Using data from a larger project on passenger perceptions of crowdedness in high-density rail situations, this article examines passenger perceptions of risk and security in Mumbai. These include the socio-criminal risks of pickpocketing and molestation, the design-associated risk of falling from the moving train, and the wider politically motivated risk of terrorism. In particular, we consider the physical and psychological methods that passengers employ to mitigate these risks. This provides an unprecedented understanding of how risk is incorporated in everyday behaviour on trains.
... A mixed-method comparative research design was most appropriate for analysing our textual data. Whilst the primary data were qualitative, the research question was ultimately quantitative, as was the need to conduct analyses to infer statistical significance [31]. This kind of approach has been used elsewhere in relation to the analysis of naturalistic or free-text survey data [32]. ...
The idea that whip use is critical to thoroughbred racing integrity is culturally entrenched but lacks empirical support. To test the longstanding beliefs that whip use aids steering, reduces interference, increases safety and improves finishing times, we conducted a mixed-method analysis of 126 race reports produced by official stewards of the British Horseracing Authority, representing 1178 jockeys and their horses. We compared reports from 67 "Hands and Heels" races, where whips are held but not used (whipping-free, WF), with 59 reports from case-matched races where whipping was permitted (whipping permitted, WP). Qualitative coding was used to identify and categorise units of analysis for statistical testing via logistic regression and linear mixed model regression. For both types of race, we explored stewards having anything to report at all, movement on course, interference on course, incidents related to jockey behaviour and finishing times. There were no statistically significant differences between WF and WP races for anything to report (OR: 3.06; CI: 0.74-14.73), movement on course (OR: 0.90; CI: 0.37-2.17), interference (OR: 0.90; CI: 0.37-2.17), jockey-related incidents (OR: 1.24; CI: 0.32-5.07), and race times (0.512 s, t = 1.459, p = 0.150). That is, we found no evidence that whip use improves steering, reduces interference, increases safety or improves finishing times. These findings suggest that the WF races do not compromise racing integrity. They also highlight the need for more effective ways to improve the steering of horses.
... Consistent with inductive coding approaches commonly used in qualitative data analysis (Green et al., 2007;Thompson, 2013) and for other surveys of horse owners in Australia (Smyth & Dagley, 2016;Thompson & Clarkson, 2016b;Thompson, Clarkson, Berg, & Riley, 2017), coding categories were developed post hoc. Categories were created inductively to accommodate the responses and in relation to the survey topic. ...
This article commences by outlining five perspectives on the sustainability of equestrian cultures covering the environment, the economy, human health, horse welfare, and social licence. Next, it presents findings from an online survey developed to understand how horse owners in Australia have been affected by major weather and climate events, how they responded in the short and long term, their considerations for the future, and the support they might require. Sixty-nine horse owners participated. Most (90%) reported being affected by major weather/climate event(s) in the last 10–20 years, four out of five (78%) took action at the time of the event and a similar proportion (80%) had taken actions for the longer term. Most (86%) had thought about preparations for future events, but had not yet taken any action, due to lack of time, money, materials, or storage. Almost all participants (93%) perceived a need for education, research, government policy. Since findings suggest horse owners may be less likely to engage with climate adaptation and sustainable horse keeping public education initiatives when they are related specifically to “climate change”, and more likely to engage when they are related to “land care, pasture management and improvement”, and “horse health and welfare”, an alternative rhetoric is recommended.
... While quantitative research is concerned with a positivist philosophy, qualitative research is best applicable to cultural phenomena where there are many questions to be answered [75]. Questions about meaning (how people make sense of the world); questions that shed light on the context; and questions that investigate processes [76] can unearth "complex workplace politics" that may not come forth in quantitative approaches [77]. While numbers can reveal the quantity of people who believed certain issues this approach cannot reveal "why it happened", "how it was done" or "to what extent". ...
This paper discusses the importance of leadership talent in the rail industry in Australia. Like many other countries around the world, rail is troubled by its ability to attract new talent as older leaders with specialized knowledge retire. This study sought to identify whether the sector is making the most of the talent already existing within, knowing the barriers faced in attracting new industry entrants, and questions what can be done to strengthen current approaches to developing leaders. In exploring the meaning of leadership talent, from a skills based perspective with three levels of leaders, blended methods using semi-structured interviews and a survey were utilized. The study is important because it focuses on the people aspects of the industry, a little researched area of rail that has major implications for how employees are engaged and retained. The findings identified a certain mindset, culture and approach about leadership talent in organizations that overlooked the heterogeneity of rail organization populations, precluding certain groups of people from becoming leaders. The project identified that leadership and other soft skills required in the rail industry are both under researched, and often undervalued, for the impact that they can have on performance and productivity of companies. There are key messages from this study for both organizations as well as inspiring rail industry leaders.
