Four Questions and Four Explanatory Answers About the Fieldwork

What are the differences between Fieldwork and Ethnographic Studies?

                  The humanity has existed with his culture, norms, values, politics, language, religion etc. and these are shaping the societies at all. There are some social sciences which are sociology, anthropology helps to analyze the details of their deep knowledge. It’s a historical process and its requirement lots of analyzes. There are two main research methods which are quantitative and qualitative research methods and when we look at the qualitative research methods, we have to see fieldwork and ethnographic studies, and they look very similar. On the other hand, there are some differences and that’s why they are two different methods. In this essay, I will try to explain them, and I will try to tell why they have differences and what are these differences. 

                  First of all, I will start to explain Ethnographic studies. It started with analyzing of the small unique groups, societies, European anthropologist went to these kinds of areas and they tried to understand their daily life and other cultural details. Ethnography is analyzing daily life of people, and anthropologists join the society and they try to find inferences about society. H. Sidky suggests, ethnography documents cultural similarities and differences through empirical fieldwork and can help with scientific generalizations about human behavior and the operation of social and cultural systems (2004, 9). It’s a holistic discipline and there is no specific time requirement ‘’researchers have to look past, future, now’’ and they make a detailed conclusion about society. It records every detail of people’s life and it aims to describe people’s culture and they use emic and etic approaches. As we said it started with analyzing of colonial societies and they tried to understand them. When we look modern ethnographic studies, it developed a lot and it maintain to develop. It extended and researchers can analyze countries, societies, groups, ‘’group of people who has same culture and same life’’. It is capable of constructing a discourse on social uses of language and social dimensions of meaningful behavior which differs strongly from established norms and expectations, indeed takes the concrete functioning of these norms and expectations as starting points for questioning them, in other words, it takes them as problems rather than as facts (Dong Jie, 2010). When we look at the past, we can see that it was a sided research method because Europe analyzed their colonies and they can make any description about them. Also, it started with unique small groups, in this era it’s hard to find that kind of places because the world became global and everybody has to follow this development. It blocked the importance of ethnographic studies in some ways.

                Fieldwork emerged for describing of people’s practices, thoughts, religions etc. The researchers have to make a connection for describing these details and they have to live with them. If they live with them, they can understand the deep knowledge about them. For this reason, first thing they should do that they should learn local language and they can adopt the society easily. They have to stay long time, because people have to behave normal, they shouldn’t behave different just because of researcher. Therefore, language is the basic, main step for fieldwork studies. It’s a qualitative data collection and basically it aims to observe, interact and understand people in their natural base.  There are some methods of fieldworks such as direct observation, interviews, participant observation, case studies. These uses in different time and places; it depends on the situation and it has to divided like that. It develops in itself, and it has some advantages and disadvantages in itself.

               In this part, I will try to explain what are differences between them, it’s hard to explain it because these topics are related each other and kind a similar. When we look at the fieldwork studies, researcher try to understand society from outside, he/she shouldn’t be part of the group. He/she is researcher and shouldn’t join society as a participant. The process of society continues without researcher, she/he is not subject of them. There is a pretty limit between group and researcher. On the other hand, when we look at the ethnography, researcher or ethnographer became a member of the field. It became one of the objects of the study and she/he tries to understand society with this tactic. Another difference is about history, ethnography was founded for analyzing colonial small groups and it has a political aim. It’s a scientific research method but the starting point is different when we look at the historical backgrounds. Fieldwork term existed after the ethnography and it didn’t find for this reason. It’s more academic research method and it extended in time. When we look at 21th century, we can see that fieldwork became title and ethnography became subtitle under fieldwork. It was not like that, they were two different research method, but we can’t say that they are two different methods when we look at the 21th century. As I said, there is no specific differential, but when we look at the history and doing way. There are some specific differences between them, they are kind a similar difference but we have a right to say that they are similar but not at all.

                 In conclusion, I tried to explain both fieldwork and ethnographic studies with specific explanations and historical backgrounds. They look similar and they became kind a same thing. Still, they have differences and they have a different way to analyze the people.

 

 What are the types of Fieldwork?

     

We have to describe what is the fieldwork. It’s way to analyze society, people, culture, norm, values and everything about society. It aims to understand and interpret whole social interactions about the society or what we analyze. For this reason, there are some types of fieldwork and researcher has to choose available one for his/her research. It determines individual reasons, cultural reasons etc. Because, researcher cannot use fieldwork directly, he/she has to choose the suitable fieldwork type for specific research. There are some major fieldwork types or methods, which are participation observation, direct observation and unstructured & semi-structured interviews. I will try to explain these methods, each one has special details.

