[Sigia-l] Ethnography - using actors in fieldstudies

[Matthew Hodgson]

there's a lot of research in the area of psychological testing of human subjects that you could draw upon.

milgram (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) used the same approach you're suggesting, using actors as confederates, to great effect. in this case, though, milgram hid the the true nature of the experiment from the subjects. milgram got excellent results -- but these days the nature of the test would mean that it wouldn't pass ethics.

unfortunately, the fact that they know they are being observed at some time will ultimately bias the results -- there's probably no way of getting around this issue.

one method that helps to lessen the effect, though, is to not have an observer watch the video. the subject and the experimenter watch it together at some later stage (recently after the event) and the subject then explains and talks through the situation with the experimenter.

M



________________________________________
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf Of Jayson Elliot [jayson.elliot at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, 28 November 2007 3:01 PM
To: sigia l
Subject: [Sigia-l] Ethnography - using actors in fieldstudies

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?
------------
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April 10-14, 2008, Miami, Florida

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