... A qualitative methodology was used to elicit fire-fighters' experiences, perceptions and understandings of working whilst fatigued. It was based on methodologies refined in studies of train driver experiences of fatigue ( Rainbird et al., 2010;Thompson, 2013). This interview protocol was designed to elicit an overall perception based on cumulative experience, rather than refer to a single critical event. ...
... Whilst respondents were restricted in the amount of open-text responses they could provide, there was sufficient data to apply a modified qualitative data analysis approach based on systematic reading of the data, recording of issues and basic organization of findings around the research questions [22]. ...
Horse riding and horse-related interactions are inherently dangerous. When they occur on public roads, the risk profile of equestrian activities is complicated by interactions with other road users. Research has identified speed, proximity, visibility, conspicuity and mutual misunderstanding as factors contributing to accidents and near misses. However, little is known about their significance or incidence in Australia. To explore road safety issues amongst Australian equestrians, we conducted an online survey. More than half of all riders (52%) reported having experienced at least one accident or near miss in the 12 months prior to the survey. Whilst our findings confirm the factors identified overseas, we also identified issues around rider misunderstanding of road rules and driver misunderstanding of rider hand signals. Of particular concern, we also found reports of potentially dangerous rider-directed road rage. We identify several areas for potential safety intervention including (1) identifying equestrians as vulnerable road users and horses as sentient decision-making vehicles (2) harmonising laws regarding passing horses, (3) mandating personal protective equipment, (4) improving road signage, (5) comprehensive data collection, (6) developing mutual understanding amongst road-users, (7) safer road design and alternative riding spaces; and (8) increasing investment in horse-related safety initiatives.
Dark Territory is an area of railway operations that doesn’t have signals or track circuits to detect occupied sections of track. Dark territory accounts for large parts of the rail networks of many countries (including the USA, Canada & Australia) and carries some of the largest passenger trains in the world. While there have been a number of accidents in dark territory that have caused multiple fatalities the safety of dark territory operations has so far not been considered in the safety literature. This paper is an initial exploration of how safe the railway dark territory system is and whether effective teamwork is able to help people identify and recover from error. Nineteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with network controllers and locomotive drivers who operate in dark territory. These interviews revealed that the safety of dark territory railway operations was almost totally reliant on the agents involved with few effective mechanisms available for detecting and resolving potential conflicts between trains and between trains and other network users. Further, the current structure and nature of interactions between network users provides little opportunity for the team to identify and recover from errors. To improve safety in dark territory operations we suggest that the network controllers need to share more information, locomotive drivers need to communicate more with each other and the network controller, and that open radio communication systems with a specific geographical focus be considered for implementation.
Categorization - such as deciding whether something is real ethnography - is a difficult task, because nature and social practices, the topics of ethnography, themselves do not come with inherent labels. In this article, which takes its starting point in AGAR's contribution to the debate on the quality of qualitative research, I articulate and expose the aporetic and internally contradictory nature of categorizing something as real ethnography.
Metrics such as passengers per square metre have been developed to define optimum or crowded rail passenger density. Whilst such metrics are important to operational procedures, service evaluation and reporting, they fail to fully capture and convey the ways in which passengers experience crowded situations. This paper reports findings from a two year study of rail passenger crowding in five Australian capital cities which involved a novel mixed-methodology including ethnography, focus groups and an online stated preference choice experiment. The resulting data address the following four fundamental research questions: 1) to what extent are Australian rail passengers concerned by crowding, 2) what conditions exacerbate feelings of crowdedness, 3) what conditions mitigate feelings of crowdedness, and 4) how can we usefully understand passengers' experiences of crowdedness? It concludes with some observations on the significance and implications of these findings for customer service provision. The findings outlined in this paper demonstrate that the experience of crowdedness (including its tolerance) cannot be understood in isolation from other customer services issues such as interior design, quality of environment, safety and public health concerns. It is hypothesised that tolerance of crowding will increase alongside improvements to overall customer service. This was the first comprehensive study of crowding in the Australian rail industry.
Like anthropologists entering the field as “outsiders,” initiates to organizations need to learn new cultures as they transition to “insiders” or veterans. Organizational research has identified the role that spontaneous humor plays in this transition. However, there has been little research into “staged” humorous events. At the same time, anthropological practice has identified various ethnographic research techniques designed to expedite entrée to a social group or organization. However, there has been no research on the implications of a colleague delivering an ethnography of a group back to itself. In this article, I detail a strategy that combined humor and the ethnography genre: the delivery of a workplace ethnography back to colleagues. Through a post hoc analysis, I explore the significance of this staged humorous event. In particular, I identify the impact of the ethnographic genre, inclusive narratives, and ambiguity as devices (in addition to the satirical tone). Through these devices, I was able to invite colleagues to engage with an alternative organizational vision in which I was an “insider.” I consider the effect of staged humorous events such as humorous workplace ethnographies on workplace identities and relations in general, and the initiation of new workers in particular. This auto-ethnographic article is based on 9 months of opportunistic participant-observation with an Australian research center.
