10 Field Research

Earlier in this textbook, I discussed my research on community responses to sexually violent predators. As a reminder, I sought to answer the question of how and why communities respond differently to sexually violent predators (SVPs) in their neighborhoods. I wanted to know how people within communities reacted to news of a potential SVP moving into their neighborhood, and I wanted to see how they responded as a community rather than just their individual opinions on the issue. I needed a research method that would allow for observing people in their communities, interviewing them, and analyzing documents and other information, to gain an in-depth understanding of the local dynamics that shaped people’s responses to this highly charged issue.

Through interviews with residents and local officials, compiling and analyzing online archives and media sources, and observing community meetings and protest events in three communities, I found that communities’ and community members’ relationships with political and legal systems shaped how they responded to SVP placements. Without field research, I wouldn’t have formed an in-depth understanding of local dynamics, which allowed me to build a theory about how and why communities respond differently to unwanted people and projects in their neighborhoods.

This chapter defines field research and explains the strengths and weaknesses of the method. As indicated above, field research encompasses a few different methods. We’ll cover some of them in this chapter, and others in subsequent chapters.

What is Field Research?

Field research is a qualitative method of data collection aimed at understanding, observing, and interacting with people in their natural settings. Field researchers immerse themselves in the settings they study, as I did in the three communities I studied for my research. While the extent to which researchers immerse themselves in a particular setting varies, all field researchers participate in the field.

When social scientists talk about being in “the field,” they’re talking about being out in the real world, involved in the everyday lives of the people they are studying. For example, I was in the field when I observed community meetings or went to people’s houses for interviews. During field research, researchers take field notes, or notes on what they are seeing, hearing, feeling, and even smelling and tasting. Sometimes this can be done while in the field; other times, researchers must wait until they leave the field for the day to write up their notes. For example, community meetings allowed me to sit with my notebook and write down everything I saw and heard, without it being too awkward because I wasn’t expected to interact with anyone. However, when I attended protest events, I had to wait until I returned to my hotel room to write my notes, because standing on a street corner wasn’t conducive to writing my observations. Plus, I wanted to talk with people who were protesting rather than having my attention focused on writing. Regardless of where they write their full field notes, field researchers often carry pocket-sized notebooks to jot down brief reminders of important observations and events to write more about later. Regardless of when a researcher writes their field notes, they must take great care to note as much as they possibly can while in the field, and as much as they can remember after leaving the field. Researchers never know what might become important later on, and things that seem entirely unimportant at the time may later reveal themselves to have some relevance.

In this text, we’ll use two main terms to refer to field research: field research and participant observation. You might think of field research as an umbrella term that includes activities that field researchers engage in when collecting data: they participate, they observe, they usually interview some of the people they observe, and they typically analyze documents, audio files, or other artifacts created by the people being observed. Figure 10.1 illustrates these common components of field research.

It’s important to note that field research may include any combination of these components. For example, some researchers may only conduct participant observation, others might conduct interviews and analyze documents, and others might analyze documents and engage in participant observation. In this chapter, we’ll focus on participant observation and document analysis. Then, we’ll discuss interviews in Chapter 11.

Participant Observation

Participant observation means that a researcher observes interactions and participates in events and interactions in the field. While this might sound straightforward, researchers conducting participant observation vary in how they participate and/or observe. One way to think about participant observation is as a continuum, with complete observation at one end and complete participation at the other. In complete observation, a researcher watches people in the field and tries to remain separate from what and whom they observe. In complete participation, a researcher fully immerses themselves in the social group they are studying (as Laud Humphreys did in his tearoom trade research, which we discussed in Chapter 3). Rather than only observing, these researchers take part in the social life of their field and sometimes do not even tell the people they’re interacting with that they’re researchers.

To understand the strengths and weaknesses of the participant observation continuum, imagine you want to understand how children learn to obey rules during unstructured play. You might conduct participant observation on a local playground over different days and times. As a complete observer, you could sit on a bench at the edges of the playground, or a blanket on the grass outside the playground area. You would then watch and take notes on how the children at the playground played with their peers and interacted with their parents. From this outside perspective, you might see several interactions between children and families.

At the same time, you might miss important interactions between individual children, small groups of children, or between some children and their parents. While you’d likely see many interactions over multiple days, you would miss important aspects of children’s interactions on their trips to and from the playground, and in their homes. These downsides of complete observation mean that researchers may not be able to fully grasp what life is like for the people they observe. Thus, complete observation has the strength of providing opportunities to see interactions that researchers might miss were they more involved, and the weakness of being unable to understand life in their field of study entirely.

