ABSTRACT
One of the main styles of social research used by empirically oriented social scientists is field research; a style of investigation that is also referred to as ‘fieldwork’, ‘qualitative method’, ‘interpretative research’, ‘case study method’ and ‘ethnography’. This approach to social investigation has traditionally been associated with social anthropologists, whose ‘field’ consisted of a small-scale society where it was possible to do ‘research’ by living and working among the people. Gulick indicates that:
When the anthropologist is in the field, field work is his total life. He copes with it by using his whole body and personality in the same way that he copes with life when he is not in the field… Life in the field involves the same emotions as life at home: elation, boredom, embarrassment, contentment, anger, joy, anxiety and so on. To these are added, however, the necessity of being continually on the alert (of not taking one’s surroundings and relationships for granted), and the necessity of learning new routines and cues. These necessities are likely to force a heightened awareness of facets of one’s personality of which one had not been aware before. This can be an emotionally devastating experience, but it is by no means inevitably so. (Gulick, 1977, p. 90; emphasis in original)
In this respect, field research is a learning situation in which researchers have to understand their own actions and activities as well as those of the people they are studying. The main instrument of social investigation is the researcher, who has to learn the local language, live among the people and participate in their activities over relatively long periods of time in order to acquire a detailed understanding of the situation under study. Such a strategy has been adopted and adapted by sociologists; especially in studies of education, medicine, deviance, institutions (schools, factories, prisons and hospitals) and rural and urban localities. Yet sociologists have argued that we still lack basic ethnographic data on the social processes involved in many areas of everyday life (cf. Delamont, 1978). Indeed, in the field of deviance, Becker (1963) has remarked that we do not have enough studies where the researcher has been in close contact with those individuals who are studied. Accordingly, he suggests that if the researcher
is to get an accurate and complete account of what deviants do, what their patterns of association are, and so on, he must spend at least some time observing them in their natural habitat as they go about their ordinary activities. But this means that the student must, for the time being, keep what are for him unusual hours and penetrate what are for him unknown
and possibly dangerous areas of the society. He may find himself staying up nights and sleeping days, because that is what the people he studies do, and this may be difficult because of his commitments to family and work. Furthermore, the process of gaining the confidence of those one studies may be very time consuming so that months may have to be spent in relatively fruitless attempts to gain access. (Becker, 1963, p. 170; emphasis in original)
These accounts by Gulick and by Becker begin to address the question ‘what is field research?’ It would appear that field research involves observing and analysing real-life situations, of studying actions and activities as they occur. The field researcher, therefore, relies upon learning firsthand about a people, and a culture. However, if the researcher is to obtain an insider’s view of situations, it is vital to maintain an outsider’s perspective (cf. Powdermaker, 1966a). Field researchers therefore have to develop self-criticism and self-awareness, if involvement and detachment are to be achieved in social situations. In this respect, researchers maintain membership in the culture in which they were reared while establishing membership in the groups which they are studying; they are socialised into another culture. This has been commented upon by Evans-Pritchard, who remarks:
Perhaps it would be better to say that one lives in two different worlds of thought at the same time, in categories and concepts and values which often cannot easily be reconciled. One becomes a sort of double marginal man, alienated from both worlds. (Evans-Pritchard, 1973, pp. 2-3)
This is the situation for anthropologists studying other cultures and for sociologists studying their own society. The social and cultural diversity that exists within any society means that the researcher has to learn a language and establish a role. The field researcher is, therefore, an outsider; a stranger who lives among the people for the purposes of study (Srinivas, 1979).
