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field research
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Principles and Practice of Field Research: 1 From fields to cities Introduction In this lecture I want to set the scene for this first half of the course. I want begin today to to explore what field research might be and as the term progresses I will look at what different methods and techniques might involve. Today I’m more concerned with overall approach whereas later in the term I’ll look at problems of gaining access, issues around recording data, and what to do with the data when you get back from ‘the field’. Next term, firstly Dave Francis and later Phil Hodgkiss will explore some of the more philosophical problems surrounding this process. They will highlight not simply problems with research methods but begin to address how reflecting on studying social life raises a set of questions about the very nature of social life and our place in it as social beings. When I was thinking about what to say I picked up a book on the history of social research methods and I was surprised by what the author had to say about the state of qualitative methods. Firstly he said that qualitative methods are unscientific in the sense that the impressions of the participant observer or the life history document are unavailable for public scrutiny. The second point he made was that the techniques of qualitative research had made no progress since they were established in the 1920s and 1930s. Combined with their lack of scientific veracity this meant that they were useful only “as a source of hypotheses to be tested more rigourously in other ways” and secondly to put “flesh on the analytical bones” of social scientific research (Easthope 1974: 105). These comments surprised me until I realised that the book was published 23 years ago. I hope that by the end of this course you will be persuaded that some of the techniques of 70 or more years ago are still useful to study social and political processes, that they are not merely a matter of intuition or impression, that there have been developments in the qualitative tradition and that it is just as ‘scientific’ as more quantitative methods. Field research But lets begin by going back seventy years. Why Principles and Practice of Field Research? Where is this field? It is a cultural metaphor that expresses the ‘otherness’ of the place where field research goes on. The field is the outdoors of culture, the open space where all sorts of things happen that are unfamiliar. The field is not a desert or a wild space. It is somewhere that is cultivated and has some sort of order that is not simply natural. It has boundaries but there are gates and styles in those boundaries. The field is somewhere that is cultivated by the efforts of people acting intentionally, but they are not the only influence on what goes on there. There is also a sense of history in the idea of the field; the field itself will reflect what happened to it in the past, what was grown there, what was left to rot, what was put on it. What is more, the social practices will be repeated perhaps each year; people in the field will have a sense of its history much like we can remember the christmases of our childhood. In field research sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists go out and study social life while it is still carrying on. They go into a cultural setting or situation to find out what happens there. They don’t rely on taking some of that social life into a laboratory to experiment on and they don’t send ‘research instruments’ in the form of questionnaires or interview schedules into the field to do the study. They go into the field themselves. Beginnings The beginning of serious discussion of methods that might be appropriate to field research seem to emerge in the 1920s more or less simultaneously amongst sociologists at the University of Chicago and British anthropologists notably Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe Brown. Anthropology Anthropology, the study of mankind, had traditionally used the stories of travellers and merchants, written as diaries and travalogues, to find out about the range of different types of peoples. The academic study of anthropology was predominantly interested in the origins of social forms and in the evolutionary chain that might be charted through different societies. James Frazer’s famous Golden Bough published around a hundred years ago was a compilation of information about religious beliefs and practices gathered from other sources but not from his own field research. Gathering original data about exotic societies probably began with Frans Boaz’s field research to learn about Eskimo society in the 1880s. But it is not until the 1920s with the field work of Radcliffe-Brown in the Andaman Islands and Malinowski in the Trobriands that a systematic approach to field work was developed. In anthropology the collection of data gathering techniques was oriented to producing an ‘ethnography’, that is a written description of the people being studied. This involved the researcher going into the ‘other culture’ and living within it for some time. This immersion in the other was expected to last for at least a year and was regarded as part of the training of the anthropologist. The anthropological ethnography involves describing the institutional and interactional structure of the culture under study. It would include all aspects of the culture: beliefs and values, religious practices, sexual behaviour, kinship patterns, the distribution of wealth and power and the economic system for creating and distributing and exchanging goods. It would also include the political structure, decision making procedures, the operation of laws, prohibitions and sanctions. As well as these largely institutional issues, ethnographers would need to grapple with the language, the way of relating to the natural world and the material culture of the different people. Argonauts of the Western Pacific Perhaps the first attempt to describe what is involved in field research is Malinowski’s account of methodology at the beginning of the first of his series of famous writings on the Trobriand Islanders, Argonauts of the Western Pacific.
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