John Forrest - Doing Field Projects

More problematic in the admonition to Do No Harm is the possibility that the fieldwork situation may harm you . Here the Self Study can be critically useful. Before embarking on fieldwork I recommend you first carry out the Self Study project (Chapter 5). One of the objectives of this project is to identify what activities could potentially harm you. The types of harm can be wide-ranging For instance, if you decide to be a participant observer in a rock climbing group, the dangers and safety measures will be spelled out by your leader, and you will be able to make a sensible decision as to whether to proceed. Participating in a political protest is another matter entirely. Even if the other participants are expressly nonviolent, there may yet be violent encounters – with counter-protesters or the police, for example. As a general rule, you should not be involved in any activities in which you run the risk of physical harm.

The potential for emotional or psychological harm to yourself is harder to assess. For example, a woman conducting an interview with a man, which seems at the outset to be innocuous, may devolve into sexual harassment or abuse. Your normal, commonsense radar should be able to alert you to such situations, and you should not shut your usual defenses off just because you are conducting fieldwork. If this kind of situation occurs, you should end the fieldwork immediately . Data gathering should never supersede personal safety.

Somewhat more abstract psychological dangers may turn up, and here is where the Self Study project is most important. We all have emotional triggers, and you may have memories of past traumas that trouble you. Addressing these issues is the domain of therapy, and if you have been in therapy you will be aware of them. I am not proposing that you engage in intense therapy before beginning fieldwork, but you must always have a degree of self-awareness, and you must always conclude a fieldwork session with a modicum of self-analysis and self-criticism. You must not expose yourself to psychological harm in the course of fieldwork, in the same way that you must avoid harming others. My general rule of thumb is not to embark on any fieldwork exercise that makes you uncomfortable in a significant way.

At minimum, all fieldwork conducted by undergraduates (and university students in general) must be approved by a university’s Human Subjects Committee, Internal Review Board, or similar committee. DO NOT START WORK ON PROJECTS IN THIS BOOK WITHOUT INSTITUTIONAL APPROVAL . This is a hard-and-fast rule with no exceptions. If you are doing these projects for a field methods class, it is possible that the class has blanket approval for its students. My field methods course had general approval from my university on the condition that I monitor each project, and that I submit an annual report to the committee. Check with your instructor if you are using these projects for a class. If you are pursuing them alone, or as part of a larger research project, check with the head of your department, dean, or supervisor.

Having standards for the ethical use of human subjects in experimentation has long been an issue when it comes to testing drugs, inducing clinical problems for trial purposes, and the like. But by the 1960s there was an increasing awareness that using human subjects in sociology, anthropology, or experimental psychology could also potentially inflict harm, either personal or social, and safeguards needed to be put in place to minimize risk. Hence, every university has a committee devoted to assessing the potential for danger in using human subjects for research, and either approving that research, or not. At first blush you might think that interviewing people about their lives would carry few, if any, risks, however, unfortunately, that is not the case. Historically, anthropological fieldwork is littered with examples of people who have been harmed by information they have communicated to anthropologists. This point leads to the next ones.

All fieldwork requires the informed consent (in some form or other) of the participants. The actual form of the consent, and the method to obtain it, vary from project to project, but the basic principles are always the same: people with whom you are working as ethnographic subjects must be aware of your purposes in using them for information, and how you intend to use the data obtained from them. However, the type of informed consent required can vary significantly from situation to situation. For instance, if you are documenting a public event, there is no need to obtain consent from everyone involved when collecting generalized data because the public has been invited expressly to be actively engaged with the event (in some sort of participant capacity – even if only as a consumer/audience member). When you begin talking to individuals about their experiences at such public events, you do need some kind of informal, informed consent, but this need not be much more than a simple question (preferably recorded) such as, “I am writing a paper for a college class on __________ (whatever kind of event it is). Is it all right to ask you some questions?” Scheduled, one-on-one fieldwork, such as life history interviews, requires more in the way of informed consent.

Let us unpack the word “informed.” Clinical trials for medications require that the participants be made aware of the risks involved in taking the medication, and also of the protocols (such as whether there will be control groups not taking the medication, and what the chances are that a participant will be in the control group or not). Experimental psychology research trials usually require that the participants be made aware of protocols, including whether deception is going to be employed, and that adequate debriefing after the trials is built into the procedures so that participants are eventually fully informed about procedures (and will have access to the results eventually).

Being informed and giving consent is much simpler for participants in qualitative anthropological fieldwork, partly because such research does not involve controlled experimentation, and partly because deception is not ethically permissible (see below). Quantitative fieldwork is a somewhat different matter, but the projects in this volume are all qualitative. In the projects in this volume that require informed consent (mostly interviews), “informed” means making sure that your interviewee knows your purpose in conducting the fieldwork, and what you will do with the information once you have collected it. The simplest way to accomplish this is to start a recording with something like:

My name is ___________ and I am here with ____________ talking about __________. I am going to be using part of the interview for ___________. Before we start, may I ask you if this is acceptable to you?

If at some later stage you have the good fortune to publish parts of the fieldwork, you may need to return to get a signed consent from the informant. This will depend on the requirements of the publisher. It is also advisable at the beginning of the recording to tell your interviewee that it is perfectly acceptable for them to stop the interview at any point, for any reason.

Finally, I will point out that minors are not legally capable of giving informed consent. Therefore, by usual ethical standards, fieldwork with children is not advisable. Technically, a parent or guardian can give consent on behalf of a minor, but it is simplest to just avoid children altogether. That way you are never in jeopardy.

I usually had at least one student each year in my methods class who wanted to hide recording equipment from participant-observer events to capture the “real thing,” or take photos without permission. Such practices are always unethical. There is a bit of a grey area here when it comes to public events, but the guidelines are straightforward. I err on the side of caution. That is, I never take a person’s photograph without their approval (whether I am going to disseminate it or not). In this case, you are not looking for formal informed consent, you are just asking something like, “Is it all right to take your photo.” You may be surprised at the percentage of people who refuse – for whatever reason. After all, it is intrusive to take a stranger’s photograph.