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Field research, field studies, or fieldwork is the collection of raw data outside a laboratory, library, or workplace setting. The approaches and methods used in field research vary across disciplines. For example, biologists who conduct field research may simply observe animals ecology with their environments, whereas social scientists conducting field research may interview or observe people in their natural environments to learn their languages, folklore, and social structures.
Field research involves a range of well-defined, although variable, methods: informal interviews, direct observation, participation in the life of the group, collective discussions, analyses of personal documents produced within the group, self-analysis, results from activities undertaken off- or on-line, and life-histories. Although the method generally is characterized as qualitative research, it may (and often does) include quantitative dimensions.
When humans themselves are the subject of study, protocols must be devised to reduce the risk of observer bias and the acquisition of too theoretical or idealized explanations of the workings of a culture. Participant observation, data collection, and survey research are examples of field research methods, in contrast to what is often called experimental or lab research.
| Key words or phrases are written down while in the field. |
| A description of the physical context and the people involved, including their behavior and nonverbal communication. |
| New ideas that the researcher has on how to carry out the research project. |
| These notes record the ethnographer's personal reactions, frustrations, and assessments of life and work in the field. |
The method originated in field work of social anthropologists, especially the students of Franz Boas in the United States, and in the urban research of the Chicago School of sociology.A variant of participant observation is observing participation, described by Kaminski, who explored prison subculture as a political prisoner in communist Poland in 1985. Max Gluckman noted that Bronisław Malinowski significantly developed the idea of fieldwork, but it originated with Alfred Cort Haddon in England and Franz Boas in the United States. Robert G. Burgess concluded that "it is Malinowski who is usually credited with being the originator of intensive anthropological field research".
Anthropological fieldwork uses an array of methods and approaches that include, but are not limited to: participant observation, structured and unstructured interviews, archival research, collecting Demography information from the community the anthropologist is studying, and data analysis. Traditional participant observation is usually undertaken over an extended period of time, ranging from several months to many years, and even generations. An extended research time period means that the researcher is able to obtain more detailed and accurate information about the individuals, community, and/or population under study. Observable details (like daily time allotment) and more hidden details (like taboo behavior) are more easily observed and interpreted over a longer period of time. A strength of observation and interaction over extended periods of time is that researchers can discover discrepancies between what participants say—and often believe—should happen (the formal system) and what actually does happen, or between different aspects of the formal system; in contrast, a one-time survey of people's answers to a set of questions might be quite consistent, but is less likely to show conflicts between different aspects of the social system or between conscious representations and behavior.
Animal migration tracking (including bird ringing/banding) is a frequently-used field technique, allowing field scientists to track Animal migration patterns and routes, and animal longevity in the wild. Knowledge about animal migrations is essential to accurately determining the size and location of .
Field research also can involve study of other kingdoms of life, such as plantae, fungi, and microbes, as well as ecological interactions among species.
Field courses have been shown to be efficacious for generating long-term interest in and commitment for undergraduate students in STEM, but the number of field courses has not kept pace with demand. Cost has been a barrier to student participation.
Peter Chen teaching biology class at Kirt Prairie.jpg|A biology class studying flora at a prairie, College of DuPage, United States
The 2009 Nobel Prize Winners in Economics, Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, have advocated mixed methods and complex approaches in economics and hinted implicitly to the relevance of field research approaches in economics.see http://newlegalrealism.wordpress.com/tag/fieldwork/. Posted on October 31, 2011. In a recent interview Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom discuss the importance of examining institutional contexts when performing economic analyses.There is a nice exchange toward the end about how much economists will miss if they ignore the knowledge offered by scholars in other fields. http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1223&view=1. Both Ostrom and Williamson agree that "top-down" panaceas or "cookie cutter" approaches to policy problems don't work. They believe that policymakers need to give local people a chance to shape the systems used to allocate resources and resolve disputes. Sometimes, Ostrom points out, local solutions can be the most efficient and effective options. This is a point of view that fits very well with anthropological research, which has for some time shown us the logic of local systems of knowledge — and the damage that can be done when "solutions" to problems are imposed from outside or above without adequate consultation. Elinor Ostrom, for example, combines field case studies and experimental lab work in her research. Using this combination, she contested longstanding assumptions about the possibility that groups of people could cooperate to solve common pool problems, as opposed to being regulated by the state or governed by the market.See her Nobel Prize presentation at: http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1223&view=1.
