[Sigia-l] Ethnography - using actors in fieldstudies

[Jayson Elliot]

We're preparing to do some field studies on financial advisors and how
they work with their clients.
Of course, the idea of having a researcher observe people discussing
their private financial information raises all kinds of red flags - in
fact, we can't do that at all.

So.

Here's my question. We have decided to use actors in the place of the
real customers, after carefully preparing them based on our research
of the demographic we're looking at.

Does anyone know of any case studies that might address a situation
like this? Has anyone tried a similar approach?

Specifically, here's what we're proposing:
*We will inform three financial advisors (FAs) that at some point over
a three-day period, they may or may not be visited by one of our
actors posing as a new client.

*Each advisor will have a camera placed in their office, and a screen
recorder on their PC.
*The camera and screen recorder will not be turned on unless one of
our actors is present.
*The advisor will have no way of knowing when the camera is turned on,
so they will not be able to tell the difference between real clients
and actors.


Thoughts?