Fieldnotes in Qualitative Education and Social Science Research

Approaches, Practices, and Ethical Considerations

Casey Burkholder, Jennifer Thompson, Casey Burkholder, Jennifer Thompson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032236247
• eBook ISBN: 9781000740387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Building upon the incorporation of fieldnotes into anthropological research, this edited collection explores fieldnote practices from within education and the social sciences.

Framed by social justice concerns about power in knowledge production, this insightful collection explores methodological questions about the production, use, sharing, and dissemination of fieldnotes. Particular attention is given to the role of context and author positionality in shaping fieldnotes practices. Why do researchers take fieldnotes? What do their fieldnotes look like? What ethical concerns do different types of fieldnotes practices provoke? By drawing on case studies from numerous international contexts, including Argentina, Cameroon, Canada, Ghana, Hong Kong, Hungary, Kenya, Lebanon, Malawi, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the US, the text provides comprehensive and nuanced answers to these questions.

This text will be of interest to academics and scholars conducting research across the social sciences, and in particular, in the fields of anthropology and education.

Part I
Producing Fieldnotes

1
Writing in My Little Red Book

The Process of Taking Fieldnotes in Primary School Case Study Research in Kirinyaga, Kenya

Catherine Vanner

During my doctoral thesis defence, one of my committee members asked how I approached data collection as a white Canadian woman conducting research in rural Kenya. I reflected on how, prior to data collection, I read and wrote extensively about my positionality and developed strategies for addressing it. I had felt confident in my preparations but had not yet felt the full weight that my positionality would bear during my fieldwork in Kirinyaga County, Kenya. To manage these challenges, I used fieldnotes as an outlet for thinking through my positionality and power as the research unfolded. This chapter describes my approach to taking fieldnotes, the power differentials between myself and my participants, and how taking fieldnotes both contributed to and alleviated tensions related to my positionality. I specifically interrogate how my fieldnotes illuminated power differentials in my research. Fieldnotes were useful in recording my observations about the context that I was seeking to understand, and in providing an essential tool for deepening my reflexivity, prompting me to address my biases as I saw them emerging. I describe these reflections through the intersecting themes of discomfort, visibility, and critique, and explain how my fieldnotes practice helped keep my positionality at the forefront throughout data collection and analysis by provoking uncomfortable but important conversations with myself.

My data collection about the relationship between gender safety, gender violence, and learning processes took place in two primary schools in Kirinyaga County. Kirinyaga is a rural area approximately 120 km from Nairobi with a low poverty rate compared to many other rural areas in Kenya. Its literacy, numeracy, and school completion rates are among the highest in the country (Kenya Information Guide, 2015; Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, 2013), although there are concerns about education quality (Mugo, Kaburu, & Kimutai, 2011). Kirinyaga’s population is almost exclusively Christian and Kikuyu. While Kikuyu is most often spoken in homes and communities, it is not permitted in schools, where the formal languages of instruction are English and Kiswahili. Despite the high historical presence of foreigners in Kirinyaga, current NGO and foreign missionary work are concentrated elsewhere in Kenya.

Fieldnotes document what is observed, heard, and felt by the researcher. Fieldnotes record the gaze of the researcher as much as the activities being observed (Koro-Ljungberg & Greckhamer, 2005). Bernard (2011) identified four types of fieldnotes: jottings, a diary, a log, and ‘fieldnotes proper.’ Jottings are brief notes taken during the day to trigger your memory later on regarding observations in the moment, preventing the dreaded loss of a moment. The diary is a personal space for making sense of emotional highs and lows, later becoming an important asset for interpretation and uncovering biases. A log systematically accounts for how you spend time and resources. ‘Fieldnotes proper’ contain written descriptions of the daily research process: the researcher’s observations, actions, reflections, and decisions taken during the day. Bernard’s classification provides a useful reference point, but I recognize that different approaches to writing fieldnotes reflect different theoretical and epistemological research orientations (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011). Multiple power dynamics are captured and exposed within the researcher’s fieldnotes (Doucet, 2008). Many researchers find the process of taking fieldnotes to be inextricably linked to their personal and professional identities and, as such, keep them closely guarded (Jackson, 1990).