Complete participation has the benefit of allowing researchers a deeper understanding of life in the group that they study. For example, in your study of how children learn to obey rules, you might decide to become a nanny. Then, you could take children to the playground, play with them, watch how they pick up on rules, and learn more about how and when they decide which rules to follow, and which to break. While complete participation offers the advantage of a more in-depth understanding of the phenomenon under study, it also may complicate the researcher’s role and position in the field. Complete participation makes it less likely for a researcher to take comprehensive notes in the field. After participating in the field, they may spend many hours writing everything they remember. Complete observers must spend time writing notes after each field session, but some of this can often be done during observation.

Another potential problem with complete participation arises when researchers find themselves in situations where they need to exit the field, but cannot because they’ve adopted the role of complete participant. For example, what if you became a nanny, but then your research ended and the family still desperately needs you to continue in your position? Also, complete participants who do not reveal themselves as researchers must face the ethical quandary of possibly deceiving their “subjects”.

In reality, most field research projects lie somewhere near the middle of the observer-participant continuum. Field researchers typically participate at least somewhat in their field sites while also spending some time just observing.

Content Analysis

Content analysis involves the study of human communications. Content analysis is the systematic analysis of the content of a text (e.g., who says what, to whom, why, and to what extent and with what effect) quantitatively or qualitatively. Another way to think of content analysis is as a way of studying texts and their meaning. The “texts” that content analysts investigate include such things as an actual written copy (e.g., news or magazine articles, legislation, e-mails, letters, blog posts, etc.), content that we might hear (e.g., speeches, podcasts, lectures, etc.), and visual representations of human communication, such as online videos, television advertisements, or movies. As researchers begin to analyze texts, they might start by sampling a subset of texts for analysis, based on criteria such as publication date, topic, or intended audience.

When researchers examine original sources, their texts represent primary sources. For example, if you wanted to study letters sent between people in prison and their family members, and obtained copies of these kinds of letters, then you are working with primary sources. It’s important to note that even though you have copies of the original sources, they’re still considered primary sources because you’re analyzing the original documents.

By contrast, secondary sources have already been compiled and analyzed by someone else. In your study of letters between inmates and their families, you may not be able to obtain copies of the original letters. However, you might be able to find books or other publications that have summarized or analyzed such letters. Other examples of secondary sources include documentaries and research reports. One way to distinguish between primary and secondary sources is to consider that secondary sources often quote or include information from primary sources.

Sometimes students new to research methods struggle to grasp the difference between a content analysis of secondary sources and a literature review. In a review of literature, researchers analyze secondary materials to try to understand what we know and don’t know about a particular topic. The sources used to conduct a scholarly literature review are typically peer-reviewed, written by trained scholars, published in some academic journal or press, and based on empirical research that has been conducted, using accepted data collection techniques for the discipline. A literature review synthesizes these sources to arrive at some conclusion about our overall knowledge about a topic.

Conversely, a content analysis of scholarly literature would raise questions not raised in a literature review. A content analyst might examine scholarly articles to learn something about the authors (e.g., Who publishes what, where?), publication outlets (e.g., How well do different journals represent the diversity of the discipline?), or topics (e.g., How has the topic’s popularity shifted over time?). A content analysis of scholarly articles would be a “study of the studies,” not a “review of studies.” Perhaps, for example, a researcher wishes to know whether more men than women authors are published in the top-ranking journals in the discipline. The researcher could conduct a content analysis of different journals, and count authors by gender (though this may be tricky if relying only on names to indicate gender). Or perhaps a researcher would like to learn whether various topics of investigation go in and out of style, and how. They could investigate changes over time in topical coverage in different journals. In these latter two instances, the researcher is not aiming to summarize the content of the articles but instead is looking to learn about how, why, or by whom particular articles came to be published.

As content analysis can be qualitative or quantitative, researchers often use both strategies to strengthen their field research. In qualitative content analysis, the researcher aims to identify themes and analyze the underlying meaning of those themes. On the other hand, quantitative content analysis involves assigning numerical values to information in the texts under study, so they can be analyzed using various statistical procedures.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Field Research

Field research can help researchers answer “how” questions, such as how the processes they study occur, how the people in the field interact, and how events unfold. Field researchers gain first-hand experience and knowledge about the people, events, and processes they study; no other method offers quite the same kind of close-up lens on everyday life. This close-up on everyday life means that field researchers can obtain detailed data about people and processes, perhaps more detailed than can be obtained using any other method.

