The Field Researcher's Handbook

A Guide to the Art and Science of Professional Fieldwork

David J. Danelo

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781626164383
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Field research—the collection of information outside a lab or workplace setting—requires skills and knowledge not typically taught in the classroom. Fieldwork demands exploratory inquisitiveness, empathy to encourage interviewees to trust the researcher, and sufficient aptitude to work professionally and return home safely. The Field Researcher's Handbook provides a practical guide to planning and executing fieldwork and presenting the results.

Based on his experience conducting field research in more than fifty countries and teaching others a holistic approach to field research, David J. Danelo introduces the skills new researchers will need in the field, including anthropology, travel logistics planning, body language recognition, interview preparation, storytelling, network development, and situational awareness. His time as a combat veteran in the US Marine Corps further enhances his knowledge of how to be observant and operate safely in any environment. Danelo also discusses ethical considerations and how to recognize personal biases. This handbook is intended for researchers in a variety of academic disciplines but also for government, think-tank, and private-sector researchers.

PART I

Research Preparation

1

Framing the “Other”

You’ve hatched the plan, been given a budget, and accepted the assignment. Your project is taking you across the border, perhaps overseas. Maybe it is your first time out of the country; perhaps you have toured the world on student visits or family vacations. One way or another, the mysterious joys and demands of the twenty-first-century world’s flatness and permanent connectivity are taking you somewhere abroad. You’re going into the field.

And you are by no means alone. In 2012, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, people crossed international borders over one billion times. That number has quadrupled since 1970, when the organization logged 250 million trips from one country to another, and increased forty times since 1960, from 25 million.¹ Combined with the internet’s ability to collect and distribute information about another country, an extraordinary number of people are seeing, experiencing, and researching foreign places.

Why Do Field Research?

The normalcy of this exposure to travel provides the field researcher with an unconventional professional challenge. The amount of information anyone can easily access on other countries through the internet is staggering and can make any research director or program manager question the value of sending someone into the field in the first place. Internet queries can tell us the demographic breakdown of Burkina Faso and the price of mulberries in Bhutan. What could possibly be so important about going to either place just to investigate these topics?

While experienced field researchers believe the answer to that question is self-evident, suspicion often lingers in the minds of supervisors that “research” is actually a ruse for vacation, adventure, or search for spiritual meaning in less materialistic locales. While any or all of these experiences may be a byproduct of research, they are not the real reasons you are going.

So why are you going? Whether for professional or personal reasons, you believe—rightfully—that no amount of time in the library or on the laptop studying a place can substitute for being there. Reading about Burkina Faso’s demographics cannot enable you to understand the way tribe, climate, terrain, language, soil, clan, colonialism, and family variables shape those demographics. Looking up the price of Bhutan’s mulberries won’t teach you why they are grown, what factors drive price fluctuations, who buys them and why, if they are purchased openly or on the black market, or what makes them valuable as exports to neighboring nations.

“Showing up is 80 percent of life,” said Woody Allen. Fieldwork is no different. Properly done, field research is about much more than finding answers; it leads to discovering the questions you never knew to ask.

An Art and a Science

Most academic field research manuals describe existing fieldwork literature in methodological terms and focus on procedural, ethical, and scientific aspects. These typically include, but are not limited to, lessons on how to make surveys, legal and moral considerations, techniques for collecting information, scaling sample sizes, assessing and sorting data, and presenting conclusions. That is all important stuff, and we should unquestionably study and attend to it as we learn the skills of our trade.

Field research, however, is more than science. As Harry F. Wolcott’s The Art of Fieldwork says, there’s more to the process than developing a clear hypothesis and testing it through a scientific method. “Science is perhaps best recognized as a critical aspect of the art of fieldwork,” writes Wolcott. “That is a different view than one that holds science to be kingpin in the fieldwork endeavor.”² If Wolcott is right, aspiring field researchers must learn more than scientific methodology; they must see themselves in an apprenticeship as an artist.

This is a challenge because the art of field research requires skills and experience not conventionally taught in the academic world. “We cannot teach students to be artists,” writes Dr. Jakub Grygiel, describing the relevance of fieldwork to policy. “We can only teach them to appreciate art.”³ We can learn to replicate scientific, quantifiable processes. Literature reviews, data collection, map studies, and online research can all be done through classroom expertise. But fieldwork demands something more: an exploratory inquisitiveness to investigate what will lead to the right data, empathy to persuade interviewees to trust researchers with (often sensitive) information, and sufficient aptitude to work professionally and return home safely. As with the writer, the painter, the sculptor, and the poet, so also does the field researcher learn through time and experience to recognize and understand the skills and methods governing the craft.

