In the Field

An Introduction to Field Research

Robert G. Burgess

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415078672
• eBook ISBN: 9781134898138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 2004. An authoritative guide to the problems and procedures associated with data collection and analysis in field research.

1
From Coral Garden to City Street: Field Research ‘Comes Home’

For social anthropologists, the conduct of field research in another culture and preferably in another country is an essential rite de passage (Van Gennep, 1960). Originally this research in some other society was seen as an ordeal; a test in which anthropologists had to engage. This style of anthropological work is well summarised by Fried who writes:

Fieldwork remains central in cultural anthropology. Basic data come not from laboratories but from living cultures. An anthropologist goes to live in another culture. He settles down amidst unfamiliar surroundings and, if he is successful, his status slowly changes from clumsy alien to friendly stranger. Ideally, he speaks or will learn to speak the local language but inevitably he will rely on certain people more than others as teachers, interpreters, or informants. To some extent the anthropologist lives like his hosts, as well as among them. This is quite variable depending on the culture, the personality of the fieldworker and the situation itself. In any event, the fieldworker participates in activities as well as he is able and as far as he is permitted. He observes whatever he can of the endless series of events and the tangle of relationships which surround him. He maps, questions, records, photographs, jokes, mourns, and gets drunk at local blowouts. Sometimes he gets sick because he may be exposed to hazardous sanitary conditions. (Fried, 1968, p. 136)

In such situations, the anthropologist becomes socialised by the people who are studied and produces a monograph about ‘their’ culture. In these circumstances, a relationship is established which results in ‘a gulf, a social chasm between those who study and those who are studied’ (Cassell, 1977a, p. 412). Indeed, the social distance between the anthropologist and those who are studied is revealed in the subsequent books which bear titles such as Other Cultures (Beattie, 1964). However, as Srinivas (1966) and Firth (1981) have shown, anthropologists are as likely to engage in field research within their own societies as in other cultures. In these circumstances, questions have been raised about the applicability of anthropological methods to the study of industrial society. After a brief review of early developments in field research, the debate about applicability will be discussed.

Early Anthropological Models of Field Research

As Urry (1972) among many commentators has shown, field research in the way in which we know it today was a twentieth-century development in social anthropology where Malinowski’s work was particularly influential. Before the 1920s many anthropologists relied on explorers, traders, missionaries and government officials for accounts of the peoples they studied. However, each of these groups had vested interests to ‘change’ the peoples amongst whom they worked, which in turn resulted in some bias in the accounts provided for anthropological work (Kaplan and Manners, 1971).

By the beginning of the twentieth century anthropologists were engaging in field trips to foreign parts but their work was still conducted at some distance from the villages in which the people lived and worked. In 1910 Radcliffe-Brown went to Australia with an expedition to conduct research among the Aborigines. After a police raid interrupted their work, Radcliffe-Brown took his party to Bermer Island which was the site of a lock-up hospital for Aborigines who were infected with venereal disease. Here, the Aborigines were not only ‘captive’ in the hospital but also in relation to the researchers who treated the inhabitants as informants, questioning them about the Aboriginal marriage system. From here, Radcliffe-Brown went on to study Aboriginal communities that were settled around mission stations. As a result of working in this way, it has been argued that Radcliffe-Brown misunderstood the ways in which the Aborigines lived and drew several false conclusions in his work (cf. Kuper, 1973). This approach to field study, which was used by several anthropologists, involved working from the veranda of the missionary and government official. Often the researchers viewed their informants with considerable contempt. The people researched were regarded as ‘primitive savages’ who were seen as simple, childish and primeval, and socially inferior to the researcher. In these circumstances, researchers summoned individuals to the veranda where they were treated as specimens to be measured, photographed and questioned for several hours about their language and customs. The result was that the day-to-day lives of the people were largely ignored and few if any first-hand observations were made. Such an approach to field research is referred to by Wax and Cassell (1979) as the veranda model; an approach that was vigorously attacked by Malinowski who argued that the anthropologist must relinquish the relative comforts of the chair on the veranda where it was customary to collect statements, write down stories and ‘savage’ texts. Instead Malinowski exhorted his colleagues to go into the villages to see the natives at work, to sail with them on their trading ventures with other tribes and to observe them fishing, trading and working. The data that would be obtained would then be based on first-hand observations rather than second-hand accounts that had been squeezed out of reluctant informants.

