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For their constant support, encouragement and for a sense of perspective, this
book is dedicated to:

Jacqueline, Charlotte and Lizzie Mannix-Pole (C.P.)

and

Margaret and David Hillyard (S.H.)

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SAGE Publications Ltd © Christopher Pole and Sam Hillyard 2016
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 CONTENTS
About the authors vii

1 What is Fieldwork? 1

2 Finding the Field 19

3 Field Relations 35

4 Tools for the Field 55

5 Fieldwork:Values and Ethics 77

6 When it’s Time to Go 107

7 Analysis 123

8 Conclusions 145

References 153
Index 167
 ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Professor Chris Pole is Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Brighton.
His long-standing research interests are in social research methodology, especially
Ethnography and in the Sociology of Education and Childhood. Previous books
in these areas include Fieldwork (Four Volumes. Sage Benchmarks in Social
Research Methods), Ethnography for Education (with Marlene Morrison) and
Young People in Transition. Becoming Citizens? (with Jane Pilcher and John Williams).

Dr Sam Hillyard is a Reader in Sociology at Durham University, UK. Her

research interests are in qualitative research methods, interactionist social theory
and rural studies. She is the series editor of Studies in Qualitative Methodology, and
has published in the area of social research methodology in the journals
Qualitative Research, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography and the Oxford Review of
Education.
 1
WHAT IS
FIELDWORK?

Chapter overview
• Fieldwork is an intellectually and technically challenging total experience
aimed at capturing meaning.
• Being there first-hand is important.
• Fieldwork is also curiosity-driven – to gain insight and understanding
or verstehen.
• In this book we are against methodological fundamentalism, but rather
advocate an inclusive approach to fieldwork.

This is a book about doing research. Not any research in general, but a specific
kind of research which is as much about the role of the researcher as it is about
the focus of the research. The intention is to provide an open and frank account
of what it is like to do research: where you, the researcher, are the reason(s) why
it will succeed or fail; where you are the main influence on what the research
will discover and; how it will be received and evaluated by those who read or
use its findings. The idea is that by the end of the book you will have a good
idea of the ethos surrounding doing fieldwork – what it’s all about and what
knowledge it can yield. This includes what this kind of research entails, but
also what it’s like to do it. We will talk about the excitement of research, the
challenges and frustrations, the rewards, the tedium and the sheer hard slog that
all research projects involve in different proportions, at one time or another.
The kind of research this book is about is that which is based on [Link]
idea behind fieldwork is that it is about getting involved with what and who you are
researching. It is about doing research in a practical, applied, ‘hands on’ sense. The
essence of it is what Robert Park, when he was director of the Chicago School
2 Doing Fieldwork

of Sociology, instructed his Chicago undergraduates to do, ‘go get the seats of
your pants dirty in real research’ (Park in Prus 1996: 119). In this sense, fieldwork
is about getting out there, wherever there is, and becoming part of what is going
on and what you are researching. It is about what Geertz (1988: 1) called ‘being
there’. But, furthermore, in our digital age, understanding that this may also take
place in a virtual research environment where no-face-to-face contact is made
but nevertheless co-presence occurs.
However, this is not the full story. By emphasizing ‘doing’ research in this
active (or participatory) sense, we are not suggesting that it is only about running
around collecting data. To suggest that is all there is to it would be to reduce
research to a set of technical operations. We are not doing what Mills (1959: 74)
called ‘fetishism of the Concept’ and getting stuck with over-elaborations of
method (Mills 1959: 74–75). This book is about making sense of, or analysing
the data that are collected, about writing and representing the research findings
and conclusions. In this sense, it is about the whole package. It is about the
research process – from initial ideas and thinking about research, to designing,
executing, analysing, writing and finishing research. We also want to emphasize
that research based on fieldwork is real research – serious, scholarly and powerful.
It can begin to tell us a great deal about things that are strange to us and also
encourage us to question and re-examine things that are familiar. Indeed, perhaps
the latter is trickier than the former.
In some ways, this is a book which is a celebration of fieldwork. We do not
apologize for this, as the reason for writing it is that we believe it is central to
social science and has an important role to play in the way in which we try to
understand and make sense of the world. However, we are not saying that
research based on fieldwork is the only way of doing research or that it should
be the only way. Underpinning the approach we take is a belief in the need to
fit the research question or problem with the right kind of research methods.
Sometimes it will not be obvious which is the right method, but finding out
which is, forms part of the research process and can, itself, tell us something
about the subject we are researching and the things we value exploring.

WHAT IS FIELDWORK?
So far we have only talked in general terms about fieldwork. Before going any
further it is necessary to define it in order that we know what we are concerned
with throughout the book. However, as with many things in social science there
will be disagreement over the definition of what we argue counts as fieldwork.
To some extent disagreement and debate is positive as it encourages us to
think about the thing being defined and to come to an understanding of what-
ever it is we are concerned with. What we are presenting is our definition of
fieldwork and we invite you to consider your own definition against it. If you
 What is Fieldwork? 3

can’t do that now, it may be possible after you have read more of the book or
after you have had a go at something you would like to call fieldwork. Having
encouraged you to do this, we are not suggesting that anybody’s definition of
fieldwork is as good as anybody else’s. To do this would be to suggest that any-
thing goes, that fieldwork could be both everything and nothing. Whilst we
would accept a fairly broad definition, we nevertheless, see it as a specific
approach to research, which can be differentiated from approaches which are not
fieldwork approaches. Therefore, it is possible to say what fieldwork is and what
it is not. So here goes:

What it is: Fieldwork is a way of doing research where the emphasis is placed
on the collection of data at first hand by a researcher. It relies on personal inter-
action or engagement between the researcher and those being researched in the
research setting, during which the researcher(s) will use one or a combination
of particular methods to collect data over a prolonged period of time.

