Ethnography is a useful research method involving participant observation, widely used in business and academics. I depict a usual challenge for them when doing the fieldwork in familiar sites. They hope to come back with new insights; however, often it is challenging to get new insights. One of the key challenges in doing ethnography is that you will not have anything noteworthy to tell about your familiar field.
When You are observing your familiar world for your ethnography or when you have familiarized yourself too much, with the social world through your previous encounters in the field, you may not be able to see and hear things properly. Our mind is tuned to see and pay attention to new or unfamiliar things. This prevents or acts as a hurdle to the ethnographer in such situations from doing your ethnographic observation properly.
What is a way out? One of the tricks I regularly like to use (and very likely to forget to use) is the one explained by Howard Becker as the Null Hypothesis trick. While using this trick, you go to the social world, thinking that the participants in the social world are chosen randomly. Imagine their way of interaction in the social world in such a case ( or visualize it). When you actually observe the field, try to notice how the social interactions are different from your imaginary field. This comparison opens your mind; the observations are now novel, and you need to pay attention now. You can no longer ignore your familiar social situation. There is something worth your attention. Immediately, your mind gets dragged into it. You will now start paying attention to what ways the social members are different from the random allocation to the social world. The social forces that make their behaviour non-random will be revealed to you. For example, you will identify the two visitors coming to the tea kiosk, who you had imagined to be random people are not random anymore; they were previously known to each other. Being aware of the differences in the observed behaviour from the expected social behaviour in your imagery gives profound social science insights about your setting.
In summary, the use of this trick is simple. 1) Imagine a random allocation of social members to your setting and visualize how they would interact. 2) Observe and compare the real social setting with the imagined social setting. 3) Your insights into the social world are ready for further analysis.