John Forrest - Doing Field Projects

In public settings it can be acceptable to take group photos, especially if other participants are doing the same. But publishing such photos may still land you in ethical trouble. Publishers may refuse to use a photo if the people in it are identifiable (and you do not have informed consent from them). I ran into this problem when picking cover photos for one of my books. The photo was of a baptism by full immersion in a local body of water which I thought was remarkably engaging, but my publisher would not allow it. Even though the event was in the open and fully accessible to the public at large, it was not ethical to publish the photo.

When you are dealing with events that are open to the public, you must be careful. Take, for example, a Sunday church service or Friday prayers at the local Mosque. You are likely freely invited to attend, but your motives for attending may not be clear to all in attendance. In general, it is not ethical to make recordings at such events, and photography is likely forbidden. You can speak to the imam or pastor before the service, and/or you can speak to participants to discover what is and is not permissible. You can also simply look around. Are other participants taking notes or photos? If not, you should not either. Apart from being good ethical practice, this injunction is also good fieldwork practice in general: you do not want to draw attention to yourself unnecessarily.

Events that have their own internal ethical guidelines prohibiting reportage must be strictly avoided. These include the likes of 12-step meetings, Masonic rituals, fraternity initiations, and so forth. They are quite intentionally secret affairs, so that even if you are eligible to attend them, you may not report on them. No exceptions.

Routinely, fieldworkers preserve the anonymity of the people they are engaging with and the places where they have conducted fieldwork when they present their findings. Likewise, you should use pseudonyms for all the people and places involved in your fieldwork. There are special cases where anonymity is next to impossible, but you must make a good faith effort. There are also many cases where anonymity may seem to be absurd. Suppose, for example, you are documenting how your granny makes the chicken soup that has been a family favorite for generations. Using her real name may not seem to be problematic to you, and chances are that it is not. Nonetheless, it is always best to start with pseudonyms. You can use real names later if the need arises, but you cannot hide a real name with a pseudonym after you have revealed it.

Getting into the habit of disguising people and places in your notes and presented materials is also a solidly good practice that you should get used to from the outset. It should end up being second nature to you. Professionals acknowledge that attempts at preserving anonymity are not cast-iron secure. Anyone who is really intent on finding out where (precisely) I have conducted fieldwork and with whom I have worked should be able to discover exact details without too much difficulty. But doing so will take effort, and casually prying minds will be excluded. Likewise, do not share your fieldwork details with others without safeguards in place.

Good research design lies at the heart of all good field research, and you should, in close consultation with your instructor, give careful consideration to how exactly you are going to carry out each project before you get too deeply into it. Each of the projects in this book has some introductory material on how to approach it, and there are many different strategies depending on the nature of the project. Choosing someone to interview in order to record a life history is a completely different matter from finding a space to map, and the methods used to carry out these projects are fundamentally different also. There is no one-size-fits-all model for research design in qualitative fieldwork. Nevertheless, there are certain guidelines that apply to most situations. To begin, field research must be driven by a research question. How to arrive at a research question is often a complicated matter, as is the nature of research questions themselves, but going into a fieldwork project, large or small, without some kind of research question, even a vague one, is potentially a recipe for disaster.

No matter how simple or rough your research design is, you should start a field project with a reason that is more than “I’d like to know something about this.” Certainly, that kind of loose pondering can be your initial jumping off point, but you have to make your purpose for inquiry much more explicit before you commence your actual fieldwork on a specific project.

The first step to formulating a research question is to locate your topic of interest, in general terms. Let’s say that you are interested in learning about tai chi. You see an advertisement for one free tai chi lesson in your neighborhood. You can certainly go along to a lesson with no other thought in mind than to check out what it is all about. You can take the lesson, talk to the instructor and other participants, get a feel for the physical location, and generally assess the situation. Then you have to begin to narrow your focus to formulate a research question. Developing a research question at the start of a project can be challenging. Without enough basic context it is difficult or perhaps impossible to formulate an incisive or insightful research question, yet without a finely tuned research question it is difficult to gather focused data. That is the chicken-and-egg problem of all field research: the more you learn, the sharper your questions, and the sharper your questions the more focused your data. Therefore, fieldwork is an inherently iterativeprocess. That is, you ask questions to arrive at answers, and these in turn provoke new questions and so on. Eventually you reach a point at which your questions become refined enough and your answers are full and contextualized.

To narrow your focus you need to move beyond simple curiosity and key in on elements that stand out to you. You must start to ask Why? questions. For instance, after your first tai chi lesson you might ask: Why do people practice tai chi? Why do some people choose to teach tai chi? Do people have different motivations, and why? Such questions can provide the initial framework for fieldwork, but they are only a beginning. These questions are still much too general by themselves to provide more than general answers, and, in many cases, the answers will be obvious. Your job is to dig deeper than the obvious. Some people do tai chi for health and fitness reasons, some because they like the calm atmosphere, some because their friends do it, and so on. There may not be a single thread uniting everyone. In such a case, you may have to cast a wider net, or develop an entirely new question. Here is where the iterative process kicks in.

After the first lesson and initial questions to participants and the instructor, you might return home and do some independent research on the history and philosophy of tai chi. You may be surprised to discover that tai chi is considered a martial art, even though what you saw at your lesson was not aggressive at all (very slow and graceful), and that the practice has a large number of forms in the modern world, including genuine sparring with partners. You may also learn that tai chi incorporates components of Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist philosophies. Armed with this information you can formulate some new questions: “What worldviews, if any, do students share, and what are they? Why?” “Are participants more interested in the health benefits or spiritual aspects of tai chi? Why?” Are there other factors that motivate participation, such as cultural expectations, power dynamics, ethnic identity, political persuasion etc.? Why? Are participants with certain ethnic or religious identities more likely to participate than others? Why or why not? These questions provide new answers which, in turn, prompt new questions.