It was this style of field research that Malinowski practised throughout his work in the Trobriand Islands (Malinowski, 1922, 1935a, 1935b, 1948). These islands which lie 120 miles north from the eastern tip of New Guinea were the location for studies of economic exchange reported in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), of social control in a society lacking formal legal institutions in Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926), of domestic organisation in The Sexual Life of Savages (1929) and systems of native gardening in Coral Gardens and their Magic (1935a, 1935b). In conducting field research Malinowski attempted ‘to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world’ (Malinowski, 1922, p. 25, emphasis in original). In these terms, Malinowski has been credited with advocating first-hand observation using the technique of participant observation. For Malinowski field research involved a field trip of one or two years, working in the native language, ‘cut off’ from contacts with Europeans in order to live as a member of the community under study. However, when Malinowski’s diary was published (Malinowski, 1967) it was evident that the great anthropologist found it impossible to live up to the lofty heights that he had set for himself and others. Indeed, in Coral Gardens, Malinowski indicates that he was aware of some of his own shortcomings when he evaluates his ‘blunders in fieldwork’ (1935a, pp. 324–30) and provides an appendix which he entitled ‘Confessions of ignorance and failure’ that includes a discussion of his errors in the field (1935b, pp. 452–82). Nevertheless, he provided an ideal that others attempted to follow (Leach, 1966; Powdermaker, 1966; Xiaotong, 1980).

Malinowski’s approach to field research has been referred to by Wax and Cassell (1979) as the noblesse oblige model. They see the researcher as a wealthy patron in the society under study with the result that two cultures come to co-exist within the same locality. This traditional mode of anthropological field research has come in for much criticism as it has been argued that the field anthropologist was linked officially or unofficially with a Western power with the result that anthropologists became tools of the exploiting interest group as they ignored the exploitation to which the peoples were subjected (Asad, 1973). However, some anthropological work took place before colonial expansion (Stocking, 1971) and as Firth (1981) has indicated, some anthropologists working in the colonial period were critical of the colonial use of land and labour and over any policy which disregarded the customary norms of the people studied.

This debate applies to much of the anthropological field research that was conducted in the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, Evans-Pritchard’s classic work on the Nuer (1940) which was based upon the field research tradition of Malinowski was financed by the Sudan government. Meanwhile, with the development of British colonial policy in Central Africa, the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute for Social Research in Northern Rhodesia (later Zambia) was established; a research institute on which others were later modelled. Here, studies developed under the directorship of Godfrey Wilson (briefly) and then Max Gluckman that focused upon urban as well as rural societies. It was these developments that were later mirrored in the work of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester where it was Gluckman’s idea to apply the field methods of social anthropology to the study of complex society. The Manchester School of Social Anthropology, which extended into sociology, therefore involved work that included the study of British communities, factories and later schools (cf. Gluckman, 1964; Frankenberg, 1982). It is studies such as these that illustrate the use of field methods in research on industrial society.

Anthropology and the Study of Complex Society

Anthropology has now ‘come home’. It is as likely that social anthropologists will be found conducting field research in their own societies as in other cultures. Several reasons have been advanced to account for this development. First, it is maintained that funding of work overseas is now in rapid decline especially given the high costs involved (cf. Boissevain, 1975, p. 11). Secondly, that newly independent countries and former colonies no longer want anthropologists conducting field studies among their people and have developed exclusionary tactics. The anthropologist is no longer free to study ‘natives’ in a decolonialised world (cf. Hayano, 1979). Thirdly, social anthropologists in Britain and North America are now finding that they do not hold the monopoly and that there is much interest among indigenous anthropologists to study their own people (Kuper, 1973; Messerschmidt, 1981). Finally, increasing specialisation in areas such as urban anthropology, medical anthropology, educational studies, women’s studies and law has meant that the focus of work has shifted from overseas to the local neighbourhood. Anthropologists are now to be found working in towns and cities in industrial society as well as in Africa, Oceania or the highlands of New Guinea. An article in Time magazine entitled ‘Studying the American tribe’ reported:

When two well-dressed strangers turned up at a sleek apartment building on Chicago’s Gold Coast the doorman called the cops. The men explained they were anthropologists from the University of Chicago anxious to study rich families. ‘The policeman couldn’t believe it,’ said one of the men. ‘He looked first for my Encyclopaedia Britannica, then for my vacuum cleaner and then asked what was the gimmick.’ (Time, 1974, p. 49)

The policeman’s ‘gimmick’ is the researcher’s methodology based on an observational approach that has not been easy to describe. When some social anthropologists have been asked to explain their work they have likened it to the study of small tribes. Hence, when Wolcott was asked about his study of an elementary school principal (Wolcott, 1973) he remarked that he was viewing the principal as if he were the chief of a small tribe and was accompanying him everywhere to gain an understanding of what it was like to be a chief. At this his listeners indicated that they understood his analogy by replying ‘Oh sorta like Margaret Mead’ (Wolcott, 1982).

