ABSTRACT
One reason people worry that the conclusions of field studies are untrustworthy is that field workers sometimes come up with quite different characterizations of the same or presumably similar institutions, organizations, or communities. Field workers have a great deal more freedom than either experimenters or survey interviewers. Most important, a characteristic feature of social organization combines with a common feature of everyday civility to make it unlikely both that the people the researcher studies will dissemble successfully and that he will be able to ignore contradictory evidence. The organizational characteristic is the interconnectedness of organizational life. Sociologists treat concrete items of data as instances of general theoretical classes, as an embodiment of some abstractly conceived variable most conveniently measured in that way. The field worker can sometimes take advantage of his presence in the situation to produce evidence based on his own experiences.
