what people:
methods
say think
interviews
do use
observation
observative
generative sessions
tacit
knowledge
surface
know feel dream
explicit
latent
deep
Figure#3.2 Methods that study what people Say, Do, and Make help access different levels of knowledge.
What people do
With Do techniques, somebody observes people, their activities, the objects they use, and the places where they conduct these activities. This somebody doing the observing can be the researcher, or it can be the people themselves. Self-observation and self-report may, in fact, be the only option available for certain everyday activities such as those involving personal hygiene, since this is a domain that people prefer to keep private. Of all three categories, the Do category seem closest to scientific practice, because it can be conducted by an unobtrusive researcher ‘objectively’ observing and recording the behavior of people. In practice, though, there are limits to the level of unobtrusiveness that can be attained, e.g., for legal reasons of privacy, and for practical reasons. A great number of tools and devices can be used for making observations of people and recording traces of use. For example, photo- and video-cameras, note-taking paper for writing and sketching, tally sheets, voice recorders, etc. Viewing and documenting the place of the action itself, even without people in it, is also of great value. Gosling and colleagues (2002; cited in Gladwell, 2005) showed that looking around someone’s living room for fifteen minutes can give you a more reliable impression of that person’s character than spending a day with the person him- or herself. There are a vast number of options available for studying what people do. Three salient dimensions to consider are the observer, the level of intrusion, and the recording media used in the study: > > Who does the observation? The answer can vary from researcheras-observer to participant-as-observer with the points in between describing hybrid conditions along this scale. part 1 > chapter 3 > page 67