CASE STUDY

How do you really understand young people's buying behaviour?



How do you really understand young people's buying behaviour?

When people live with other people and live like them so that they may study them in detail, this act can be termed as ethnography. This is a term which means a portrait of people. In most of the cased ethnography gives the culture of a particular section of people, which include their customs, their beliefs and the way they behave. All these information is collected with the help of field work. Some times this kind of investigation may take as long as a year or more. Ethnography describes a culture or group and this group may be a small tribe or a major tribe of an area. Personal experience is an essential factor for this kind of investigation. Only observation quality is not enough, but an ample training in research, interview methods, language and culture is very necessary for ethnography.

1. Critically assess the role of ethnographic research as a means of learning more about buyer behaviour.

Ethnic groups are defined by the individuals who belong to them, and can be recognised and identified by people who don't belong to them (Roosens 1989:15-16). It has been argued that these groups are characterised by their perception of shared ancestry more than by actual shared beliefs or practices (Bauböck 1999:138). In many societies, one ethnic group is in the majority and one or more form minorities. This creates power imbalances between different ethnic groups (Bauböck 1999:143-4) which underpin all the challenges faced by researchers working with participants from different ethnic groups. Also, it is not possible to be sure that a research method which works well with one ethnic group will work well with another (Hannerz 1996:64). For example, a multiple-choice questionnaire in English which works well with native English speakers might not work so well with people whose first language is not English. A researcher might try to circumvent this problem by giving non-native-English-speaking participants pictures to choose from, rather than phrases or sentences. However, there are also cultural conventions in art. For example, most young English people would recognise a cartoon drawing of a stunned person from stars drawn whirling around the head and curved lines by the legs to indicate a wobbling gait. However, young people from Africa may not recognise these conventions (Duncan et al, 1973, cited in Cox (in press)). Equally, many Western observers would not understand that in ancient Egyptian art a figure with feet apart depicts a live person, while one with feet together signifies that the person is dead (Cox (in press)). I will examine these kinds of challenge more closely in the contexts of ethnography in general and interviewing in particular.

Ethnography has been described as the 'original and quintessential qualitative research method' (Taylor 1995a:34). It is a multi-method approach in which researchers are willing to collect data in any way which may help to shed light on the issue in ...