Field Research

History of the Concept

Taken from the widest angle, it is as important to give equal weight to the history of the idea of field research as it is to recognize its common usage and meaning to qualitative research as a whole. There are, for example, the issues and problems associated with doing field research, which are dependent upon different traditions of qualitative research. In addition, the notion of the field in qualitative research does not simply mean a place any longer, the exotic location abroad for the lone anthropologist, but it can signify a range of possibilities for the locus of research.

The field in essence is where qualitative research is carried out by the researcher. The field experience is bounded by time. In other words, one's field experience is referenced by how long one is in the field and may be a recurrent process during several sets of time periods. Its focus depends on the training of a particular researcher in a specific discipline such as anthropology, psychology, or sociology, for example, and his or her employment of different research traditions.

The difficulty often is bridging the epistemological foundations and gaps between the past and present with the conceptual evolution of the idea of field research and methodological practice in the field together with a contemporary divide between entrenched disciplines and the interdisciplinary character of qualitative research. This bridging is significant in order not to ignore the history and philosophy of social theory or the ongoing dilemmas from the production of present day field research.

An honest historical reckoning of field research in the social sciences begins with Malinowski (1884–1942), the founding father of anthropological fieldwork practice and field research in the traditional sense. His now-classic study of Trobriand Island society took anthropologists off the terrace, where the colonial administrator observed colonial subjects, to live with the natives themselves and thereby gain invaluable knowledge from the native perspective. Such proximity to the Indigenous subject became known as participant observation. Field research in this traditional view at the turn of the 20th century meant going out to the field in far-off places to Africa, Asia, Melanesia, Polynesia, and elsewhere. It also meant acquiring the subjective point of view of the so-called native from an observable distance. It signified participating and observing the everyday lives in a study over a prolonged period of time.

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