John Forrest - Doing Field Projects

Choosing locations and people to investigate go hand in hand with formulating research questions. There is nothing wrong with choosing events to study, or people to interview, out of simple interest or curiosity, and some of the projects in this book, such as the life history, rely primarily on interest more than on a targeted research question. Without doubt, you should not conduct a project that does not interest you – ever – although such a danger always exists when you are carrying out an exercise for training purposes. Sometimes, a field situation is not your first choice. You, or the situation you want to study, may have time constraints that are unworkable, or the like, so you may have to go with a second choice that is more convenient. Given that the projects here are for instructional purposes, such situations may arise out of necessity. Nonetheless, choosing a field location for no other reason than that it is handy is a mistake. You must have some interest in the site as well. At this point you are learning certain skills, so that your research will likely not be earth shattering. But your lack of interest in a project will be overtly and directly reflected in the work you produce.

When I first began teaching field methods, I used to insist that all fieldwork projects had to be conducted off campus, preferably in locations that were new to the student, but I relented on that requirement after several years. It is true that participating in events that are completely new to you can produce data experienced through fresh eyes, but it is also possible to see well-known situations in a new light if you are creative in developing a research question. The pitfall is that if you know a situation very well you can end up with a research question that you already know the answer to, or, you may have trouble formulating a question at all, because nothing seems unusual or noteworthy.

We all spend significant portions of our day on auto-pilot. This state of affairs is normal and efficient, but has to be overcome when carrying out fieldwork. There is a difference between seeing and observing or hearing and listening. The first verb in each pair describes the act of sensory data entering your body, and the second verb concerns paying attention to the meaning and content of that sensory data. Fieldwork, unlike normal, everyday life, is all about paying attention, or what I call “radical paying attention.” You have to get into the habit of asking questions that you do not normally ask, and keep a note of things you observe: Why do the input keys on a drive-up ATM have braille numbers on them (blind people cannot drive up)? Why is the bride’s side of the church the left-hand side as you enter? Why are deodorant, shampoo, and body soap marketed toward men and women differently, whereas hand soap and dish soap are not typically gendered? Why does the color red classically signify a warning (stop sign, red light) and green means you can proceed, yet when it comes to natural fruits many of them are ready to eat when they are red, but are unripe, and one should exercise caution, when they are green? In fact, “green” is used as a general metaphor for someone or something that is not ready to go.

As you prepare for the projects in this book you need to start radically paying attention to your world, observing and listening instead of merely seeing and hearing, and asking, “Why?” all the time. You will find that this stance is exhausting, which explains why we do not normally do it. Nonetheless, it is an important habit to cultivate as you are learning to conduct ethnographic fieldwork

After you have done the fieldwork for a project, you will then prepare your data and results for presentation. Presenting your results may take many forms, and each project in this book has specific guidelines on how to do so. You should not see these guidelines as hard-and-fast rules, but as suggestions which you can modify to suit your own needs and skills. Your instructor may want you to use PowerPoint or some other software for oral, written, or video presentations.

In general terms, I recommend breaking your presentation into three parts: setup, data, and conclusions. Your instructor may have different, or more specific, guidelines, but these components will be in the mix somehow. Presenting your material clearly is as important as conducting fieldwork effectively.

Here you present details concerning how you got started on the project. Lay out what interested you about it, how you fixed on specific places and/or people, and what your initial research question and hypothesis were (if hypothesis formation is appropriate). Also explain any preconceptions or concerns you had before beginning the project, and describe any missteps, such as canceled events, and other things that forced you to change plans.

Lay out your data in an appropriate manner. Methods of presentation of data are driven by the nature of the project. Sometimes you will have voice recordings, sometimes photos, sometimes plain written notes. Each chapter here will have specific advice about the presentation of data as well as advice on adding explanatory notes. As needed, get in the habit of using pseudonyms as well as disguising the location of events (wherever possible) to preserve confidentiality.

This section is much more than a simple declaration of whether your conclusions matched your expectations at the start of the project or not. This part of your presentation lets you delve freely into an analysis of your data as well as draw a variety of conclusions. These conclusions may take many forms. Sometimes you discover that your original research question was misguided or posed badly. Sometimes your intention was to establish a hypothesis in order to show it was false (the null hypothesis). Or, maybe you discovered that hypothesis formation was unnecessary or unhelpful. Sometimes your research design was badly conceived or your data are muddled. There are a thousand and one ways in which what you intended to do in a project and what you actually did do not coincide. This part of the presentation is your opportunity to critique yourself as well as to offer your formal conclusions.

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