What it is not: Fieldwork is not the kind of research that relies on a ‘scientific’
distance between researcher and research subject or object. Through its emphasis
upon emersion, it is not research which can be conducted quickly. As a richness
of data flows from emersion in the field, neither does fieldwork necessarily look
to produce generalizations which cover large populations or groups of people.

The problem of providing definitions, either in terms of what things are or what
they are not, is that there are always exceptions and grey areas. By offering these
two definitions some of you will now be saying, ‘But what about this situation’ or
‘Does that rule out that method?’ Some of you will disagree with our definitions
and, implicitly or explicitly, suggest your own. In turn, other people will take
issue with your definitions and suggest that they too are ambiguous, exclusion-
ary, too broad and confused. And so it goes on. The best we can hope for in
offering these definitions is to identify some general principles, which underpin
fieldwork, and to use these in our following discussions. In doing this, we may,
ourselves, come to challenge the definitions and so push back the boundaries of
what fieldwork is and what it is not. Importantly, we do not see the traditional
as static or rooted in the past. So, these debates keep it fresh and better able to
engage with changes in society.

RESEARCHING IN THE FIELD AND DOING

FIELDWORK
From the definitions it is possible to draw an important distinction between
doing fieldwork and working in the field. Whilst fieldwork takes place in the
field – albeit a field that is broadly defined – it does not follow that all research
4 Doing Fieldwork

which occurs there is fieldwork. In drawing this distinction we are separating

location and activity. For example, there are many hundreds of books which
describe the use of many different kinds of methods which might be used in the
field. Many of these are, in our opinion excellent books that we have both used
in teaching research methods (e.g. Berg 2004, Bryman 2012, Greener 2011,
Mason 1996, Neuman 2011, Robson 2002, etc.) and doubtless have helped
many researchers over the years. In most cases, however, these and many others,
remain books about a range of methods, rather than books about fieldwork per se.
By way of contrast, Burgess (1982, 1984), Delamont (2002), Hammersley and
Atkinson (2007), Shaffir and Stebbins (1991) and Wolcott (2005) again to name
just a few, address fieldwork as a distinctive approach to research. Whilst such
texts may very well draw on a similar range of methods as those outlined in the
more general books, it is possible to draw an important distinction between
them. Whilst the former are concerned with research tools or techniques, the
latter are concerned with a holistic approach to a particular kind or style of doing
research. It is not the intention to suggest that one of these types of books is
qualitatively better than the other, nor to dismiss any out-of-hand. Both
approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. The intention is, however, to
draw attention to the difference between research methods and research
methodology. This merits further explanation. In short, research methods refer
to the range of tools that the researcher has at his/her disposal. Methodology,
meanwhile, is about the way in which the researcher uses these tools, the relation-
ship between the tools, the data which they can yield and the knowledge which
follows from those data. Applying this distinction to our discussion of fieldwork,
we are purporting that fieldwork is a methodology rather than a method. It is
simply more than the sum of its parts.

FIELDWORK AS METHODOLOGY
Having made what some might see as lofty claims for fieldwork as a distinctive
methodology, we should say more about what it seeks to achieve and what
distinguishes it from other approaches to research. This in itself is not easy. As
with discussions about what makes ethnography a distinctive approach to
research (Atkinson 1990, Brewer 2000, Hammersley 1990, 1992, Hammersley
and Atkinson 2007, Pole and Morrison 2003,Walford 2009,Willis and Trondman
2000), the term fieldwork is often used interchangeably with a number of other
phrases, which are seen, if not as direct synonyms, then as phrases that describe
broadly similar activities. For example, ethnography, case study and qualitative
research are all terms used to convey a picture of research that seeks to collect
primary data at source, usually on a face-to-face basis. Therefore, in discussing
and seeking to define fieldwork, it may be that we are also discussing other
forms of research or certain aspects of it.
 What is Fieldwork? 5

However, we want to adopt an inclusive [Link] is, our argument is that

fieldwork may incorporate these synonyms, for example, an ethnographic
approach may be taken to fieldwork, similarly, a case study may be conducted as
part of fieldwork and fieldwork is usually based on qualitative research.
Consequently, using these terms in place of fieldwork fails to convey all that this
might involve. Whilst we would not wish to diminish ethnography or case study
research, we would argue that there remains something which sets fieldwork
apart from these approaches. In short, this is the capacity of fieldwork to embrace
the entire research process and to incorporate research design, method and
methodo­logy, field relations, politics and ethics of research, analysis, dissemination
and subsequent impact. It is then, a total [Link] we say we are engaging
in fieldwork we are by implication taking on all of the above as integral to our
research. Moreover, to return to a point made at the very start of this chapter, they
are all processes which are mediated at first hand through the researcher.1

