Fieldwork

Fieldwork: Constructing Data

Human geographers draw on a variety of field methods or techniques to construct data, usually through direct engagement with people. Interviews span a range of[Page 163] interactive forms, from impromptu chats and storytelling to highly structured one-on-one interviews. In a focus group interview, the researcher convenes several people to initiate discussion or activities around preselected themes, sometimes with the aid of visual imagery such as maps or photographs. In contrast to interviews, door-to-door-style surveys typically are designed to generate responses from large and representative samples of people, usually with the aid of a scripted questionnaire. Participant observation relies on the researcher's active engagement with particular places, people, and processes. This might entail attending a community meeting, hanging out in a mall, or accompanying individuals through a normal day. Ethnography is participant observation sustained through long-term multimethod interaction with a community. The ethnographer might live for months or years in a foreign settlement or take a job that offers immersion in a particular industry or retail space. For geographers interested in historical phenomena, archival research (e.g., examining old diaries or parish records) often is considered fieldwork because it offers one of the most direct ways of engaging the past.

In practice, most field-workers combine multiple methods. Participatory mapping projects, for example, usually incorporate interviews, group sketch-mapping exercises, and walks with residents to locate significant landscape features. In fact, one of the challenges of doing fieldwork is to figure out what combination of methods is the most effective and practical, especially in light of the unanticipated hurdles and new avenues of inquiry that inevitably arise during the fieldwork process. For many geographers, it is the promise of serendipity and discovery that makes fieldwork so personally stimulating, memorable, and attractive as a research mode.

Data generated during fieldwork can be stored in any number of ways, including as a sheaf of completed questionnaires, tape or video recordings, photographs, drawings, e-mails, handwritten notes, tally sheets, click meter readings, and sketch maps. Therefore, these field data may be in numerical, digital, visual, or textual form and may emphasize qualitative or quantitative aspects of the research topic.

Researchers sometimes refer to fieldwork as data gathering. But this is misleading because data are not lying around waiting to be collected. The term data construction is preferable because it conveys the extent to which data are the product of innumerable decisions and interpretations made by the researcher. After all, a photograph is framed by the researcher's choices about what to exclude from view, a tape recorder is turned off based on someone's assessment that a conversation is over, and the contents of a field journal reflect what the researcher considers to be worth jotting down. Thus, fieldwork—as data construction—simultaneously is composed of data acquisition and some degree of data interpretation.

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