Fieldwork. On fixers and focus.
(Finding my feet during deer pizzle ethnography)
I’d heard of nose-to-tail eating, but apparently there are parts of certain animals which do more than provide nourishment…
Yep. I’m talking about Pizzle. (Deer dick).
Operating from of New Zealand brings exposure to a diverse range of niche products we export, and the people who consume them. Usually through fieldwork in distant markets, and often with the client riding shotgun.
So when a large-scale deer farmer and venison exporter came knocking, I jumped…
…but this time higher than usual. Higher, because they wanted to learn about what drove Chinese consumers of deer products for use in Traditional Chinese Medicine — parts of the deer revered for their aphrodisiac and ‘performance-enhancing’ benefits, amongst others.
One of the great privileges of design research is the deep dive into a specific market. This time a market of sticky-up and dangly bits, raw and processed. A world of medicine and mystery, but — most enticing to me — people and their beliefs around the product, how and why they choose and use it.
No project of mine has come close to the dinner party-mileage, pun and innuendo this one generated, or the amount of planning and support required to do it well.
We arrived in Guangzhou a day early — to find our bearings, starting by perusing the sprawling Qingpingdong Drug Market. Block after city block of traders’ stalls peddling raw, bulk materials. All of it belonged to something that once walked, swam or grew, and with almost all of it I wouldn’t know what to do.
Long a follower of Jan Chipchase’s far-flung ethno-adventures and having quizzed colleagues who’ve worked in these regions, it took actually arriving in-market to fully appreciate the methodological tradeoffs, logistical challenges and rich layers of cultural nuance we’d struggle to navigate without local support.
Using a local recruiter is standard for projects in USA, UK and Europe, but this was a whole new level to me. Jan and others recommend using ‘fixers’, well-connected and resourceful local guides who can make shit happen, while remaining discreet about your project.
Our team comprised a local partner triple-act of:
- Fixer, who’d screened, recruited and visited the participants,
- Well-briefed Mandarin speaking researcher,
- Quick-thinking translator, briefed to convey meaning, not just verbatims.
Plus one curious client (with ears alert and eyes on stalks, and me, camera in hand.
I’d run many studies before in ‘new markets’ for customers but always in western cultures and with English speaking participants. I usually ran with a ‘three’s a crowd’ policy when doing home visits, so arriving with an entourage like this was new territory for me. Territory I reckoned to be clouded with compromise and tradeoff.
All was about to become clear once the first home visit was chalked up…
As I stepped through the door with a “Ni hao”, I watched all my norms float back out the door I came in.
When I say norms, I mean the usual ingredients of a successful field visit.
Home visits rely on the crucial first few minutes to build rapport. It’s essential. With a ‘sensitive’ topic like this, rapport needed to be converted into trust if we were going to get below the surface.
So as the five of us filed into a participant’s home with only low-key greetings I had to fight my instinct to be convivial. Where was the ice-breaker? Where was the rapport?
Turns out it hadn’t actually gone out the door. The ice was broken and rapport built a week earlier when our local partner visited the participant. A necessary step to introduce him to the idea of our arrival and why we were so interested in his thoughts and use of the aphrodisiac animal part in question.
Even so, with our entourage out-numbering the guy in an already cramped private space, I couldn’t see how we’d gain the trust and confidence for him to open up about such personal topics, let alone peel back the layers of culture, beliefs and behaviours — all through a moderator and translator?
I had to do two things, and fast.
Relax, and focus. (only possible in that order as it turned out)
Relax — because I knew all the details were taken care of… The recruit, rapport, and recording gear was rolling. This left me to observe, take notes, photos and ask the occasional ‘why?’ question.
Focus — because I needed to keep my eyes on the participant for their body language ‘tells’ while filtering out their voice to parse the rich flow of translated conversation coming through on a two second delay.
This focus took all my mental bandwidth for the first minute or so and had me feeling brain-freeze — like I was listening in mono…
Then — CLICK — after a couple of minutes a switch went off …like when you flick into subconsciously absorbing the dialogue in a subtitled film.
My tired — but now trained — processor had thawed and I was back in stereo. Tuned into the context. Drinking-in the moment, and the data — thick and rich as a bowl of pizzle broth.
While I was curious about how the details would work, my big learning wasn’t from the layers of logistics and practicalities but in finding and briefing the ‘fixer’ — a local partner team with the right connections and skills to be the ‘research roadie’, so we could relax and focus.
In that order.
This article was originally published in two parts on Nick’s blog www.userexperience.co.nz