Reflexivity

Qualitative and feminist fields of research emphasize recognizing how researcher positionality, power, and privilege influences the research project (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011; Olesen, 2011). Feminist research’s emancipatory objective seeks to challenge and change power structures to become more equitable, in part by illuminating the voices and experiences of the less powerful through ethical research processes (Collins, 2000; McCormick, 2012). Qualitative and feminist research epistemologies largely reject an objective study of social contexts and phenomenon, and assert that subjectivity and its effects must be examined to minimize negative effects on participants (Cannella, 2015). Attending to researchers’ experience can explore how their subjectivities influence research processes and outcomes (Fawcett & Hearn, 2004). Reflexivity—an examination of the researcher’s social, political, and ideological beliefs and emotions throughout the research process—contextualizes how the researcher approaches the participants and data. Now considered a marker of rigorous qualitative research (Carter, Lapum, Lavallée, & Martin, 2014), reflexivity invites the researcher to critically examine her motivations, biases, and values, and their influence on her process and relationships. It involves moving out of her epistemic comfort zone by leaning into a space of discomfort. Like Boler and Zembylas’ (2003) ‘pedagogy of discomfort,’ reflexivity is intentionally counterhegemonic and critically examines the researcher’s contribution to reinforcing hegemonic structures.

The growing reluctance to classify researchers as ‘insiders’ or ‘outsiders’ recognizes researcher positionality in relation to participants as a continuum rather than a binary (Breen, 2007; Minkler, 2004). Yet, while I gained a sense of membership within the community of Kirinyaga over time, I felt—and believe that I was perceived to be—an outsider. Outsider researchers face additional challenges in relation to their research communities, including access, trust, communication, and representation (McAreavey, 2013; Minkler, 2004). These challenges are heightened when conducting research in a space that is not intimately familiar. Fawcett and Hearn (2004) observed that all research constructs other(s) to some degree, but that varying levels of ‘otherness’ derive from the social locations of the participants and researcher and how they fit within dominant power relations. Given the legacy of colonialism and ongoing neocolonial relations that characterize postcolonial locations, all research participants living in postcolonial contexts are considered vulnerable, although to varying degrees (Shamim & Quereshi, 2013). Given my privilege as a white Western researcher conducting research in Kenya, where my participants were teachers and students who were unlikely to ever experience the social and economic opportunities colonialism had given me, my relationship to my research participants was delicate and politicized. Researching ‘others’ can produce positive, at times necessary, work but this work is often fraught with difficulties (Fawcett & Hearn, 2004).

My outsider status and research experience was marked by my whiteness and its associated connotations of wealth and power. Whiteness is multi-faceted: it is a position of structural advantage and privilege, a perspective from which white people see ourselves and others, and a set of cultural practices that are often positioned as the norm or as the highest standard within a globalized, racially, and culturally diverse society (Fran-kenberg, 1993). Socially constructed like other racial identities, whiteness provides countless systemic, cultural, and social advantages which enable white people’s success (Delgado, Stefancic, & Harris, 2017), while excluding them from the impact of negative racial stereotypes (Jensen, 2010). As noted by Gross (2015), structures of whiteness in East Africa are differentiated from North America or Europe, where white people make up the majority or a sizable portion of the population and the power of whiteness is derived from its invisibility and normativity. By contrast, in countries such as Kenya, white privilege is manifested and confirmed through hypervisibility and the ties between whiteness and social and economic power (ibid.). The relatively few white foreigners in rural Kirinyaga further enhanced the hypervisibility of my whiteness, creating what felt like an uncomfortable ‘celebrity status’ (Molony & Hammet, 2007).