THE TOTAL EXPERIENCE

It is not our intention to build fieldwork into something which is unattainable or
remote from all but the largest, generously-funded research projects. In defining
fieldwork as a total experience we would see it as applicable or relevant to research
of large and small scale, available to experienced researchers and to students who
may be coming to research for the first time as part of their undergraduate studies.
In using the term ‘total experience’ we are doing two things. Firstly, we are
attempting to convey a sense in which doing fieldwork is an absorbing activity
by virtue of the involvement that it demands of the researcher, technically in
terms of the deployment of particular methods and intellectually in thinking
about and planning research strategies. In many respects, fieldwork may be seen
as a form of living research. Secondly and closely allied to this, the term total
experience relates to the theoretical underpinnings of fieldwork where the
intention is to seek to understand whatever is being studied from the perspective
of those who are being studied. In order to do this, it will be necessary for the
researcher to immerse him/herself in the research setting and to deploy research
methods which provide, as far as possible, an insider’s view.
Whilst there are many modern commentators who base their work on such
a position (e.g. Allan 2012, Atkinson 2005, Delamont and Stephens 2006,
Sparkes et al. 2012, to name but a few), the approach may be traced back to that
of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropologists like Powder­
maker, Rivers and in particular Malinowski. These pioneers of modern
anthropology sought not to rely on the second-hand reports of faraway places
from missionaries and travellers, but to see and experience things for themselves.
They talked directly to the ‘natives’; they lived with them and took part in their
everyday lives as well as the festivals, feasts and other less ordinary activities.
6 Doing Fieldwork

FIGURE 1.1
Source: Malinowski (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Plate I The ethnographer’s tent on
the beach of the Nu’agasi, demonstrating ‘life among the natives’.

The intention was that by taking part in the everyday life of the research setting
and by participating alongside members of the indigenous population, the
researcher(s) would, as far as possible, become members of the social setting
which they were studying. In an original anthropological sense, therefore, the
notion of fieldwork could be taken quite literally, that it was work (research)
conducted in a field (rural location).
The idea of sailing away to uncharted, faraway lands to study unknown or
little-known people, lends to fieldwork a degree of exoticism in which the
anthropologist (fieldworker) may be cast as explorer, swashbuckler or pioneer.
This may have been the case at the turn of the twentieth century when foreign
travel was rare and many parts of the planet remained inaccessible to Westerners.
It is now, in a globalized context, little more than a caricature perpetuated
largely by Hollywood heroes like Indiana Jones! Few of today’s fieldworkers
would see themselves in such a role.
The advent of relatively cheap and easy international travel has meant that few
places in the world – physically or culturally – remain inaccessible to the tourist,
let alone the intrepid anthropologist or researcher. In addition, a rethink about
the ethical and political relationship between the ‘visiting’ anthropologist or
fieldworker and the indigenous population, has led to a greater emphasis on
researchers in what might previously have been seen as faraway places, researching
their own societies. The world has, in effect, become a much smaller place. This
more local approach to fieldwork was typified by the work of the Chicago
School of Sociology, who produced many studies of everyday events in
Chicago during the early decades of the twentieth century (e.g. Anderson 1923,
Polsky 1967, Shaw 2013 [1930], Thrasher 1927). Their approach was to treat the
relatively new phenomenon of the city of Chicago, with which they were familiar,
 What is Fieldwork? 7

in the same way as the anthropologist would treat the faraway locations. In doing
this, the Chicago sociologists were instrumental in encouraging an approach
that challenged the familiar and looked beyond what was often taken for granted
within their own society.
In the words of Burgess (1982) as the twentieth century progressed, anthropology
came home. By this, he refers to the fact that although traditional ‘faraway’
anthropology has declined, ironically, the research methods and the general
approach are now more common than ever. Researchers may no longer travel
to the islands of the South Pacific to gather data and try to understand ‘exotic’
and remote communities in the way that they did at the start of the twentieth
century, but they are now more likely to be found ‘at home’ in their own com-
munities practising fieldwork. For some modern day fieldworkers, the
homecoming meant that they studied whole communities. Classic examples
being Stacey’s (1960) study and restudy (Stacey et al. 1975) of Banbury, or
Frankenberg’s (1957) study of a north Wales village. Here, the approach to what
became known as the community study was, and in many respects remains
(Payne 1996), very similar to that taken by the anthropologists working in the
islands of New Guinea. The principles of working (and living) alongside the
‘natives’ did not vary with the location, be it Banbury or the South Pacific.
The objective of understanding the location (the field) at first hand, from the
inside remained the same.
Transporting the principles of anthropological fieldwork a little further, the
approach did not always have to be applied to a field in a rural or geographical
sense. The ‘coming home’ of anthropology meant that research based on field-
work became common in what in some sense, were much smaller or more
tightly defined fields. For example, the definitions of a school or a factory, a
football stadium or a family as a field, meant that researchers could apply
anthropological techniques to situations with which they were often very
familiar. In this respect, it could be argued that the late-twentieth-century
emphasis on the ordinary or the familiar research setting, as opposed to the
exotic or the unfamiliar, limited the scope of fieldwork. However, such an
argument emphasizes technical issues of geography and location over methodo-
logical and theoretical issues. Although fieldwork is now more commonly
found in the researcher’s own ‘back yard’, the principles which underpin its use
remain largely unaltered. The concern is to understand the field and those who
‘inhabit’ it from the inside. So even in ‘ordinary’ surroundings, exploring the
total experience remains the objective.

