An Ethnographic Study on Female Solo Travel

In our Ethnography for Designers course, my team conducted a virtual applied ethnographic study that focuses on solo travel from the woman’s perspective and what it means to women. Aside from researching women's perspectives on solo travel, we also aimed to understand how solo travel has impacted the lives of our participants and the social interactions between participants in our field, the Girls About the Globe Facebook group. Due to the pandemic, we conducted a virtual ethnography.

Our study revolved around this research question: As a woman, how has solo travel shaped your perspective?

Our Findings

We discovered that women's perspectives were primarily shaped by the following categories:

• Cultural Archetypes: Anything related to culture during solo travel whether it be cultural immersion, way of communication, or simply discussing sights

• Feminism: Any social implications that come with being a woman in a solo travel context

• Freedom and Empowerment: Feelings of freedom and empowerment experienced while or related to solo traveling

• The World is a Kind Place: The praise for kindness in other communities around the world

We used these four themes to organize the data from our observations and interviews which helped us understand solo female travel as it relates to culture.

We developed a cohering metaphor that encompasses our overall findings: To solo travel is to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.

Methodology

Ethnography is described as “the study of culture." Ethnography done on a smaller scale is called Applied Ethnography, which is what we completed since we had a limited time frame of 12 weeks to complete our research. Due to COVID-19 restrictions and the short duration to observe our fields, our class was asked to choose virtual fields, making our project a virtual applied ethnography.

Virtual Ethnography is a research approach that concentrates on exploring social interactions that occur in virtual environments. This means no face-to-face interaction in the field itself, but observing virtual communities, interactions, and interviewing participants from our field instead.

We chose Facebook as our virtual field and searched for female solo travel groups that would permit us to observe and participate in their virtual community. We secured access and permission to the Girls About The Globe Facebook group. Each group member conducted twelve hours of observation which included a minimum of four sessions. To organize our notes, we recorded our observations in a journal, which were composed of jottings and field notes. Jottings are quick notes about anything the ethnographer deems relevant when observing the field, but they strictly focus on behavior and interactions that occur, whether it takes place in the present or past. Following each jotting session, a short, corresponding field note is written to analyze the documented behavior.

Observing the Field

Our observations afforded us the opportunity to become familiar with regular participants in our field and develop an understanding of these women. Each team member observed the Girls About the Globe Facebook group for 12 hours over 6 weeks with a minimum of 4 sessions. I completed my observations over 6 sessions. Observations are comprised of cumulative jottings and field notes. In order to keep track of our observations, we kept journals which were dated with the recorded the time of each entry.

We would note the date of the post, the name of the participant who made the post, what the post was about, and the conversations and comments that took place in the post. Sometimes, our jottings would simply describe what the participants were discussing. Other times, they were more in-depth as we noticed common themes among answers or phrases that were used repeatedly.

For more detail on our observations, refer to the research report.

Analyzing Our Findings

After evaluating our research from the observations and interviews, we came together to analyze our findings collectively. To analyze our work effectively and reduce it to something manageable, we needed to visualize our data so that we could finalize our themes. This was done by creating a conceptually ordered matrix comprised of our interview and observation sections; We borrowed this concept from Sam Ladner’s Practical Ethnography. A matrix is essentially a table that is time, role, or conceptually ordered, and its goal is to devise a cohering metaphor and answer the research question.

Creating Our Matrix

To ease the process of creating the matrix, we started with a matrix based solely on interviews, which helped refine the categories that we wanted to analyze for the remaining fieldwork. Since we used a conceptually ordered matrix, our matrix was based on categories that we thought were significant rather than time or role. We first created our interview matrix based on the questions that all of our participants touched on and wrote down the respective notes. We noticed that our all of our participants talked about subjects related to facing adversity, how freeing solo travel feels, immersing themselves in culture, and kindness of strangers in other countries, which became our four conceptual categories. These were the identified categories that made up the columns of the matrix: Cultural Archetypes, Freedom and Empowerment, Feminism, and The World is a Kind Place.

To create an observation matrix, we each compiled our notes into the four categories on individual matrices, which were then put into one comprehensive matrix. We combined this matrix with the interview matrix to create one complete matrix. For a detailed description our analysis, refer to the report.

Cohering Metaphor

A cohering metaphor is an effective way to summarize complex ideas from qualitative research. In other words, it enables our audience to understand our research in a familiar way. It helps us, as ethnographers, in our process of reducing, visualizing, and drawing conclusions from our findings.

To come up with our cohering metaphor, we took note of insights that stood out from our the Cultural Archetypes column of our matrix as it was our most pressing theme. We found the most common reason for solo travel to be a desire to immerse oneself in other cultures, whether it is through food, social interactions, unique opportunities, or simply seeing the sights. Some of these outstanding insights were "not wanting to be the ugly American," "seeing the world through the locals' eyes" and "what I've found from experiencing other cultures is that we're all the same." Using these insights, we came up with several potential cohering metaphors before settling on "To solo travel is to walk a mile in someone else's shoes." We felt that this phrase encompassed our findings best.

Our cohering metaphor is defined by the ability to understand another culture and people with lives dramatically divergent from one’s own. In a nutshell, female solo travel is to immerse oneself in another’s norm and to recognize and appreciate the experiences that ensue.

Conclusion

To recap this project, we conducted a virtual ethnography on female solo travel using an applied ethnographic approach. Throughout our observations and interviews, we were able to answer our research question: “As a woman, how has solo travel shaped your perspective?” Comparable to immersing oneself in a different culture, we removed our personal bias to welcome others' opinions and thoughts throughout this study. This was my first research-intensive project, and I learned so much about conducting and analyzing research comprehensively and trying my best to understand the perspectives of those who have gone through drastically different experiences from my own.