Engaging in reflexivity unleashes emotions, internal dialogue and questions that ideally lead to more ethical research that will reduce potential harm to participants (Carter et al., 2014). But reflexivity also places a high emotional burden on the researcher as she draws out feelings of vulnerability, discomfort, anxiety, hope, fear, and disappointment (Bloor & Fincham, 2008). Researcher reflexivity constitutes a form of emotional labour, particularly for feminist researchers, many of whom conduct research on sensitive subjects with participants who have experienced heightened powerlessness and vulnerability (Blix & Wettergren, 2015). For me, fieldnotes were a critical tool in managing emotions and maintaining my sense of purpose and direction as I documented the many concerns that arose throughout my research.

Methodology

Over seven months of fieldwork, I conducted participant observation, individual semi-structured interviews with 13 teachers (8m/5f), and open-ended art-based interviews with 31 students (18f/13m). In total, I observed 52 classroom lessons in English, Social Sciences, Science, Mathematics, Kiswahili, Physical Education, and Christian Religious Education; 30 taught by female teachers and 22 by male teachers. Additionally, I participated in school assemblies and staff meetings, spent time with students and teachers during breaks, attended extracurricular school trips, and conducted informal interviews with students, teachers, and community members. I volunteered in both schools in order to give back to the community and establish membership within the school (Angrosino & Rosenberg, 2011). Both schools asked me to co-teach several classes, drawing on my background as a part-time professor and doctoral candidate in a faculty of education. I also marked examinations, occasionally substituted when teachers were absent, and taught basic computer classes to interested teachers. I used fieldnotes to document and reflect on my observations and the research process during participant observation and interviews fieldwork phases, and coded my fieldnotes alongside interview transcripts throughout data collection.

To write this chapter, I returned to analyze my fieldnotes again using Charmaz’s (2014) Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT), which was the main analytical framework for my dissertation. CGT emphasizes the researcher’s role in shaping the narrative by drawing on her own experiences as she interacts with participants and the data. Shifting the analytical focus from the observations about the schools to the use of the fieldnotes themselves, I re-examined these texts to identify reflections of my power and positionality in the method, both in the way that I took fieldnotes and in my observations contained within them. In my analysis, I moved between my handwritten jottings (Bernard, 2011) and my extended typed notes to conduct theoretical sampling based on my emerging analysis and memoing throughout. Theoretical sampling is a form of purposeful sampling of data to verify and develop emergent themes (Charmaz, 2003); in this case, it involved returning to the data to search for specific themes that emerged during initial coding. The following describes my process of taking fieldnotes before examining the interconnected themes of discomfort, critique, and visibility that emerged from this new analysis of my fieldnotes.

Reflections on Fieldnotes

My Little Red Book

Taking fieldnotes in the schools often generated a distinct feeling of discomfort that I could perceive in both myself and in the participants. As I sat at the back of the class, teachers and students visibly noticed whenever I pulled out my little red notebook. Taking fieldnotes, particularly during classroom observation, gave the impression that I—the young, white, foreign researcher—was judging the teacher and/or the students, an impression that was not entirely false. To minimize feelings of discomfort, I used a multi-step process to document my observations as much as possible outside the view of my participants. During observation, I made mental notes of key elements but refrained from writing them down in the moment. As soon as I was out of sight of the participants I was observing, I recorded as much as possible by hand and then expanded upon the handwritten notes at home later that day. I also memoed frequently across data sources to stimulate and record critical self-reflection on ethical dynamics related to my positionality and privilege in the research, including in my use of fieldnotes.

The small red notebook that I took fieldnotes in is well worn (see Figure 1.1). Three years after my fieldwork, the paper is still tinged with rust-coloured Kirinyaga dirt from the seven months that I carried the notebook in my bag as I took boda bodas (motorbikes) up and down rural roads, on route from one school to the next. This notebook contained both my initial fieldnotes of my participant observation and interviews, as well as draft research questions, ideas, meeting notes, references, and To Do lists that began prior to fieldwork and ended with my thesis defence.

Figure 1.1 Thesis notebook

My point form notes are what Bernard (2011) called jottings; reference points that were helpful to later jog my memo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Forthcoming Routledge Series
• What About Fieldnotes? An Introduction
• PART I Producing Fieldnotes
• PART II Using Fieldnotes
• PART III Sharing Fieldnotes
• PART IV Reflecting on Fieldnotes Practice
• Index