Fieldwork: Questions and Challenges
Many of the issues raised here are raised in another form in related documents. You might like to look at:
And Ricky and Steve talk about their experiences of fieldwork in Bankside Hostel in Ricky talks about fieldwork and Steve talks about fieldwork. Discussed below are a series of more general issues about doing fieldwork in partnership.
Planning and preparation for fieldwork
There are a series of dilemmas associated with planning and preparing for fieldwork in partnership. The first of these relates to the implications of highly formalised approaches to your preparations. For example, when planning an interview together, it may be useful to type up a list of agreed questions and to discuss who will be responsible for asking the questions. However, this approach to planning and carrying out an interview inevitably emphasises questions rather than listening to people’s answers.
If an interview is to develop and an interviewee is to feel that you are really listening to them, then you will want to take cues from them in terms of follow-up questions, comments, prompts and so on. Similarly, a ‘good’ interview sometimes depends on silences and allowing an interviewee to think, pause, and begin to talk again. With a pre-defined list of questions, a list of responsibilities in relation to who asks those questions, and the implication that the questions are addressed in a particular order, it may be quite difficult to ‘follow’ where an interviewee leads or allow enough space for a constructive dialogue to develop. This is not to suggest you should not plan and carry out your fieldwork in partnership. It is to alert you to the fact that doing so may have particular effects that you may then want to address.
An alternative approach to preparing for fieldwork is to encourage things to be much flexible. It can be the case, for example, that spending lots of time making plans, formalising arrangements and agreeing roles can make people uncomfortable when they are in the field. This may be because the detailed preparations have made them feel anxious rather than reassured. This can result in some people feeling very self-conscious when they are gathering data and wondering if they are doing it ‘right’. It may be just as useful to discuss some general principles about gathering data and then allow things to develop. This can then be followed by a detailed conversation of what happened and thinking about general lessons for next time. A danger with taking this more ‘open-ended’ approach is that those with more experience ‘take over’ and people new to research do not get a chance to ‘learn by doing’.
It is probably the case that you will want to try both flexible and more structured approaches to carrying out fieldwork and see what happens. It is likely that people will gain confidence with experience.
Carrying out fieldwork together
There are lots of good things about working in a team when you are doing fieldwork. See Ricky talks about fieldwork and Steve talks about fieldwork for some examples. Some of the more difficult things can be:
It can be quite difficult to continue to see the ‘bigger picture’ when you are doing fieldwork. What we mean by the ‘bigger picture’ are things like: ‘Why are we doing this research?’ ‘What do we hope to learn?’ ‘Who are our audiences for this research’? Sometimes when we have done research, we get caught up in the personal stories of the people we are working with and in the practicalities of actually doing the fieldwork. This means it can be a good idea to build in lots of thinking time so that you can remind yourselves what the ‘bigger picture’ is. One way of doing this is to try to do some data analysis soon after you carry out your fieldwork rather than leaving it all to the end of the project (see Working with words – Starting points). This on-going data analysis will also help you plan the next stage of your fieldwork. It is always a good idea to keep asking: What should I be doing next, in light of what I have already found out?
When you are doing fieldwork there are usually lots of decisions to be made as you are doing it. This is true even if you have taken a very structured approach to planning, as described above. When you are working in a team, you will need to think about how you make these on-going decisions. Are you going to try to discuss everything and decide together? This may be impossible in some circumstances. It may also mean missing opportunities to explore certain things because you are busy talking over the different options! If you have worked together for a long time and know each other well, it may be unnecessary to keep consulting each other directly. However, at the beginning of a project it may be a good idea to think really carefully about how these on-going decisions are made. This is because those with more experience may, again, ‘take over’ and leave the less experienced researchers feeling their opinions are not taken seriously. This underlines the importance of talking about the experience of fieldwork soon after you’ve done it, and considering alternative ways of proceeding in the field.
Criminal Record Bureau (CRB) Checks
By law, anyone who intends to work with or do research which brings them into unsupervised contact with children or vulnerable adults (such as adults with learning or other disabilities) must first be checked by the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB). This includes service users who are working as researchers, including those with disabilities. For more information contact the Criminal Records Bureau on 0870 90 90 811 or at www.crb.gov.uk or www.disclosure.gov.uk. The file LINK: Legal Issues – CRB Checks provides further background information. If you are managing a piece of research it is your responsibility to make sure that everyone has been CRB checked.
Partnership Research - Negotiating User Involvement in Research Design
Contact: jo.frankham@man.ac.uk
