Constructivist Worldview

Constructivist worldview

China's markets are difficult to research and understand because of a rare combination of many factors.

First is the country's size, comparable only to the United States, Brazil, India and the EU. Then is its rate of market change, which compares only to developing economies such as India and Brazil.

Third, though large secondary information is available in China, it is often old, questionable, or inaccurate, and the methods by which it is produced are rarely understood. Even more, China's markets are fragmented and diverse.

But the biggest issue in China is that individuals and businesses are often unreceptive to direct research inquiries. The main obstacle for entering the Chinese market in my opinion is understanding their culture first and way of doing business afterwards.

That's why when doing our research and collecting the data, we have to observe their behavior by engaging in their activities or by collaborating with them.

Research Issue

This paper discusses the assumptions Western ethnographic research methodologies are based on and how they would contradict with the Chinese culture and way of working. I suggest for companies that want to enter China to first understand the Chinese market in a socio-

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anthropological way. I will briefly use Google as an example. The biggest mistake they made was underestimating the market. They were supposed to be hiring teams of Chinese and non- Chinese ethnographers, sociologists, and anthropologists (triangulation approach) to work intimately in all phases with human-computer interaction designers and programmer and invest in long-term fieldwork for teams to absorb themselves in a diversity of environments. While usability tests and focus groups are useful for specific phases of app development, they aren't as useful for understanding cultural frameworks and practices because by the time an app is being tested, it already has accumulated so many cultural assumptions along the way in the design process that users are asked to test something that functions in the programmer's world, not the user's world.