Taking a Walk and Beginning Reconnaissance

Dr. George Friedman, founder of Stratfor, a geopolitical risk and forecasting company, illustrates the limitations he sees with learning about a place just by studying geography on a map and explains how they are overcome when discovering a place in person. “Walking a mountain path in the Carpathians in November, where bandits move about today as they did centuries ago, teaches me why this region will never be completely tamed or easily captured,” Friedman writes. “A drive through the Polish countryside near Warsaw will remind me why Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin took the path they did, and why Poland thinks the way it does.”⁴

In this way, field research can often be seen as the first phase, rather than the last, in problem solving. Marine Corps instructors teach junior officers that basic leadership requires a cycle of planning, arranging for and doing reconnaissance, finishing a plan, tasking, and supervising. Of the six “troop leading steps,” two involve organizing and completing reconnaissance, which is much less mysterious than it sounds. Finding information is what field research is all about. And if that sounds like spy work, well . . . the skill sets required for both field research and intelligence collection have far more similarities than differences.

Shedding Bias

Considering their resemblances, both field researchers and intelligence collectors of any background—government, corporate, or academic—will benefit from grounding their professional endeavors in an understanding of bias and perception. How will the people you are researching perceive you when you’re in the field? How will you perceive them? What natural biases will impact your ability to ask and answer honest questions? How does your background enhance or reduce your capacity to collect the data your project requires?

Shedding bias isn’t fully possible. We are all inclined, through culture and experience, to view the world in a certain way. But stepping back, examining, and evaluating the way their own race, ethnicity, citizenship, culture, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, physical appearance, body language, speech patterns, and value sets will be seen by the people they want to meet with in the field enables researchers of any background to acquire new perspectives on their abilities and themselves. Our biases can evolve, but they will always exist.

Although this may seem intuitive, academic conversations about charged subjects like racial bias, ethnic preference, and gender discrimination often lead to heated debates on social privilege, class warfare, and policy failures. Hashing out these disputes is not the field researcher’s motivation; polemics and political correctness have no place in good fieldwork. But without understanding your natural bias, it’s difficult to look for the data you might be missing.

Bias can emerge as part of a project itself, as sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh learned during his first days as a graduate student. While researching his first project, Venkatesh was surprised to discover that many of the researchers who were most intent on collecting statistical data on the poor had no real interest in meeting the people they wrote about. “On one side of the divide lay a beautifully manicured Gothic campus, with privileged students, most of them white, walking to class and playing sports,” he writes in Gang Leader for a Day. “On the other side were down-and-out African Americans offering cheap labor and services (changing oil, washing windows, selling drugs) or panhandling on street corners.”⁵

You don’t need to go into the field to find what you already know, or even necessarily what you know you don’t know. That part can happen through literature reviews, online research, and phone or Skype interviews with the right people. Field research, in contrast, tells you what you don’t know you don’t know. This is why it is important to examine your own expectations. As a field researcher, understanding the bias your own life experience has created gives you a head start on identifying the unknowns—things you don’t know you don’t know—before leaving the comforts of the library, classroom, or office.

Who Are the Nacirema?

Have you ever heard of the Nacirema? Anthropology and sociology students often study the tribe’s body ritual as an early course requirement. Each morning, Nacirema tribe members enter a shrine room, bow their head before a charm box, and mingle holy water that has been purified from the local Water Temple to perform a rite of ablution. A ritual is also performed daily involving a small bundle inserted into the mouth and then moving the bundle—along with a magical powder-based substance—in a formalized series of gestures. The Nacirema sometimes embark on fasting to make fat people thin or ceremonial feasting to make thin people fat. Excretion and reproduction are formalized, routinized, and relegated to secrecy.⁶

Spelled backward, you may have noticed, Nacirema is American. Perhaps you never considered washing your face or brushing your teeth as “body rituals,” but how do you think they would appear to someone who had never seen them before? What about other common American physical practices, such as regular visits to the doctor and dentist or taking sick people to the hospital?

The point of the exercise is not to judge these activities as good or bad. Face washing and teeth brushing are not the only practices humans have performed throughout history prior to sleep or when waking up. The value of studying the Nacirema lies with admitting that the way modern Americans do things—even common daily physical activities—is an adopted cultural practice. If we aspire to make the unfamiliar familiar to our colleagues, students, readers, or supervisors—which is the goal of field research in the first place—we must first start by making the familiar unfamiliar to ourselves.

Who Is the Other?

Making the familiar unfamiliar—as with the Nacirema illustration—leads us to an awareness and understanding of the “Other.” Philosophy and social science characterize the Other as the social construction of an ethnicity, culture, or nationality that is different from your own, “a state of being different than the identity of self or social identities.”⁷ Seeing a “them” as opposite to an “us” has played an important conceptual role in how scholars from Edward Said to Simone de Beauvoir explain human relationships. More works from social science theory than can be listed discuss how...