An ethnographic approach to carrying out research has a number of advantages:

• It immerses the project team in participants’ lives and enables a relationship to develop with research participants over the period of study;
• It provides a rich source of visual data and helps to reveal unarticulated needs;
• It captures behaviour in the different contexts of everyday life;
• It puts a human face on data through real-life stories that teams can relate to and remember;
• It provides understanding behind ‘statistics’;
• It allows emotional behaviour to be captured;
• By carrying out research in the everyday life environments of participants it helps to identify discrepancies between what people say they do and what they actually do.