FAMILIAR AND STRANGE

The fieldworker born and bred in Birmingham, UK would doubtless regard an
opportunity to conduct research in a village located within the Amazon Rain
8 Doing Fieldwork

forests as an opportunity to observe and experience the ‘exotic’ and the unfamiliar.
Similarly, a researcher from the Amazon Rain Forest is also likely to regard the
prospect of conducting research in Mosely or Solihull in the same way. The
concept of the exotic or the strange is of course relative. The fieldworker can
also find themselves responding differently to the field, Atkinson (2012), for
example, recounted ‘doing fieldwork in the opera company’:

I went on tour with them. I spent a great deal of time observing rehearsals and a
few performances watching from the stage wings and observing backstage activity. I
hung out in the offices of some of the administrative staff. I got in the way in the
props department. It was one of the best possible periods of field research […] a
rare opportunity to study performances at first hand (Atkinson 2012: 44).

Even sustained fieldwork in Birmingham is personal and emotive, as Moore (1977)

recounted of his seminal study with Rex on race relations in the Sparkbrook:

For a year I ate, breathed and slept Sparkbrook. I made new friends, made and
dissolved relationships, took sides in conflicts, had problems with my landlady
and went to parties […] [The] demands on emotions are certainly felt very
acutely when one is working in the field of race relations […] The most beguil-
ing interview was with a dim and amiable young prostitute who said as we
parted that if I wanted to know any more about her work I should call at her
place ‘anytime’ (Moore 1977: 87, 88).

The definition of what is exotic or strange depends on the particular circumstances

of whoever is defining the situation. In the same way, the definition of familiar
is contingent upon the same things. However, the concepts of strangeness and
familiarity are central to an understanding of fieldwork and what it attempts to
achieve. So it becomes important to think about what these concepts mean and
how they work in fieldwork practice.
The researcher from Birmingham perceives the rainforest village as strange
because it is unfamiliar. He/she does not have to try very hard to think of
questions to ask about what he/she sees, hears and experiences because they
are different and unfamiliar. Similarly, the researcher from the village in an
Amazon rainforest is likely to find Birmingham strange and will, therefore,
have many questions to ask of what he/she sees and experiences. This is part
of our everyday thinking – what interactionists see as our making-sense of the
world around us. However, to suggest that our capacity to ask questions about
a particular location or institution or process depends on how well we know
it, is to oversimplify things. For example, we have all been to school, but how
many of us can say that we understand fully the way in which a school works?
Or perhaps even more basic than that, most of us will live with, or have lived
with, other people at some stage of our lives, as part of a family – in the many
forms they can appear – but who can claim to fully understand the role of the
 What is Fieldwork? 9

family in all its different forms in the twenty-first century? We may all have
personal experience of a school or family, but that does not mean that we
know everything there is to know about them. Moreover, it is likely that we know
about those situations from a particular vantage point, say as a pupil or a
youngest son or daughter. How different does a primary school seem from the
position of the head teacher or the caretaker? Similarly, how does the family
seem from the perspective of a great grandmother, a father, a stepmother or an
adopted brother?
These examples of where we may find the present-day researcher, studying
a family or a school, suggest that fieldwork can be as much about situations
which are familiar to us as it can about those which are strange. This is an important
point, given the sheer scale and pace at which contemporary life is moving
and working. We would argue, therefore, that the essence of fieldwork relates
to the capacity of the fieldworker to pose questions about whatever situation
or location he/she finds him/herself in. In some cases this may appear easy
because everything is new and unfamiliar or strange. In others it may appear
very difficult because everything is all-too familiar. In both situations there
are problems and challenges, the fieldworker’s job remains the same – to
attempt to get to the essence of what is happening. This may mean making familiar
situations strange by asking questions about everyday activities and situations.
For example, in the context of the school we may wish to pose questions,
which on the face of it seem a little strange, but actually succeed in getting
to the heart of what happens everyday and which we take for granted. This
is taking things apart in order to get a better picture of how they work
together. For example:

• Why does the head teacher have their own office when other teachers do not?
• Why are the children grouped by age for lessons?
• Who decided that it would be a good idea to read the plays of Shakespeare?
• Why do we have prefects or houses?

Or in the context of the family:

• Why do I live with my brother and sister and not with my cousins?
• Why does dad pay towards the upkeep of the house although he doesn’t live
here anymore?
• Why does mum do most of the cooking and the housework?
• Why do my teenage daughters argue so much?

