Humanalysis
Dissecting human behavior through cultural anthropology and ethnography
Why do people act the way they do? Humanalysis™ combines cultural anthropology, the study of people and humanity, and ethnography, an in-depth research methodology, to answer that very question. Humanalysis™ does not rely solely on common research techniques or take what people say at face value. Rather, it seeks to dig deeper and get to the core of consumers’ behavior through methodologies that immerse GDC in people’s daily lives.
What is Ethnography?
Ethnography is the in-depth fieldwork that we use to study human behavior. Rather than solely relying on surveys and focus groups, we integrate ethnography’s cornerstone method: participant observation. We participate in our subjects’ daily lives in every way possible, observing how they live, how they work, and how they play by doing these activities with them.
Obviously, it wouldn’t make sense to do this kind of true-to-life research in a lab or controlled setting. A key element to ethnographic research is that it is done in the subject’s comfort zone (i.e. their home, car, office, neighborhood). And that’s exactly where you’ll find us—right alongside our subjects in their kitchens making breakfast, in their offices on conference calls, and in their cars picking up their kids from school.
With participant observation and other methods, we glean a more profound, holistic understanding of our research subject’s thoughts, actions and behaviors.
Our Ethnographic Methods
• Follow-alongs & shop-alongs
• Home/office tours & inventories
• In-depth interviews
• Emotional/behavioral landscaping
• Storyboarding, relationship mapping and behavioral identification
• Projective investigations
• Video/photo documentation
• Product and service testing
• Social media interfacing
If you'd like to discuss our full repertoire of ethnographic and other qualitative methodologies based on your specific needs, please email our Cultural Anthropologist Tim Craig at tcraig [at] gdc-co [dot] com or (210) 223-2772. He promises not to study you during your dialogue.