This project was a result of the IAD 3300 class: Ethnography for Designers. Our goal was to practice applied ethnography, by picking a location that we would travel to and observe for approximately half the semester. We wanted to focus specifically on the impact that WAVE has on college students, and what drives them to continuously attend this church.
User Researcher, Visual Designer
Google Docs, Figma, FigJam, Teams, and Discord
September - November 2022 (8 Weeks)
Team Lead
Ethnographer, Facilitator
Ethnographer, Facilitator
Ethnographer, Facilitator
Ethnography itself is the study of culture, focusing on the regular habits and behaviors of people within a certain group. However, ethnography often takes long periods of time, capable of spanning several months. For this class project we would be using applied ethnography by integrating ourselves into the field and fully immersing ourselves in the culture that resides at WAVE over the course of 8 weeks.
As Sam Ladner states in her book Practical Ethnography in the Private Sector, "The ethnographic method is steeped in this patient approach to documenting social life and making interpretations about its meaning" (Ladner, 15). Our research would take time out of our daily schedules, as we would be actively participating in WAVE's late night sessions, but it allowed us to experience the culture created in this space for ourselves.
As our team prepared for the field, we first had to identify what we were looking to discover. We spent a week creating ideas as a team to narrow down our focus and develop the research question.
We decided that we wanted to focus more on the student's opinions of WAVE to get idea of why they consistently attended the service there. This lead us to our final research question
How does having access to WAVE affect college students?
With our research question defined, our team entered the field and attempted to immerse ourselves within the setting as best we could. This would allow us to get as close as possible to the potential feelings and experiences that students attending had. Our whole team had previous experiences with churches and knew the general happenings that would take place. With this prior knowledge, we were able to focus on what might have been different about this field specifically.
Our team chose WAVE as our research field, the college ministry at NorthStar church in Kennesaw, Georgia. For four weeks, we attended their main Tuesday night sessions and observed the service that they held. We wanted to gain insight into how young Christian adults view church, and why they regularly chose WAVE as their church of choice. WAVE has created a community of college students coming from all different backgrounds that come together with one common interest.
WAVE would give us a medium-sized population to observe with consistent people that we saw throughout the weeks so that our field was not too large that we would not be able to make accurate conclusions. This also allowed us to observe some of the same people over the course of time, to see how they were impacted by the services on a week-by-week basis.
Observation was the largest contribution to our research. For four weeks, our team visited WAVE's Tuesday night sessions and observed the things going on. We spent a majority of the four sessions watching the students there, and noting their behavior, the atmosphere and environment, and implied reasons that students might be coming for. We as a team would sit together and participate in the services, taking personal notes that would describe our personal insights to the sessions.
During each observation period our team kept individual journals. These journals were primarily focused on the jottings, or any thoughts that we had while physically in the research field. These jottings gave us a running record of information that we would refer back to later when going over our observations.
After each observation session we completed a field note for what we had seen. This allowed us to briefly summarize all of our jottings to begin analyzing our data. Each field note followed a modified version of Dell Hymes' SPEAKING Model that helped us to focus in on the Setting, Participants, their Ends, Key, Norms, and a final Analysis. All of this work was still done individually between team members, but it provided a helpful way to organize ourselves before the team came together.
During our observation we began conducting interviews. We gave ourselves a few sessions at WAVE to grow acquainted with the community and give us a chance to organize the questions that we wanted to ask within our interviews, fine tuning them to cater towards what we had seen and what we wanted answered.
The interviews were split half and half, with two being in person, the other two hosted virtually through Microsoft Teams. All of our participants were friends of the team leader and very happy to participate in our research. With this however, we do recognize the potential for bias and came to a mutual agreement as a group that their information was genuine, but it does not represent the full scope of students' experience with WAVE.
We began with an early interview script where we introduced ourselves, shared more information regarding our project, and asked for permission to record the interview. We also took this time to get to know our interviewees a bit more to break the ice and make the interviewee more comfortable before we get to more research-specific questions such as what meant the most them about WAVE, why they kept coming back, and their previous church experience comparing to what WAVE offered.
In her book, Practical Ethnography, Sam Ladner defined what our analysis process would look like, saying that "Just like quantitative social researchers, ethnographers must do two things: describe the data and interpret the data" (2014, 139). Our team followed this two-step approach towards our analysis by starting individually with our journals and field notes to do a personal analysis and come together afterwards to combine our ideas and identify affinities.
To begin our analysis, each team member was in charge of reducing their own journals. We went through our notes, picking out repeating themes and quotes that stood out. This process was largely aided by the field notes where we had already started highlighting important themes. I filtered through my journal by color coding sticky notes on Miro with key themes that I found repeating. After identifying some things I already knew I would find, I worked my way through my journal, flagging any instance of the specific theme.Once we had all individually gone over our notes, we came together as a team to form a conceptually ordered matrix.
We decided beforehand that we wanted to create two matrices: one for observations, one for interviews. This would allow us to organize our data better, while still finding references to the points that we would identify; especially since our journals were already divided between observations and interviews. After discussing our common findings as a team, we were able to identify four key themes that crossed all our of journals.
1. Community
2. Love of Scripture-Based Messages
3. A Safe and Welcoming Environment
4. A Healthy Christian Experience
These four points became the main axis of our matrix, to which we would pull specific references from our journals. Once we had all the information together in our matrices, we decided on a cohering metaphor. Our team wanted the cohering metaphor to effectively explain what WAVE means to students. We came up with several metaphors to represent it and ultimately decided on our final metaphor:
WAVE caters itself to everyone, no matter where they have been in their life. This acceptance and openness to everyone gives all students an equal footing when they walk through the doors. Welcoming volunteers invite them in and give them a friendly face to see, sermons are strong enough to challenge experienced Christians, and explain them clearly to those who are unfamiliar. This range allows WAVE to reach anyone that wants to hear, further encouraging the building up of a healthy Christian experience.
Overall, we identified several ways that WAVE affects the lives of college students. However, after our observations and interviews, we found that having a community of like-minded individuals has the biggest impact on the students that attend.
To summarize our data, our team compiled all of our findings into a visually appealing report that we could present to the staff at NorthStar Church. This report includes our initial research question, our answer in the form of the cohering metaphor, and the evidence that we collected in our observational field notes and interviews.
The final stage of our applied ethnography project was to compose our findings into a formal report that would be presented to the staff at NorthStar. This report lists and explains our findings in great detail, providing our methods, key findings, and final conclusion that could potentially help the NorthStar team to improve on the community that they have already built based upon the observations and conclusions that our team made.
View Full Report
This project allowed me to learn many new skills that I will be able to use in the future regarding research and observational settings. While I had previous knowledge of acquiring first-hand information from people within the field, this process has taught me how to pay closer attention to what is going on and how to read into the mindset behind certain actions and phrases. These small and intricate details can be vital and should be watched for.
The experience at WAVE allowed me to see how important it is to understand where someone is coming from, as it helps to explain why people do what they do. Understanding people's values and comforts also allowed me to realize that everything has to be set up in a "professional" light. Research and observation can take place anywhere and I as a researcher must be willing to adapt to that.
I am extremely grateful to have been a part of WAVE and honored that our 4 interviewees trusted our team enough to share their stories and experiences with us. Given the time, we would have loved to interview more people that would allow us to round out our conclusions since WAVE is a much larger population. However, based on our limitations, and the information we gathered and observed, we answered our research question to the best of our abilities.
