[Sigia-l] Ethnography - using actors in fieldstudies

[Jessica Enders]

Hi Jayson

What you're describing sounds equivalent to "Mystery Shopping" used by 
market researchers. A mystery shopper is a trained person who pretends 
to be a customer - of an unsuspecting shop assistant - and then reports 
back on the experience. Works quite well if the shop assistant can't 
pick that they are being mystery shopped, something that I think you 
might struggle with in your situation. Most visits to a financial 
adviser are repeat visits so "new customers" are going to stick out 
like a sore thumb. Another thing that might be problematic is that the 
first visit to a financial adviser is usually different to subsequent 
visits - at least in Australia - so the experience you're measuring is 
not likely to be representative.

Are you sure that you're not going to be able to get the information 
you need by talking to the financial advisers without the clients 
present? I have done a number of such interviews across Australia and 
found the advisers very forthcoming, provided you were explicit about 
confidentiality.

Cheers

Jessica Enders
Director
Formulate Information Design
----------------------------------------
http://formulate.com.au
----------------------------------------
We've just moved! New details are:
Phone: (02) 6116 8765
Fax: (02) 8456 5916
PO Box 5108
Braddon ACT 2612
----------------------------------------

On 28/11/2007, at 3:01 PM, Jayson Elliot wrote:

> 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?
> ------------
> IA Summit 2008: "Experiencing Information"
> April 10-14, 2008, Miami, Florida
>
> -----
> When replying, please *trim your post* as much as possible.
> *Plain text, please; NO Attachments
>
> Searchable Archive at http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/
> ________________________________________
> Sigia-l mailing list -- post to: Sigia-l at asis.org
> Changes to subscription: http://mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/sigia-l
>