              First of all, participation observation is an ethnographic data collection method. Basically, researcher live with the people who researcher observer. He/she joins into society and watch every detail of people’s behavior, speech, movements, thoughts everything. It can take a long time; the researcher can stay for years with the society and minimum time period is 6 months for this fieldwork type. He/she takes notes every detail, he/she makes interviews with people, he/she lives with them. Thus, he/she witness everything about people, their emotions, thoughts, feelings, norms, ideas, fears etc. With this method, researcher can see deep information, un-written rules, dejures, defactos. So, he/she can make a superb connection with the culture, because he/she lives with them and he/she makes better conclusions.

              Participant observation combines participation in the lives of the people under study with maintenance of a professional distance that allows adequate observation and recording of data (Fife, 2005). The people continue their lives and researcher is kind a watch who is watching everything. For example, he/she analyze worker life in car industry, so researcher just watch works or joins the meeting of board of directors etc. They do what they do in daily life and researcher just watch them. Whole knowledge came from researcher’s notes and his/her meaning. However, researcher has to careful, because she/he can feel close his/her research and she/he can lose his/her objectivity, impartiality. It’s called going native and its bad side for this method, but if it’s not happened and when everything is gone great, it can be reflective good research.

            Second one is direct observation and it analyze and record individual’s or group’s behavior, daily life. There are two type direct observation, which are structured observation and unstructured observation. For structured observation, there is a syllabus which researcher follows, he/she makes a pre-determined guidelines before starting research. For unstructured observation, it depends on the researcher’s notes and there are no specific guidelines, so it shapes on the way. The researcher doesn’t communicate with people and it mainly does in public areas which possibility of gathering people. It can’t do in close areas because it can’t be ethical, when it makes in public it can be ethical.

            The last ones are unstructured and semi-structured interviews. Unstructured interviews usually part of the large research and it just a conservation. There are no specific questions, there are questions but there is no limitation for interviewee, he/she can speak about the question and researcher takes note important points from conservation. For this reason, researcher can find some data but it hard to find it, because everything depends on researcher’s view, mind. It can seem as a natural conservation and researcher can reach deep and true information about the topic with this interview. However, researcher has to be careful, because interviewee starts to speak outside of the question. Also, the researcher should have a good relationship with people, group, society because it’s a conservation and interviewee must feel free. He/she has to balance the way of answering, the topic must be in conservation, and other topics are should blocked by researcher.

           Semi-structured interviews must be in the middle between structured interviews and unstructured interviews. The balance set carefully, there are some questions and it has to find answers at the end of the interview. So, the researcher should control the interview and he/she have to be openminded like unstructured conservation. semi-structured interviews are a chance to develop a conversation along one or more lines without most of the usual “chatter” (i.e., extraneous information) that accompanies such talk. At the same time, through the use of open-ended questions, the interviewee is given the opportunity to shape his or her own responses or even to change the direction of the interview altogether (Fife, 2005). The question can ask randomly, we have to look to the end, at the end all question must answered. All the questions are open so interviewee can feel free to answer these questions. Also, there is focus group interview and this method shows the social knowledge. It uses semi structured method but researcher sometimes need this method, because we need to find answers. İnterviewees are free to debate about topic and researcher should find to correct answers.

            Conclusion, we tried to describe types of fieldworks, it was hard to tell without references because it’s a direct information, there is no comment about it. When we look to up, we learnt to different methods and we gave answer to their usage areas, how to use, when we use and other questions.

 

What are the strategies of Fieldwork?

When we look at fieldworks, it has lots of different ways to do it. It’s kind a tree and there are lots of options which you can follow. For these reasons, we have broad knowledge, each has distinct strategies. Sampling styles, methods, asking questions, qualitative, quantitative, collecting data all of these has unique strategies in themselves. We will try to look wide perspective, so we will focus on 10 main strategies of fieldwork. It doesn’t mean that other strategies are not main, I choose these ones.

                The fieldwork designing is one of the significant subjects, there is no specific road in fieldwork studies, but the researchers have to decide what they will do. For example, they have to know tension between insider and outsider perspective, are they going to do it alone or with coresearcher, how they choose people who they will work in research, what is the observer’s role in the study, what is the duration of the observation short or long, what is the focus observation, is it going to be narrow or broad etc. It’s designing and having some specific guidelines about fieldwork. When the researcher knows the answer of these questions, the study will be easier and more effective, because he/she doesn’t have to make sudden a decision while doing research. Knowing something before research is always better.

