About Chainjee
In the age of AI, anyone can run a survey or analyze big data. Qualitative research is different: a professional discipline, impossible without trained researchers. At Chainjee, every study is carried out by experts grounded in theory and method, with careers spanning academia and industry and project experience in Korea and abroad.
People rarely say exactly what they mean. Often they do not know it themselves. What people say, what they do, and what they actually want are three different things. In the gap between them, products fail, policies miss, and surveys mislead.
But the gap can be read. The unconscious does not stay hidden. It leaves traces in habits, in hesitations, in the small distances between word and deed. Observed carefully, across many people and many contexts, those traces become legible patterns. Reading them takes time in the field, cultural literacy, and a systematic method of analysis.
Chainjee has built that expertise through years of training and experience.
The roots
It began with anthropologists trying to understand cultures far from their own. Faced with people whose thoughts and actions made no sense by their own standards, they developed a way of seeing the world from the native’s point of view. That way of working became participant observation, and ethnography.
Seeing the world through the eyes of the people being studied proved powerful far beyond its origins. The method spread to research on markets and consumers, local communities, youth, migrants, and public policy. Today it is growing sharper still, combined with software, AI, and data science.
Research firms built on anthropological insight are growing worldwide: Ethnographic Solutions and LTG Associates in the United States, ReD Associates in Denmark, Stripe Partners in the United Kingdom, Gemic in Finland, Meshwork in Japan, and Rhizome in China, consulting for global companies and public institutions. Chainjee was founded in Seoul in 2018, by Korean Ph.D.s in cultural anthropology, on the same path.
The name
To draw knowledge and wisdom from people.
People are a source of information and knowledge, and of the ideas that solve problems. Chainjee’s greatest asset is its ability to draw knowledge, wisdom, and insight from people.
How we work
We do not rely on words alone. At the center of our practice is ethnographic observation: staying in the field, watching closely, over time. The most important findings are often the ones nobody says out loud.
We set no limits on method. Literature review, surveys, statistics and big-data analysis, in-depth interviews, participant observation: we gather every kind of data the question requires and weave it into one analysis. The patterns big data reveals take on meaning only when they meet thick data, the dense contextual record of how people actually live. And the whole process, from research design through data collection, analysis, and insight, runs on an integrated research system, hosted on our own servers for data security.
Quantitative research can be standardized. Qualitative research cannot. The depth and reliability of its findings depend on who does the work. In the end, the quality of qualitative research is the quality of the researcher.
People
CEO
Chainjee is led by Hansun Yang, cultural anthropologist. He studied anthropology at Seoul National University (B.A., M.A.) and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with dissertation fieldwork in Huaxi, the village in Jiangsu known as the richest in China. He has served as professor of sociology at Ajou University and as secretary general of the Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology.
His research spans Chinese society and culture, consumers, the Korean Wave, food, tourism, international migration, education, religion, and public policy, with consumer fieldwork in Korea, China, and Vietnam. His focus is applied rather than theoretical: putting anthropological knowledge to work on real problems, and developing qualitative methods for a changing technological landscape. He analyzes big data in Python, works on the effective visualization of qualitative findings, and keeps building new fusions of method.
Director
Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, Academy of Korean Studies; research professor at the Institute of Globalization and Multicultural Studies, Hanyang University. Expert on China, overseas Chinese communities, international migration, migrant healthcare, and elder welfare.
Outside Director
Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, University of Tokyo; professor of Global Cultural Industries at Soonchunhyang University; former vice president of the Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology. Expert on Japanese society and culture, legal anthropology, migrant labor, and marketing.
Director, Senior Researcher
Ph.D. in education, Seoul National University; formerly head of the Policy Research Center at the Seoul 50 Plus Foundation. Expert in career and vocational education, program development, education and career consulting, and interviewing.
Director of IT
Programmer and project manager. Runs Chainjee’s servers and research software.
Researcher
Trained in cultural anthropology. In-depth interviews, participant observation, and data analysis.
Researcher
Trained in cultural anthropology. In-depth interviews, participant observation, and data analysis.
Alongside this core team works a network of research fellows and consultants: specialists in cultural anthropology, sociology, education, geography, and information science, with regional expertise across China, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia, and North Korea. For each project, we assemble the team the question requires.
For projects that call for broader expertise, Chainjee keeps close ties to the academic community. Researchers from the Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology, the Korea Academic Association of Contemporary Chinese Studies, and the Korean Association of Southeast Asian Studies advise us and work with us on projects.
The network is open. If you have built deep expertise in your field, we would welcome you as a research fellow.