At first glance we may think that we know the answers to these questions,
that they are obvious and not worth serious consideration. However, if we
stop to think about our everyday lives – about what we do almost automatically,
every day and why we do it – our familiar world starts to become less familiar.
10 Doing Fieldwork

We start to ‘exoticize’ or problematize everyday occurrences and to treat as

strange those things we may have always regarded as so familiar. For many present
day fieldworkers, the research task rests on their capacity to ask challenging
questions, not to take things for granted and to look beneath what we may have
always regarded as ordinary. Given that we are part of the social world we want
to study, that is neither easy nor straightforward.
There are, of course, many anthropologists who continue to conduct fieldwork
in faraway places, where most things are unfamiliar to them. Essentially, however,
we would argue that wherever fieldwork is conducted, it is seeking to achieve
the same things:

• To observe and experience at first-hand what is happening

• To examine the significance of events and activities, beliefs and rituals
(including the mundane and the ordinary) to people involved
• To examine the ways in which activities and events, beliefs and rituals relate
to each other and to the participants in the location
• To look for the significance and meaning of social behaviour
• To look below the surface of events and activities, beliefs and rituals for pat-
terns and theories which can begin to explain social life in ways which go
beyond the particular fieldwork location

As with the early and the present-day anthropologist, the fieldworker is driven
by curiosity, by a desire to understand, to be there, as things happen and to use
what he/she sees, hears and experiences to begin to explain social behaviour.
Whilst this broad remit for fieldwork may be traced back to anthropology, the
process by which anthropology ‘came home’ means that fieldwork is now a
research process which is applicable to many disciplines. The fieldworker may
be an anthropologist, a sociologist, an economist, a geographer or a member of
one of many more disciplines which have primary research as their core.
Whichever label the fieldworker attaches to his/her intellectual identity, we
would argue the basic tenets of fieldwork remain the same. We should also add
that fieldwork is defined here as an approach to doing research, whereas eth-
nography, for example, uses fieldwork. In this sense, it is the activity, the research
process, the total experience which defines fieldwork rather than the discipline
to which it is applied.

DOING FIELDWORK
In attempting to define fieldwork as a particular approach to research by
identifying characteristics and objectives which distinguish it from approaches
to social research which are not based on fieldwork, we have pointed to par-
ticular forms of research practice. Underpinning this research practice is the
 What is Fieldwork? 11

intention to understand at first hand what is happening in the particular field

of study – to encounter that climate or environment. To do this the field-
worker uses a range of different methods which allow him/her access to the
interior world of those who populate that particular setting or field. For
example, Sarah Pink’s work on both visual and sensory ethnography (Pink
2012, 2013) has continued and extended moves by ethnographers to appreci-
ate the embodied and emotional characteristics of fieldwork (cf. Coffey 1999,
Madison 2011). Pink (2012) is clear in her own use of visual techniques as well
as in her reflections upon their use that they are tools helping to achieve a rich
and detailed understanding of a fieldwork site. Therefore, it remains important
to reflect upon who took (or, to use Becker’s term, made) any visual images
that make up a portfolio of fieldwork data and contributed to an under-
standing of a research site. So, in a ‘tour’ of a locale in Wales using visual data,
Pink (2008: 193) outlined how she sought to share the ‘emplaced’ feel of that
environment and how visual techniques were instrumental to that process:

the tour can be understood as an ethnographic pathway which, through its

entanglements with the pathways of others, gathered memories, imaginings and
the immediate present though multiple modes and media (Pink 2008: 193).

Pink (2008) used visual and sensory ethnography here to capture the sense of
belonging and space in the locality of Mold, Flintshire, UK but we would argue
they can be applied to a wide range of settings, including virtual settings. Again,
the work of the early anthropologists and particularly Malinowski is relevant
here in offering guidance on the principled use of fieldwork techniques. This is
important because photographs and visual data are only artefacts that facilitate
fieldwork, they are not fieldwork in themselves.
In 1922, in the introduction to his most celebrated work Argonauts of the
Western Pacific and in a chapter entitled ‘How an anthropologist works in the
field’, Malinowski outlined the preconditions for effective ethnography. For
Malinowski, fieldwork and ethnography were synonymous. Whilst we may now
wish to argue the differences between the two, and we would personally suggest
that rather than being synonymous they are in fact facilitative, as fieldwork is the
research approach used in the conduct of ethnography. Therefore, Malinowski’s
(1922: 6) three preconditions for effective ethnography offer a useful guide for
our consideration of fieldwork:

• The student must possess real scientific aims and know the values and criteria
of modern ethnography.
• He ought to put himself [sic] in good conditions of work, that is, in the main
to live without white men, right among the natives.
• He [sic] has to apply a number of special methods of collecting, manipulating
and fixing his evidence.
12 Doing Fieldwork

