Qualitative Methods of Data Collection | Artifact Analysis

Artifact analysis

What are artifacts?

Objects that have been "created, handled, modified or transformed by human intervention". Artefacts are inextricably linked to specific behaviours, actions, knowledge, competences or thought processes

What is the aim of artifact analysis?

Artifact analysis is about explaining the decisions, social contexts and communications inscribed in artifacts through qualitative analysis. The focus of the analysis is not on the materiality or fundamental nature, but on the social, cognitive, context of use in which an artefact is integrated. Artifacts have intrinsic advantages compared to other data (such as interviews):

Artefacts are ubiquitous and easily accessible (e.g. stationery).
Artefacts are created without the intervention of researchers and are therefore genuinely field-specific decisions.
Artefacts are stable objects and often outlive concrete persons. Thus, past structures can also be reconstructed.
Artefacts are a social memory and can also communicate social barriers.

How is the artifact analysis implemented?

Key issues:

Why is there an artefact?
How do people make the artefact?
What do people do with the artefact?
What does the artefact do to people and society?

Levels of analysis of artifacts (Lueger & Froschauer, 2018, 65)

The analysis addresses different levels:

Questions to the artefact at the levels of analysis
Contextualisation
Integration into the research process
Integration into the results of the research - presentation of results

Literature

Lueger, Manfred, Froschauer, Ulrike (2018): Artefaktanalyse. Grundlagen und Verfahren. Wiesbaden: Springer.

Froschauer Ulrike (2009): Artefaktanalyse. In Stefan Kühl / Petra Strodtholz / Andreas Taffertshofer (Hrsg.), Handbuch Methoden der Organisationsforschung. Quantitative und Qualitative Methoden, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, S. 326 - 347

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