                 On the other hand, while researchers are doing fieldwork, they have to take notes and it’s one of the major points for fieldwork studies. Moreover, the fieldwork connects with these notes, researcher makes inferences from these notes and they usually look these notes at the end of the research. Therefore, the notes must be clear, when they read after time, they should understand what they want to say when they were writing. They should remember root knowledge, meaning. For this reason, it must be understandable and if it possible, it can be long. Sometimes, they forget their notebooks or the interviewee doesn’t want to see a person who is taking notes while he/she is speaking. The researcher must find a way for writing like writing to hand or don’t forget the main issue and after interview, he/she should write directly what they remember.

                As we said there are lots various way to do fieldwork, so we should be more strategical. Another significant issue is various perspectives, the interviewee can be more optimistic. With this perspective, we can find the deep and true information because he/she is a good person. Also, it’s not a requirement, I mean the researcher should more open to everything. Thus, there can be new perspectives and researchers shouldn’t block them. Allow the design to emerge flexibly as new understandings open up ne paths of inquiry (Michael Patton, 2002)

                The using interview and observation limits the fieldworks and these methods can’t fair enough to find pure, deep knowledge from the group. There is a strategy, researcher can develop their fieldwork with other methods such as using photograph, artifacts, documents, recordings and so on. It improves validity of the fieldwork, because you can collect mixed data and it will helpful for you the fieldwork. It’s a kind of trick for fieldwork and the basic way to improve value of knowledge.

                 As we know language is the main representation of culture and it creates the cultural reflection. When the researcher knows local language, he/she can understand the meaning easier and more accurate. For example, local can use a phrase in his/her language and researcher can’t understand correct meaning of it. Therefore, if he/she knows language and meaning of the phrase, researcher can look from their perspective and experiences. It will be helpful for researcher in many ways, so it’s an also important strategy for fieldwork studies.

                 The researcher should select a key information, it should use carefully. This information can bring us to very different location and it shapes the looking of researcher. On the other hand, the key information can be sided, so while you are choosing them, researcher keep in their mind. They would have various knowledge, perspective about topic, but in a corner of our minds, it is necessary to question the veracity of this.

                 The fieldwork studies have steps, stages and each of the stage has unique own strategies. Firstly, researcher should have mutual trust with the group, because it’s not enough to trust of researcher, also people should trust to researcher. The researcher also has a mutual trust with his/her coworkers, sponsors, because these things can change too. The researcher must be ware of everything while doing fieldwork, because he/she also is analyzed by people, so it creates a burden and separate responsibility for the researcher. He/she has another mission which taking notes is a disciplinary work, researchers have to realize that taking notes not only about important interviews, observation. The routine can bring deep knowledge or something can happen which is significant. At the end of the fieldwork, researchers have to find conclusions, so they have to give feedbacks to improve reaching clear conclusion. It will be helpful for researcher, and they should be like a robot, they should not include their personal thoughts in the work, it can be harmful for fieldwork.

                The researchers must create an environment for their fieldworks and it should protect the analytical perspective about fieldwork. Be as involved as possible in experiencing the setting as fully as appropriate and manageable while maintaining an analytical perspective grounded in purpose of the fieldwork (Michael Patton, 2002). They should make description which separate from interpretation and judgment. Researchers always think that they could have affected by outside, their thoughts, outside factors. For this reason, they should know it and they should ask question for themselves.

                  Tu sums up, I tried to explain strategies of fieldwork. There are lots of strategies but I choose these ones because these are main and it must know before doing fieldwork. Essentially their focus of interest is the way in which different people experience, interpret and structure their lives. Accordingly, the methods of investigation that are used have been developed in relation to those theoretical perspectives or theoretical orientations that are concerned with the way in which the social world is structured by the participants (Burgess, 2006). We learnt that it’s hard to doing fieldwork, because there are lots of difficult details and all of these affects the fieldwork quality. It has mutual effect between people and researcher, so there lots of different conditions about fieldworks.

 

What are the critics raised against Fieldwork? 

Fieldwork studies are one of the important collecting knowledge methods. It provides deep information, so its kind a requirement for some research. It has disadvantages and advantages; it depends on the situation. For this reason, researchers, academicians criticized some aspect of their field studies. We know specific critics about Fieldwork studies, we will try to explain what they are, why they are exists.

The first thing about critics are reliability and validity, they are important concepts for research especially while you are doing qualitative research. It’s hard to provide reliability and validity in qualitative research, so it can be problematic, because research could fail. It’s problematic qualitative research, because if we want to analyze the reliability and validity of research, we need some critics for studying. For this reason, some criteria emerge which are authenticity and trustworthiness. It’s about that can we do the research again and can we reach the same result. These critics provide acceptability of the research without looking scientific side. As this brief treatment suggests, qualitative researchers have tended to employ the terms’ reliability and validity in very similar ways to quantitative researchers when seeking to develop criteria for assessing research (Alan, 2012). It’s easy to find what is reliable or valid in quantitative research, but when we look qualitative research, it became problematic.  