Only a few animals are regularly ridden by humans. Despite the rarity of the riding relationship, the fact that humans ride horses remains arguably the most taken for granted aspect of the human-horse relationship. The riding relationship presents a valuable area of research into the embodied dimensions of human-animal communication because it requires and encourages the harmonisation of human and animal bodies in space and time. The archetypal metaphor for the achievement of harmony between horse and rider is the mythical centaur with the upper body of a human and the lower body of a horse. In this paper, I demonstrate the ways in which the centaur metaphor conveys the transformative and generative nature of the rider-horse relationship. In so doing, I suggest that there is an inherent centaurability in the rider-horse relationship. Following a theoretical contextualization, I illustrate the centaur metaphor ethnographically by discussing the centaur-in-action in the Spanish bullfight (corrida). I compare the picador who appears in the first phase (tercio) of the bullfight from foot (corrida de toros) with the lesser-known rejoneador of the bullfight from horseback (corrida de rejones) to illustrate that although the centaur is the archetypal and somewhat romantic metaphor for a transcendent rider-horse relationship, such as achievement is not a fait accompli of that relationship. To some extent, this is because the human-horse is part of a broader dynamic network of humans, animals and technology.
This article discusses some of the everyday risks and professional dilemmas encountered when conducting participant-observation based research into the use and meaning of alcohol among fans of Australian Rules football. The key risks and dilemmas were those that emerged from female researchers entering into a predominantly male football subculture in which alcohol is routinely (and often excessively) consumed, the negotiation of key gatekeepers, the potential dangers of conducting research with participants who are inebriated and the duty of care to research participants. The article draws on an eighteen-month period of ethnographic fieldwork to highlight the risks and dilemmas negotiated and re-negotiated throughout the research process. The article argues that a failure to attend to these and other risks and dilemmas can threaten the viability of research among drinking-based communities and subcultures.
The centrality of the researcher and their position in relation to the research setting has been subject to controversy and long standing debates threaded with the narratives of insider and outsider myths. Insiders are often charged with the tendency to present their group in an unrealistically favourable light, and their work is often considered to be overshadowed by the enclosed, self-contained world of common understanding. This article draws upon data generated by six participants from a research project, which aimed to explore and represent the everyday experiences of working-class mothers and daughters residing on a peripheral social housing estate. The article describes how I, as an indigenous researcher, employed visual methods of data production in order to suspend my preconceptions of familiar territory, and facilitate an understanding of the unique viewpoints of mothers and daughters on the margins of contemporary Britain. The article focuses the usefulness of the approach for making the familiar strange when the researchers own experience mirrors that of their participants.
There is a common perception that football and alcohol go hand in hand and that players and fans routinely engage in excessive and irresponsible drinking. In Australia, this is manifest in the stereotypical ‘Pissed Aussie Rules fan’. Following research with Australian Rules football fans in South Australia, we identified three categories of fans according to their (non)engagement with alcohol: Drinkers, Non-Drinkers and Deferrers. Deferrers were self-identified drinkers who separated alcohol consumption from spectating, for fear of ‘contamination’. Our identification of counter-stereotypic ways in which fans engage with alcohol (or not) challenges the assumptive worlds in which popular commentary on football and drinking operates. This was, to our knowledge, the first ethnography of drinking behaviour amongst Australian Rules football fans. It demonstrates the advantage of using ethnographic research techniques to understand the relationship between identity and consumption.
Qualitative research seeks to examine the interconnections in rich, complex data sources. The statistical tools of quantitative methods separate out pieces of data in a manner that defeats the purpose. But, like quantitative researchers, qualitative researchers often still find themselves overwhelmed by the amount of data and equally in need of tools to extend their human senses. This has led the development of a number of software packages designed for this purpose. An often overlooked option, however, is Microsoft Excel. Excel is generally considered a number cruncher. However, its structure and data manipulation and display features can be utilized for qualitative analysis. In this article, the authors discuss data preparation, analysis, and presentation, including discussion of lesser known features of Excel.
Anyone involved in ethnographic research knows that in practice participant listening is an important technique employed by ethnographers, particularly among those of us who live in an ‘interview society’; yet its importance is barely acknowledged in the ethnographic literature. It is curious that ethnographers seem not to have reflected much on a gap between what we say we do and our real life practice. Based partly on my own research into schools and schooling, alongside the work of various other practitioners, I argue the need to better acknowledge the importance of engaged listening for ethnography, and the ways in which personal style (visual learners versus aural learners) impacts ethnographic data production. I also examine the use of interviews in social research, exploring ways in which we might construe ‘the interview’ conducted with an ethnographic imaginary as an ‘experience-near’ event in Western settings: they offer truly ethnographic moments.