Qualitative Field Research

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Qualitative Field Research

• Feng-chiao Chung
• 11/24/2006

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Some topics are appropriate to field research

• 1.Those attitudes and behaviors best understood
  within their natural setting.
• 2.Field research is well suited to the study of
  social processes over time.

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John Lyn Lofland(1995) pointed several elements
of social life

• 1. practices
• 2. Episodes
• 3. Encounters
• 4. Roles
• 5. Relationships

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John Lyn Lofland(1995) pointed several elements
of social life

• 6. Groups
• 7. Organizations
• 8. Settlements
• 9. Social worlds
• 10. Lifestyles or subcultures

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Special considerations in qualitative field
research

• 1. The various roles of the observer
• a. reactivity The problem that the subjects
  of
• social research may react to the fact
  of
• being studied, thus altering their
  behavior
• from what it would have been normally.
• b. go native
• 2. Relations to subjects

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Some qualitative field research paradigms

• 1. Naturalism An approach to field research
  based on the assumption that an objective social
  reality exists and can be observed and reported
  accurately.
• 2. Ethnography A report on social life that
  focused on detailed and accurate description
  rather than explanation.

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Some qualitative field research paradigms

• Ethnomethodology An approach to the study of
  social life that focuses on the discovery of
  implicit, usually unspoken assumptions and
  agreements this method often involves the
  intentional breaking of agreements as a way of
  revealing their existence.
• 1. Its roots was the phenomenology.
• 2. The way people report their experience
• 3. Reality was socially constructed.

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Some qualitative field research paradigms

• Grounded Theory An inductive approach to the
  study of social life that attempts to generate a
  theory from the constant comparing of unfolding
  observations. This is very different from
  hypothesis testing, in which theory is used to
  generate hypotheses to be tested through
  observations.
• 1. Positivism an interactionism
• 2. The attempt to derive theories from an
  analysis of the patterns, themes, and common
  categories discovered in observational data.

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Some qualitative field research paradigms

• Case Study The in-depth examination of a single
  instance of some social phenomenon, such as a
  village, a family, or a juvenile gang.
• Extended Case Method A technique developed by M.
  Burawoy in which case study observations are used
  to discover flaws in and to improve existing
  social theories.

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Some qualitative field research paradigms

• Institutional Ethnography A research technique
  in which the personal experiences of individuals
  are used to reveal power relationships and other
  characteristics of the institutions within which
  they operate.
• 1. Developed by Dorothy Smith to better
  understand womens everyday experiences by
  discovering the power relations that shape those
  experiences.
• 2. Has been extended to the ideologies that shape
  the experiences of any oppressed subjects.

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Institutional Ethnography

• 3. Starts with the personal experiences of
  individuals but proceeds to uncover the
  institutional power relations that structure and
  govern those experiences.
• 4. Links the microlevel of everyday personal
  experiences with the macrolevel of
  institutions.

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Participatory Action Research

• An approach to social research in which the
  people being studied are given control over the
  purpose and procedures of the research intended
  as a counter to the implicit view that
  researchers are superior to those they study.

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Conducting Qualitative Field Research

• 1. Find a way to develop an identity with the
  people to be studied.
• 2. Make more formal contact with the people,
  identifying yourself as a researcher, you must
  establish a rapport with them.
• 3. Contact a participant with whom you feel
  comfortable and gain that persons assistance.

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Qualitative Interviewing