If we translate these preconditions into their present-day equivalents then we

can see that Malinowski’s concern was to facilitate access for the fieldworker to
as much of the life of the research setting (the field) as possible. The conditions
he identified centred largely around the researcher him/herself adopting appro-
priate behaviour, having particular abilities like languages and the capacity to
blend in with the situation by spending time with the subjects2 of the research.
In addition, his preconditions highlight the need for a genuine and legitimate
reason for conducting the research. His reference to possessing real scientific
aims can be seen as a warning against research which is perhaps more voyeur-
istic than scientific. Moreover, some technical pre-requisites are identified to
facilitate the effective collection of data. Like Malinowski, we need good access
to key informants; we would need to be able to speak the language of those we
are studying. For Malinowski this meant quite literally learning a new language
in order to communicate directly with informants and not having to rely on
translators. For present-day fieldworkers there may well be the need to speak
additional languages, particularly where cross-­ cultural fieldwork (Pole and
Burgess 2000) is conducted, but alternatively language may refer to a particular
kind of speech or argot. For example, Hockey (1986) conducted intensive field-
work with new recruits to the British Army. In order to understand much of
the argot which passed between the squaddies, Hockey had to ‘tune in’ to a
form of language often constituted by slang, sexual innuendo, swearing and
mickey-taking. In short, he learned the language of the young soldier.
Similarly, we can see in Delamont’s (in Atkinson et al. 2008) fieldwork the
unravelling of not only the terms used to capture the Brazilian martial art
form of capoeira, but the nuances in the teaching of capoeira across instruc-
tors. For Delamont, a highly experienced fieldworker, unlocking the
complexities of this social form and its political context was deeply challeng-
ing (Delamont 2009). In the case of fieldwork conducted in single locations,
the researcher would not necessarily be pulled into political debates, but
Delamont’s immersion and the knowledge that her fieldwork yielded led her
to understand that the very status of capoeira in the UK was shot-through
with wider concerns (see 2009). In addition, fieldworkers also need to be able
to observe and experience the everyday activities and social rhythms of the
field in which they are researching (indeed, why capoeira classes always start
late). This means that they are not just interested in the spectacular or the
unusual (though as Delamont notes, this can be useful in getting to know a
research field) but in the ordinary and the mundane. For Malinowski, as for
the fieldworker a century later, this emphasizes the need to spend prolonged
periods of time in the field, to witness at first-hand the range of activities
which shape the life of the community. For an opera house, it may be the
rehearsals and intense background preparations before a new performance is
staged (Atkinson 2005). For a gamekeeper, it would have to be the habitat,
predation control and feeding routines that underpin preparations for the
 What is Fieldwork? 13

game-shooting season (Hillyard and Burridge 2012). Above all, Malinowski’s

preconditions are about enabling fieldworkers to get close to what they are
researching, to see for themselves what is going on and to understand as far as
possible from the perspective of an insider. To achieve these same things, the
modern fieldworker uses a range of research methods that traditionally have
involved face-to-face contact. In particular, these techniques include: observa-
tion and participant observation, interviews and conversational techniques, life
histories, documentary analysis and the use of various sources of visual data
including photographs, works of art and artefacts. Each of these is an active
method in which the fieldworker is central to the data collection process.
Unlike research which is based on questionnaire or survey techniques, field-
work methods facilitate direct interface between the researcher and the
researched. We also need to acknowledge here Savage and Burrows’ (2007,
2009) call for empirical sociology to engage more seriously with what they
term ‘social transactional data’ (Savage and Burrows 2007: 885). Their call is
for sociologists to take more seriously the kind of digital data that capitalism
now yields (such as new social media; archives not presently available to the aca-
demic and; the ‘scraping’ of unrestricted data from sources such as Facebook).
They call for sociologists ‘to get their hands “dirty” by exploring the potential
of such methods and issues posed by their use’ (Savage and Burrows 2009:
766–7). These new forms of media are important because they are new means
by which people associate and construct their social worlds (Lawler 2013).
But, we would also reiterate that pictures and artefacts facilitate fieldwork but
they are not fieldwork in themselves. So, for example, Smith’s (2012) use of
CCTV footage of Aberdeen city and the working environment of the opera-
tors of that city’s cameras is not fieldwork although it offers an insight into
social action in the city, both malignant and benign. The proliferation of social
data is a resource that can be used by fieldworkers and we attach great impor-
tance to it, as have many social scientists in their analyses in the past,3 where
new inroads were made into understanding the ‘politics of [such] methods’
(Savage and Burrows 2007: 885). Yet with fieldwork, you cannot hide behind
the white coat of a laboratory scientist, the software of the social statistician
and distanced manipulation of digital datasets.
Fieldwork is a human method dependent to a great extent on the social
and interpersonal skills of the researcher. In this respect, this very human
character of fieldwork makes it an unpredictable approach to research. The
journey or apprenticeship involved in becoming a good fieldworker has been
discussed elsewhere (Delamont 2002, 2009). Whilst it is important for field-
work to be carefully planned in advance of entering the field, there are limits
to which this is possible. Social life is difficult to predict and the fieldworker
must maintain a degree of flexibility in his/her work. Unlike the experimental
scientist, he/she needs to react and adapt to situations as they occur rather
than stick rigidly to a set research procedure in the interests of uniformity
14 Doing Fieldwork