However, explaining the nature of anthropological study is but one problem. All social anthropologists studying ‘at home’ have to consider how to apply those techniques that are central to the anthropological perspective when studying urban life. In particular, they have had to consider how the methodological concerns of participant observation and holism can be reconciled with the study of life in towns and cities. The scale and diversity of urban life means that it is only possible either to study people superficially or to study a small number of informants in depth. This leaves the researcher with the problem of extrapolation from a small-scale study to the whole of a city or segment of a city. To overcome this problem anthropologists have shifted away from holistic studies towards the detailed treatment of particular topics and themes. Basham and De Groot (1977) have identified three ways in which this has been achieved. First, holism has been sacrificed for a micro level ethnography of a segmented population. Among these studies are Liebow’s research on negro street corner men (1967), Agar’s study of drug takers (1973), and Spradley and Mann’s study of cocktail waitresses (1975). Secondly, urban interactional networks have been traced through field studies. A classic British example is Elizabeth Bott’s study of families (Bott, 1957, 1971). Finally, macro level ethnographies of entire cities have brought together survey material, historical data, and ethnographic evidence. This combination of different research strategies is evident in Pons’s study of Stanleyville (now Kisangani) (Pons, 1961,1969).

The traditional anthropological field research model has, therefore, not been static but has been applied to the new circumstances in which social anthropologists have chosen to conduct their work. Accordingly, field research in urban areas has retained several features associated with the traditional model: residence in situ, participant observation, unstructured interviews and the use of key informants. However, it has also involved modification of research designs to meet the demands of new settings using different methods and different theories. Anthropologists have, therefore, borrowed concepts and methods from other social science disciplines, especially sociology, where researchers have had some experience of working within their own society.

Social Researchers, Sociologists and the Study of their Own Society

Just as social anthropologists had studied the native peoples in the societies in which they lived (Firth in New Zealand and Gluckman in South Africa) so the early social researchers worked similarly among the ‘native’ peoples in their own society. The early English social researchers such as Charles Booth and Sidney and Beatrice Webb all used observational methods alongside other approaches to study individuals who were not of their class (Burgess, 1982a, pp. 4–6). In these terms their work has much in common with the social anthropologists as they were outsiders to the individuals and groups with whom they worked.

In America the work of the Chicago School of Sociologists (whom Hannerz (1980) has referred to as the ‘Chicago ethnographers’) used observational methods to study diverse groups: homeless men, street gangs, delinquents, and dance hall girls among many others. In short, the focus was mainly upon groups with whom the researcher shared little or no experience; the only exception to this was Nels Anderson who did have a family connection with homeless men (cf. Anderson, 1923). However, many of the researchers were ‘outsiders’ to the groups studied. Like the social anthropologists they were strangers in their own society. However, there were further parallels with anthropology here. Robert Park, the joint founder with W.I.Thomas of the Chicago School of Sociology, indicated in a paper that was to be a blueprint for the Chicago School studies that anthropological methods which had been used to study North American Indians should be employed in the study of inhabitants in the city of Chicago (Park, 1952, originally published in 1916). There was, therefore, some interchange between social anthropology and sociology both in terms of the methods used and the perspectives employed.

A further strand to this approach comes from the ‘community’ studies or locality studies tradition in sociology in Britain and the USA which has consistently used field methods (Burgess, 1982a, pp. 7–9). Among the earliest studies were those conducted by the Lynds whose investigations of Middletown (Lynd and Lynd, 1929) and Middletown in Transition (Lynd and Lynd, 1937) involved living in the town, the use of key informants, observational methods and unstructured interviews alongside the collection of statistical and documentary evidence. One group of studies which are indebted to social anthropology and the use of field methods is the Yankee City series conducted by Lloyd Warner and his associates in Newburyport in the 1930s. Warner had recently returned from studying Australian Aborigines where he had used field methods. In Newburyport he used similar methods to examine the culture of this American community. Furthermore, his work was also connected to the Chicago School tradition of social research (Warner and Lunt, 1941, 1942; Warner and Srole, 1945; Warner and Low, 1947; Warner, 1959). Many of these approaches were used in subsequent studies of urban areas as in James West’s (Carl Withers) study of Plainville (West, 1945). However, the term ‘community’ is a slippery concept (Stacey, 1969b; Bell and Newby, 1972) with the result that many studies have been incorporated within this approach. For example, Vidich, Bensman and Stein (1964) take the term ‘community’ to embrace studies of street gangs in an urban slum (Whyte, 1955,1964, 1981) and a mental hospital (Schwartz, 1964) as well as geographical localities in urban America.

