What is Ethnography??

• Ethnography is a form of qualitative research, developed by anthropologists and sociologists to describe a society, group or culture.
• The researcher becomes immersed in group that is goes native and lives with small group of people in specific setting to record, categorize and code what is going on to provide a holistic picture of the group (Sanday 1979).
• An example of marketing ethnographic study is in Dunnett and Arnold (1999) : Jane wanted to investigate how the strong organizational culture of the retailing giant Wal-Mart impacted upon customer satisfaction.

Advantage in the research:

• Can provide significant understanding of the phenomena being researched as well as produce new, previously unrecognized phenomena and insights.
• May build relationship between company and customer.
• The company can make improvement for their weakness or lack of services.

Challenges of this research:

• The different background of people such their occupation may cause the bias for the data.
• The questionnaire must distributed to many number of people, so the result will be more accurate.

During the presentation of Research Methodology For Economics & Business by the senior, I asked some questions. These are the questions and answers followed by their topic.

1) For topic : The impact of participative management on organizational performance & employee effectiveness.

Researcher by : 
Laura Chang Leng Yi


Question : Why do you choose this topic for your research?
Answer   : Because the topic was interesting and never done in Malaysia. So I want to determine the impact of skill variety on employee effectiveness and organizational performance, by distributed questionnaires to employees in Malaysia SMEs (in manufacturing, service and agriculture sectors).


Question : What kind of software that you used to analyse your data?
Answer   : I used SPSS software and found that there are 3 hypothesis (skill variety, task significance and mentoring moderates) which have positive relationship on employee effectiveness.

2) For Topic : The impact of service quality - A study on Hotel industry in Malaysia

Researcher by :
Chin Chee Hua


Question : Why you use Smart PLS software in your research?
Answer   : Because Smart PLS is a new software to analyse the data and it is more easy to calculate the data. Additional, it was suggested from my supervisor, Associate Professor Dr. Lo May Chiun.