and a notion of scientific replication and reliability. For the fieldworker, the
intention is not to impose a restrictive framework on the research which
must be adhered to, come what may. This is one of fieldwork’s strengths, in
that it has – at its very core – the capacity to be flexible and move to explore
something unanticipated.
Given the aim of understanding social processes from the inside, the field-
worker seeks not to influence the situations or the behaviour that he/she is
researching. In this simplistic sense, it is a naturalistic approach to collecting
data which attempt, as far as possible, to capture the reality of the situation
from the perspective of those being researched. So, rather than a concern with
objectivity, we might claim that fieldwork is concerned with subjectivity. This
statement may seem to run counter to those in many ‘general methods’ text-
books, which advocate the centrality of objectivity to social research (see
Cooper et al. 2012, for a very clear introduction and overview by Hammersley).
However, by referring to subjectivity in this context we are not suggesting or
advocating that the fieldworker provides an account of events merely to suit
his/her own prejudices or ideas about the situation being researched. By using
the term subjectivity, we refer to one of the key reasons for conducting field-
work, that is to capture the significance and meaning of a situation, a set of events or
whatever is being researched for the people (social actors) who are taking part in those
events. In this sense it is subjective insofar as it seeks to capture and portray
the internal reality of the situation being researched. The fieldworker will
unavoidably influence the field setting at some level, wittingly or otherwise.
The issue then is to account for this in their analysis and reflexive discussion.
Returning to our earlier example of the school-based research may help to
clarify the point.
In seeking to understand the way in which a primary school operated by
identifying some everyday activities, we may wish to examine or observe
these activities from a number of different perspectives. For example, if we
wished to understand the significance of the assembly to the life of the school
we may see it as important to not only observe and take part in the assembly
but also to talk to different participants about their experience of it. On
doing so, we might collect a range of views. For example, the head teacher
may see it as important in bringing the whole school together, providing a
sense of collective identity for the pupils and teachers and at the same time
an opportunity to recognize and celebrate the achievements of the school
(this might be to reward individual pupils, say goodbye to school-leavers or
to congratulate the school on displays arranged for the village flower festival
or suchlike). From the perspective of the new arrivals in a small, rural pri-
mary school, this might be an exciting experience where they use the
biggest room in the school and when the whole school (and bigger children)
and even their mum and dad might attend. From the perspective of the
caretaker, the assembly may simply be a nuisance. All the chairs and benches
 What is Fieldwork? 15

for teachers and parents have to be put out and then collected in, the floor
to be re-polished after the children have walked on it in muddy shoes and
the room re-organized for lunch-time.
The task of the fieldworker, therefore, is to collect these different experiences
in the round (all of which represent a particular subjective view based on the
different positions of the different actors) and then to analyse them in accord-
ance with the context within which they were collected and the perspective
from which they were expressed. In this situation, there may be no single objec-
tivity possible. All the different views are subjective, based on the position of
those expressing them, but all are valid and important. It is the role of the field-
worker, therefore, to collect and portray these different perspectives in the
understanding of the school which he/she seeks to convey. In addition, as the
fieldworker will have witnessed the school assembly at first hand, he/she will
also be able to add his/her own perspective on the event. This will be useful
not only in adding another perspective on the assembly, but also in providing
something against which the other perspectives can be compared. In some
respects, the fieldworker’s view may be seen as one which is not shaped by
vested interest or by him/her having a specific position in the school such as
head teacher, pupil or caretaker. However, it will remain subjective in that it is
the fieldworker’s interpretation of events that he/she has observed and partici-
pated in. By being there, the fieldworker also, of course, becomes part of the
social action being researched. Although he/she may take steps to minimize any
direct impact or interference on the setting, the very fact of his/her presence
means the situation has changed and it is therefore vital that the fieldworker
adopt a reflexive stance throughout their fieldwork (see Atkinson 1990: 2 for an
excellent definition of reflexivity).
It is worth reiterating at this point that fieldwork is an approach to
research which requires the fieldworker, if not to take part, then to be there –
or rather to immerse themselves in what action is taking place. Consequently,
who the researcher is may have an impact on the interpretation he/she
brings to the events witnessed and also on the extent to which and in what
capacity it is possible to participate in events. For example, characteristics
such as gender, ethnicity, age and social class may affect the role a field-
worker might play in any given situation. In Dunning et al.’s (1986) research
into football hooliganism, John Williams as the principal fieldworker,
needed to be there when violence occurred. He needed to blend in with the
‘hooligans’, to run with them and to experience, as far as possible, their
emotions as the violence ensued. In order to do this, Williams needed to be
male, young and fit. In addition he needed other attributes which enabled
him to blend into a male, largely working-class group of football supporters.
Things like accent (Williams has an identifiable Liverpudlian accent),
knowledge of football and the right kinds of clothes, all went to help Williams
in his quest to be there.
16 Doing Fieldwork

There are many more examples of attempts to blend in and be acceptable,

some of which we will draw on in Chapter 4 where we discuss participant
observation. The point to be made here is that in doing fieldwork, the field-
worker’s role is both facilitated and constrained by his/her own social, physical
and emotional characteristics. In short, it is his/her identity that is fundamental
to the whole fieldwork experience.

