We all need to get away from our desks and really talk to people in order to better understand how they think and feel about issues, or to discover what’s meaningful to them. That’s where culture lives, and that’s what ethnographic research is all about: understanding people on their own terms and discovering their shared cultural categories of thinking and making sense of the world.

If you’ve ever taken a survey and found you don’t fit neatly into one of the little boxes, then you can start to understand the difference in an ethnographic approach. Ethnography explains the world from the perspective of the community we study, rather than the survey maker’s perspective. As a case in point, I was involved in a yearlong ethnographic research study of Latino voters in Texas. Why do some people choose to vote, while others don’t? We discovered that while most pollsters and pundits confidently told stories of a clearly partisan American political landscape, the cultural reality we uncovered by talking to a lot of people in great depth revealed a much different and more complex portrait. 

Whether you’re running a consumer brand or trying to understand a community of voters, understanding and embracing the messy realities of human decision-making can lead to new ways of thinking and the development of more effective strategies for change.

Challenge

The client, Texas Organizing Project Education Fund, hired Culture Concepts for a yearlong research project to examine voter turnout among Latinos in Texas, using ethnographic methods. The Culture Concepts team included lead researcher Cecilia Ballí, PhD, sociologist Monica Betsabeth Lugo, PhD, and myself.

Approach & Methods

Latinos in Texas represent a fast-growing demographic and community of voters. Yet in comparison with other groups, Latino voter turnout continues to lag. 

Why? 

The study sought to offer better answers by allowing Latinos to explain things in their own words.

Based on in-depth, one-on-one ethnographic interviews with more than one hundred eligible voters in five major regions of the state, this research provides a holistic look at why some Texas Latinos vote and others don’t.

• Ethnographic interviewing

• Literature reviews: Latino citizenship and voting history, social context, political partisanship and polarization trends, media trends, and selected voting data.

Findings

The report uncovered key cultural, social and emotional factors that lead some Latinos to vote and discourages others, with an emphasis on empowerment and belonging.

For a full look at the findings and insight, see the full report, available for download here.

My Role

My contributions to the project were mostly behind-the-scenes and versatile, working alongside my expert partners. Small research teams need full involvement from everyone to yield results, and my participation included research design and project coordination, reviewing interview transcripts and recordings for field notes and analysis, assembling external literature reviews and data inputs for additional context framework, organizing insights, and report writing.