Quantitative research methods (as valuable as they are) can never replace interviews and ethnographic research. Despite what many UXers think, the essential difference between ethnographic research and other forms of qualitative research is not merely that it observes behavior in context, but rather, as Spradley notes in The Ethnographic Interview, that in ethnographic research the person being researched plays a role in the research quite different from that of other methods: the role of informant (as opposed to subject, respondent, actor, etc.). An informant doesn’t merely provide answers to set questions or exhibits observable behavior. An informant teaches the researcher, and helps establish the questions the researcher ought to attempt to understand — questions the researcher might never have otherwise thought to ask. An informant is far more empowered to surprise, to reframe the research, and to change the way the researcher thinks. In ethnographic research the researcher is far less distanced and intellectually insulated from the “object” of study, and is exposed to a very real risk of transformative insight.
This attitude toward human understanding goes beyond method, and even beyond theory. It implies an ethical stance, because it touches on the question of what a human being is, what constitutes understanding of a human being, and finally — how ought human beings regard one another and relate to one another.
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The passage that triggered this outburst, from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition:
Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: “Who are you?” This disclosure of who somebody is, is implicit in both his words and his deeds; yet obviously the affinity between speech and revelation is much closer than that between action and revelation, {This is the reason why Plato says that lexis (“speech”) adheres more closely to truth than praxis.} just as the affinity between action and beginning is closer than that between speech and beginning, although many, and even most acts, are performed in the manner of speech. Without the accompaniment of speech, at any rate, action would not only lose its revelatory character, but, and by the same token, it would lose its subject, as it were; not acting men but performing robots would achieve what, humanly speaking, would remain incomprehensible. Speechless action would no longer be action because there would no longer be an actor, and the actor, the doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at the same time the speaker of words. The action he begins is humanly disclosed by the word, and though his deed can be perceived in its brute physical appearance without verbal accompaniment, it becomes relevant only through the spoken word in which he identifies himself as the actor, announcing what he does, has done, and intends to do.
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The dream of quantitative research rendering qualitative research obsolete might be one more instance of an age-old fantasy: a world of people who are seen and not heard, who obey our predictions and commands, to whom we can dictate terms. Such beings cannot remind us of the difference between reality itself, and one’s own conceptions of it — and they leave the mind in peace to to be “its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell.” Hell is not other people, per se. It is speaking people showing us what we’d rather not know, which can strip us of what we knew but can no longer believe.
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(Maybe we lack faith in our capacity to recover from loss of faith?)