The second issue is subjectivity of research. As we know, we have researcher who is a person and she/he has own ideas, thoughts, emotions, everything about human. The fieldwork studies are so subjective, because researcher creates the data and it tries to find answers. Before the research, there is no specific views and he/she can have good relationship with the group so it can be affecting his/her research. The researcher has to decide importance of events, and it’s not systematic, it depends on him/her. She/he can lose his/her objectivity, so it’s a problematic issue for fieldwork studies. Also, it came from large scale and research gets narrow while researcher is doing research. The research must select which context he/she will examine, why he/she choose it, what are the critics of observation, because some part of the research can lose or he/she can’t see it.

The third is critic is replicability of the studies, it’s so difficulty point because it’s hard to do research again. The conditions are not stable and it can change easily. As we have seen so far, research based on fieldwork is not usually large scale, it is not concerned to produce generalizations as means of social explanation, or statistical analyses which can be tested for forms of reliability and significance (Christopher Pole, 2016). Actually, it can change in one hour, you cannot find the same conditions which you found before. Even if the same conditions stay same, you can’t reach the same result. Moreover, researchers are free to manage his/her research, because there is no structured method. They usually use unstructured method in fieldwork, so there is no specific way to do research. There is no order to follow steps, so researcher does what he/she wants, it depends on him/her. However, he/she main point for collecting data, he/she can hear something and he/she decides to what he/she writes. If another research does the same research, would find another result. It relates with researcher’s sex, thoughts, age, culture etc., it depends on researcher’s comment, he/she makes his/her own comments about data. Thus, it’s hard to find same result and replicability becomes impossible when we look these details about fieldwork and researcher relationship.

Another critic is generalization of collected data, it emphasizes from the setting of fieldwork. When we do interview or observation, we do with small group of people and we generalize the data for whole society. Its problematic, we can find theoretical knowledge from this data, but possibility of reflection can’t be valid for large. There always exist a question ‘’is it related with whole or research group. When we find a data, it covers the others? Because fieldworks do with the small groups and it reflects this group. We can’t say something about other groups, societies. It’s hard to say it, it can be wrong.

When we look to trust issue in the fieldwork, we have to focus on transparency. It can be lack of it or it can be non-transparency. However, we don’t know how research goes to result or which ways he/she follows. When we look fieldwork studies, we can’t see these details and it creates this critic for fieldwork. There are some questions but there is no answer about how they collect data, why they choose the people, which conditions she/he makes fieldwork. We can’t see that researcher thoughts, its flue. I mean that we don’t know anything process of fieldwork and we don’t know other conservations, interviews. We just see the result of the fieldwork and researcher’s conclusion about the fieldwork.

After these major critics for fieldworks, we have to explain other specific critics. When we look at the history, we can see that fieldworks usually made in specific areas. It causes the importance of other geographical areas, we should focus on all over the world, because its not romantic business, it’s all about the people and every group has special importance for the world. When look ethic issue, research has to ask permission of people and he/she has to protect their security. Most of the researcher accept this issue and it must be. The fieldwork studies became political issue and people’s life became less important. They became a thing for research, they lost their humanitarian specialty. We have to remember that they are people and they have soul, they are not tool for our research.

In conclusion, I tried to explain critics raised against fieldwork. Unfortunately, these critics are still existing and they will continue to exist. The fieldwork study is so important for researches but there are some disadvantages. We should know these critics and we have to be careful while we are doing fieldwork.

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

·       Sidky, H. (2004), Perspectives on Culture: A Critical Introduction in Cultural Anthropology. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, p.9.

·       Jan Blommaert and Dong Jie (2010), Ethnographic Fieldwork A Beginner’s Guide, Multilingual Matters Bristol – Buffalo – Toronto, p.10-11.

·       Wayne Fife (2005), Doing Fieldwork, Ethnographic Methods for Research in Developing Countries and Beyond, 2005, USA: Palgrave Macmillan, p.71, 94-95, 

·       Michael Patton (2002), Qualitative Research & Evaluation Methods, 3^th edition, UK: Sage Publications, p.331.

·       Robert G. Burgess (2006), In the Field, An Introduction to Field Research, Taylor & Francis e-Library, p.3.

·       Alan Bryman (2012), Social Resarch Methods, 4^th Edition, New York: Oxford University Press, p.390.

·       Christopher Pole & Sam Hillyard (2016), Doing Fieldwork, Sage Publications, p.79.