In Britain field research methods were used by sociologists engaged in studies of geographical localities. Stacey and her co-workers researching in Banbury between 1948 and 1951 used a combination of methods based on observation, interviews and the social survey (Stacey, 1960); an approach that was also used by Williams in his study of Gosforth (Williams, 1956), by Frankenberg in his study of Pentredaiwaith (Frankenberg, 1957), by Littlejohn in his study of Westrigg (Littlejohn, 1963) and by Stacey and her research team when restudying Banbury in 1966 (Stacey et al., 1975).

Nevertheless, the major site for the discovery of American ethnography by British sociologists was the sociology of deviance where sociologists have used observational methods to study drug takers (Becker, 1963), pool room players (Polsky, 1969) and homosexuals (Humphreys, 1970) among many others (cf. Rubington and Weinberg, 1968). This approach was embraced by British sociologists of deviance (Young, 1971; Cohen, 1972). Yet as Payne et al. (1981) argue, this resulted in some distance between British sociologists engaged in ethnographic work and social anthropologists, even though it did lead to the consolidation of links between field research and symbolic interactionism (cf. Rock, 1979; Cohen, 1980, pp. i–xxxiv). One thing that this approach still held in common with social anthropology was the study of ‘natives’; individuals with whom sociologists were not familiar in their own society.

Field research methods have also been deployed by sociologists in several other substantive fields including: the sociology of labour and industry, the sociology of health and illness, and the sociology of education. In the area of industrial studies Gluckman had encouraged Manchester sociologists to engage in workshop studies (Lupton, 1963; Cunnison, 1966); a trend that was continued in Manchester in the work of Morgan (1969) and Purcell (1982). As Emmett and Morgan (1982) indicate, these studies employed a methodological approach that was common to British social anthropology. Here, researchers were required to learn about a field of study from those who lived within it. This involved collecting data in order to understand the situation and to make behaviour comprehensible to those outside and inside the system studied. Accordingly, those Manchester sociologists who have studied factories have not only observed the situations in which factory workers have been located but have taken jobs within factories in order to share in the work experiences of those whom they have studied. In these circumstances, the sociologists began as outsiders who although familiar with the location of the factories had none the less had little detailed knowledge or understanding of the workers’ situation until they engaged in their research. Further studies in the same area but with a radical political approach have also used a similar range of field methods in studying workers’ experiences (Beynon, 1973; Nichols and Beynon, 1977; Pollert, 1981; Cavendish, 1982) and on the transition between school and work (Willis, 1977). However, even here the researchers were outsiders. The latest contributor (Cavendish, 1982) in this line of radical field research remarks that left-wing intellectuals come from middle-class backgrounds, and hold professional jobs with sufficient incomes and spare time to cushion them from the harsh realities of life experienced by workers. The result is that considerable difficulties are experienced by those sociologists with middle-class life styles who attempt to understand the life of working-class factory workers (Cavendish, 1982, p. 2). Indeed, she goes on to discuss the absence of neat categories around which experiences can be organised. For Cavendish reports:

My experience of the work was the same as that of all the other women in the factory and it affected my outside life in much the same way; it was a means of livelihood for me as for them but I was also observing what went on while they had no pressing need to do so. My account of the factory and the work is therefore that of an outsider. (Cavendish, 1982, p. 6)

The sociologist as outsider is also apparent within studies on the sociology of health and illness. Observational work has been done within doctors’ surgeries (Fletcher, 1974; Stimpson and Webb, 1975); within teaching hospitals (Atkinson, 1981); among students engaged in health visitor training (Dingwall, 1977) and patients (Roth, 1963). While in the case of Fletcher, Atkinson and Dingwall they came as outsiders to the situation, Roth’s po...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1: From Coral Garden to City Street: Field Research ‘Comes Home’
• 2: Starting Research and Gaining Access
• 3: Selection Strategies in Field Research
• 4: Methods of Field Research 1: Participant Observation
• 5: Methods of Field Research 2: Interviews as Conversations
• 6: Methods of Field Research 3: Using Personal Documents
• 7: Multiple Strategies in Field Research
• 8: Recording and Analysing Field Data
• 9: Ethical Problems, Ethical Principles and Field Research Practice
• 10: Evaluating Field Studies
• References