As with focus groups, field research yields rich and nuanced data, making it an excellent choice for studying social processes, and understanding the role of social context in shaping people’s lives and experiences. Because field research typically occurs over an extended period, it enables a greater understanding of the intricacies and complexities of daily life.

Plus, using observations, interviews, and content analysis in field research provides further opportunities to understand the social and historical contexts of people’s words and actions. For these reasons, field research may also uncover elements of people’s experiences or group interactions that no one previously knew. With other methods, such as interviews and surveys, we certainly couldn’t expect a respondent to answer a question to which they did not know the answer, or to provide information to which they were unaware.

While the time spent in the field, and the ability of field researchers to collect very detailed data are strengths of the method, these benefits come at a cost. Because a field researcher focuses on gathering in-depth details on elements and interactions in the field, the focus is by necessity also somewhat narrow. Field researchers cannot gather data from as many individuals as survey researchers. In short, field researchers generally sacrifice breadth of knowledge for depth of understanding.

Field research can be extremely time-intensive and require a lot of money to conduct. Researchers sometimes spend years in the field and must write detailed notes to document their observations and other elements of their time. A related concern is the emotional labor when successfully conducting a field research project. Field researchers must develop close relationships with the people they study, and sustain those relationships for much longer than the hour or two it might take to conduct a focus group, interview, or survey. These relationships can be rewarding (and yield the rich, detailed data noted as a strength of the method). However, as in any relationship, field researchers experience the highs and lows of daily life and interactions. Plus, participating in day-to-day life with one’s research subjects can result in some tricky ethical decisions, and can be a challenge if the aim is to observe as “objectively” as possible.

Finally, documentation can be challenging for field researchers. When writing field notes, field researchers generally have only themselves to rely on for documentation. As noted earlier, it may not be possible to take field notes while in the field. A researcher might not know which details to document, or which will become the most important details to note. And when a researcher takes notes after some observation, they may not recall everything exactly as they saw it when they were there.

In addition to field notes, field research produces data such as texts to be analyzed, and audio recordings of interviews to be transcribed. Preparing data for analysis requires many hours of careful cleaning and curating before the researcher begins a systematic data analysis. In short, field research can produce so much information that researchers can become overwhelmed by the amount of data they need to sift through.

Table 10.1 summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of field research.

Table 10. 1 Strengths and Weaknesses of Field Research

As indicated in the table, some of the weaknesses of the method are also its strengths. For example, the narrow focus yields rich and detailed data. A researcher must weigh the costs and benefits to determine if the method is right for the research question, and the overall goals of the research project.

Summary

• Field research is a qualitative research method that uses multiple data collection and analysis techniques such as participant observation, content analysis, and interviews to understand people’s words and actions in their social contexts.
• In participant observation, a researcher watches people’s interactions and participates in the events and interactions in the field.
• The participant observation continuum includes complete observation on one end and complete participation on the other.
• Content analysis is the systematic analysis of the context of a text in which a researcher aims to understand the text and its meaning. Researchers analyze primary (original) sources and secondary (already compiled and reviewed) sources.
• The rich, detailed data from field research can be beneficial in studying social processes, social and historical contexts for words and actions, and how people interact.
• Field research can be limited by its narrow focus and the resources it requires (like time, money, and emotional labor). Documenting observations and the sheer amount of data produced during the field research process can be challenging for researchers.

Discussion Questions

1. Pretend you’re a field researcher. Find a public place to take field notes for about 15 minutes. Be sure to use all your senses as you take notes: your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and sense of touch. After 15 minutes, consider what strategies you used to take notes. What decisions did you have to make about what details to write, and what details to overlook? How many pages of notes did you write? Did you notice any patterns in your observations? What challenges did you face in your brief field research experience? How might you approach field note-taking differently if you had to do it again?
2. Where do you think is the best place to be on the observer-participant continuum? Why?
3. Consider a research question interesting to you, and would require content analysis as part of a field research project. List at least one primary and one secondary source for your content analysis. How do you know which source is which?
4. In your opinion, what is the most important strength of field research? What do you view as its greatest weakness? Why?