 So far in this module, we have been discussing the various questions that we should consider as we design our research. Let us now bring in examples of some research projects and how they address some of these questions. The first of our questions was about the nature of knowledge that we are seeking. We know that in order to articulate this, we need to define a research question. Our first example focuses on the research question framed by a design team working on a healthcare project. This process helped them understand the nature of the problem their design was trying to address. The state of Bihar has a vast and dense network of public health centers. The government employs many healthcare workers who go from village to village administering vaccines to newborn children and pregnant women. However, the frequency and regularity of vaccination is low and many people do not get their regular dosage of vaccines. An international NGO working on improving healthcare services in developing countries wanted to work on this problem. They approached a design consulting firm based in New Delhi, the Center for Knowledge Societies or CKS, and asked them to design interventions for improving vaccination services in the state. Let us pause a moment to reflect on the nature of this problem. In your opinion, what is the challenge that the team at CKS has to address? Option A, people not coming for regular immunizations. Option B, insufficient public healthcare services. Option C, low frequency of vaccinations. And option D, none of the above. Select an answer from the options on the screen. Let us discuss your answers. Some of you may have selected option A. This may or may not be correct. We cannot tell unless we actually look into the matter. The same is true for option B. There may be sufficient healthcare services in the state, but people may not be accessing them for reasons we are unaware of. Some of you might have selected option C. It is true that the frequency of vaccination is low. That is the problem that the NGO wanted to address. But this is only a symptom of the problem. What causes low frequency of vaccination when there are enough vaccines and a large network of healthcare services? This is the question that the designers and researchers at CKS had to address. The team at CKS realized that the brief they had been given was too vast and vague for them to address directly or effectively. So they carried out some groundwork. They began by reading up on vaccination in poorer districts of India. They interviewed experts in public healthcare and maternal and childbirth. They visited rural and peri-urban public healthcare centers from where public vaccination drives are managed and deployed. They conducted observations and interviews with ground-leveled healthcare workers to understand the scenarios in which they work. All of these inputs helped them to understand the nature of the problem. And thus they were able to go beyond the brief they had been handed and articulate a nuanced research question. The research question they came up with was where are the missing children? Which translated into where are the children who are not being vaccinated? This question was broken down by the team into a set of sub-questions. And by exploring these sub-questions the team was able to understand the causes and the factors that is the wise and the house of low vaccination rates in the state. And this study led them to design interventions that address the causes of low immunization. For those of you who might be interested in learning more about the research and design process that the team followed and the interventions that they designed you can access the report here. And as always there is a quiz to help you revise and reflect on what you learnt. Let us move ahead now to another aspect of designing a research. One of the questions we had posed to ourselves was how do we know if ethnography is the method we need for our study? Let us take two examples here each from application focused fields design and brand strategy. In the first example a designer decides to use ethnography as part of a toy design project. Designer Neha Parik was given a brief to design a low cost toy that would appeal to lower middle class and middle class children of primary school age living in cities. As you can see this brief does not suggest very much Neha decided to redefine the brief. She started with expanding the focus of her study from looking at toys to exploring all play like activities among children. Before she got down to designing she wanted to understand what playing means to children. What are the multiple ways in which children play? How do they invent play like activities? In what all ways do they enjoy playing? As you can tell her questions revolved around an activity and the perceptions associated with that activity. You may recall that these are two of the areas where an ethnographic study is more suitable. Moreover it was important for Neha to investigate the subject of play by observing it as it happened. And so she chose ethnography as her primary research method. She and her team spent time with children in their homes and in playgrounds. They observed them as they played games, invented new ones and interacted with playmates. The ethnographic method enabled her to carry out observations of the activity of play and these observations fed into her understanding of the activity. It's many aspects and the meanings it held for children. This helped her identify aspects of playing that she might not have otherwise thought of. Such as the role of play in building relationships among children and between children and adults. The many ways in which children use their bodies and imaginations to create fun situations. And the desire of parents for toys and games to be educational for their child. These insights eventually led her and her team to design several new games and toys. The second example towards this question is from the field of brand strategy. Satish Krishnamurthy, a brand strategist at sideways consulting, was asked to come up with a branding and marketing strategy for a new fintech app that would allow small shop owners to accept cashless and cardless payments from their customers. While the question itself was quite pointed, it required him to understand a rather large set of activities. He needed to understand the various kinds of financial transactions that take place in different kinds of small retail shops. This was quite a huge range of transactions to understand. And given that personalized fintech apps are relatively new, there wasn't much existing research that he could fall back on. Without the support of existing research, he would have to learn for himself through on-ground engagements and observation. So he chose ethnography as the research method. Let us pause here a moment. You might remember we had listed out four broad areas that are suitable for exploration through ethnography. Perceptions, relationships, social activities, identities. In choosing ethnography, Satish would be exploring one of these. Was Satish's research about any of these four areas? If so, which ones? Some of you might have said that none of these areas necessarily falls in the domain of Satish's brief. Others may have selected option C. But the brief given to Satish is all about financial activities. What is the social activity here? Some of you have selected option B. But does Satish need to focus on interactions between shop owners and their customers? Well, options B and C are correct. Let us understand how. Satish's research is about the financial activities of people in retail stores. He needs to understand what kinds of transactions take place at these shops and what is the nature of those transactions. Using ethnographic methods, he can observe these activities. And importantly, buying and selling is as much a social activity as it is a financial one. A lot of what happens in a shop is social. People exchange greetings, ask questions to each other. Shopkeepers often advise customers and influence their buying decisions. And there is bargaining and haggling too. All of these are social activities and interactions. And they can be observed closely by using ethnographic methods. And did some of you select option A? Is this a situation where Satish is trying to understand people's perception of monetary transactions in a shop? Let us see. By using ethnography, Satish was able to observe transactions at the shop in the context in which they were carried out. He followed up these observations with interviews with shopkeepers and attendants. This helped him make sense of the shopkeeper's business and their relationship with their customers. He was able to understand what they thought of as a profitable and efficient transaction. And what kind of transactions were unprofitable for them. In short, he learned of the shopkeeper's perception of their customers, their transactions and their business. So yes, this was a study where the researcher attempted to understand people's perception of phenomena they were involved in. And so ethnography was the correct choice here. All of these insights and learning fed into the strategy he finally designed for the FinTech company. He outlined kinds of businesses and shops the app should cater to and what existing challenges it should try to address. We hope that these examples give a fair idea of how we may articulate our research question and where we may use ethnography as our research method. In our next section, we will take some more examples addressing other questions on our list.