Edward J. Nell argued in 1998 that there are two types of field research in economics. One kind can give us a carefully drawn picture of institutions and practices, general in that it applies to all activities of a certain kind of particular society or social setting, but still specialized to that society or setting. Although institutions and practices are intangibles, such a picture will be objective, a matter of fact, independent of the state of mind of the particular agents reported on. Approaching the economy from a different angle, another kind of fieldwork can give us a picture of the state of mind of economic agents (their true motivations, their beliefs, state knowledge, expectations, their preferences and values).For further details see Nell (1998, Part II).
Business use of field research is an applied form of anthropology and is as likely to be advised by sociologists or statisticians in the case of surveys. Consumer marketing field research is the primary marketing technique that is used by businesses to research their target market.
Aktouf (2006, p. 198) summed-up Mintzberg observations about what takes place in the field:‘’First, the manager’s job is not ordered, continuous, and sequential, nor is it uniform or homogeneous. On the contrary, it is fragmented, irregular, choppy, extremely changeable and variable. This work is also marked by brevity: no sooner has a manager finished one activity than he or she is called up to jump to another, and this pattern continues nonstop. Second, the manager’s daily work is a not a series of self-initiated, willful actions transformed into decisions, after examining the circumstances. Rather, it is an unbroken series of reactions to all sorts of request that come from all around the manager, from both the internal and external environments. Third, the manager deals with the same issues several times, for short periods of time; he or she is far from the traditional image of the individual who deals with one problem at a time, in a calm and orderly fashion. Fourth, the manager acts as a focal point, an interface, or an intersection between several series of actors in the organization: external and internal environments, collaborators, partners, superiors, subordinates, colleagues, and so forth. He or she must constantly ensure, achieve, or facilitate interactions between all these categories of actors to allow the firm to function smoothly.’’
Throughout his career, Bourdieu sought to connect his theoretical ideas with empirical research grounded in everyday life. His work can be seen as a sociology of culture, which Bourdieu labeled a "theory of practice". His contributions to sociology were both empirical and theoretical. His conceptual apparatus is based on three key terms: habitus, capital, and field.
Furthermore, Bourdieu fiercely opposed rational choice theory as grounded in a misunderstanding of how social agents operate. Bourdieu argued that social agents do not continuously calculate according to explicit rational and economic criteria. According to Bourdieu, social agents operate according to an implicit practical logic—a practical sense—and bodily dispositions. Social agents act according to their "feel for the game" (the "feel" being, roughly, habitus, and the "game" being the field).
Bourdieu's anthropological work was focused on the analysis of the mechanisms of reproduction of social hierarchies. Bourdieu criticized the primacy given to the economic factors, and stressed that the capacity of social actors to actively impose and engage their cultural productions and symbolic systems plays an essential role in the reproduction of social structures of domination. Bourdieu's empirical work played a crucial role in the popularization of correspondence analysis and particularly multiple correspondence analysis. Bourdieu held that these geometric techniques of data analysis are, like his sociology, inherently relational. In the preface to his book The Craft of Sociology, Bourdieu argued that: "I use Correspondence Analysis very much, because I think that it is essentially a relational procedure whose philosophy fully expresses what in my view constitutes social reality. It is a procedure that 'thinks' in relations, as I try to do it with the concept of field."
One of the classic ethnographies in Sociology is the book Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations & Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood by Jay MacLeod. The study addresses the reproduction of social inequality among low-income, male teenagers. The researcher spent time studying two groups of teenagers in a housing project in a Northeastern city of the United States. The study concludes that three different levels of analysis play their part in the reproduction of social inequality: the individual, the cultural, and the structural.MacLeod, Jay. (1995). Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations & Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
An additional perspective of sociology includes interactionism. This point of view focuses on understanding people's actions based on their experience of the world around them. Similar to Bourdieu's work, this perspective gathers statements, observations and facts from real-world situations to create more robust research outcomes.
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