FIELDWORK AND THEORY

By now we hope to have established that fieldwork, in the way that we have
defined and portrayed it, rests upon the capacity to understand situations as
defined from the perspective of the insider. This in itself is a theoretical position
based on Weber’s (1949) notion of verstehen (by which we mean empathy or
understanding). In addition, we have also discussed issues of objectivity and
subjectivity in relation to the accounts of particular events that the fieldworker
gathers and the interpretations brought to them. We have asserted that field-
work is about finding ways to portray the subjective reality of social action in terms of
its meaning for the social actors. Putting these two conceptual issues together we
move towards a broad theoretical position for fieldwork research which is based
upon interpretivism. By this we mean that fieldwork facilitates an approach to
understanding the social world, which is based upon the interpretation of social
action from the position of the social actors who create or construct that action.
Whilst interpretivism is a broad church (which we like), fieldwork is not an
approach to research which will facilitate large generalizations or social trends
and behaviour across large populations. Rather, the way we see it, fieldwork is
an approach which says: let’s see how people shape the situations which con-
stitute their lives; let’s see what things mean and how they work out for the
people involved in a particular social situation. It is curiosity-driven in the sense
that it is exploratory, but it values people’s own accounts of their everyday lives
and their own actions and words.
This characterization of fieldwork is an approach which emphasizes inter-
pretation, social construction and meaning. Together with the idea of
subjectivity (in the way that we discussed it earlier) this locates fieldwork
within a micro-sociology framework of social research. By this we wish to
infer that for the fieldworker, the concern is with discrete social behaviour
rather than large-scale social structures. This is not to say that the fieldworker
ignores structure, far from it. It is, however, fair to say that fieldwork focuses
on the ways in which structures are constructed, interpreted and made
meaningful to the lives of those who live within them or who construct them.
It is the performance of structures in the everyday realm which is of interest.
In terms of its general theoretical orientation, therefore, we see fieldwork
 What is Fieldwork? 17

emphasizing social action and individual agency. This is important as it directly

links the kinds of research methods upon which the fieldworker may draw and
the desire to understand social behaviour from the inside. For us, the two flow
into one another. The use of participant observation, observation, conversa-
tion techniques and documentary analysis, in short, the fact of placing a value
on being there and seeing/experiencing at first hand is what defines the
theoretical orientation of fieldwork.

SUMMARY
Our characterization of fieldwork in this opening chapter has attempted to
raise a number of issues which will help to facilitate an understanding not only
of how fieldwork is done, but also to begin to understand what it can achieve
in terms of producing knowledge and understanding of the social world. We
are not arguing that fieldwork is in itself a theoretical position – it is too broad
for that. What we are saying, however, is that fieldwork lends itself to a par-
ticular way of attempting to understand the social world, how it is constructed
and what it means to those who construct it. By this we are not rejecting the
importance of large-scale macro theories of the social world, we see these as
having an important role to play in explaining social structures and organiza-
tions of a different scope. Indeed, some large-scale trends demand exploration
at the local level. Our view is that fieldwork is an approach best applied to
facilitate an understanding of the ways in which people experience social sys-
tems and structures and how they, in turn, may influence them. It recognizes
the structural limitations and constraints which are placed on free will and
individual action, but rather than seeing these as the sole determinants of the
ways in which individuals or groups live their lives, it seeks to recognize –
even celebrate – the importance of human interaction.
Research based on fieldwork is, therefore, attempting to understand the
significance of social structure from the perspective of the individual social actor.
It is about being there, wherever the social action is, at home or faraway.
Fieldwork is about doing and being. It can be tremendously rewarding,
frustrating, fun, dull, exciting and ordinary. It can be all of these things because
it is about life – the way people make it and how it is experienced.

NOTES
1 Although this mediation can also take place in virtual environments.
2 We discuss scales of participation and the importance of power in Chapter 3.
3 For example, Dingwall (1977), Travers (2007).
18 Doing Fieldwork

FURTHER READING

Hammersley H and Atkinson P (2007, 3rd edition) Ethnography. London:

Routledge. (Chapter 1 and prologue to the third edition.)
Any text or article from the shortlist for the BBC/BSA Ethnography Award.
Sampson H (2013) International Seafarers and Transnationalism in the Twenty-first
Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press. (2014 award winner.)
 2
FINDING THE FIELD

Chapter overview
• Finding the field is both a conceptual and locational ambition.
• Gaining an insider’s view is a key objective.
• Fieldwork ‘at home’ can be harder than fieldwork conducted in strange
or exotic settings.
• Immersion is a key principle, as is the importance of finding a research
role to build – and maintain – a strong rapport.
• Flexibility and adaptability are essential fieldwork skills.

Having established what is meant by fieldwork and before moving on to examine

some of the principal research methods which it utilizes it is important to spend
some time reflecting on the ways in which fieldworkers define their field of
enquiry and how they secure access to it.
Looking back to the work of the early anthropologists once more we might
surmise that for them the question of how to define the field was not so difficult.
The general lack of information about far away locations, the unavailability of
long-distance travel to all but the very intrepid or the foolhardy, meant that
anthropology had a role not only in satisfying scientific curiosities but also in a
more general desire to know about faraway lands. For the present-day anthro-
pologist, as we have already said, the situation is very different and that in
Burgess’ (1984) words, anthropology has now come home. Whilst there
is much evidence to corroborate this view, given the wealth of studies
having been conducted in recent years into all manner of seemingly ordi-
nary or everyday situations, this does not take us very far in understanding
how the present-day fieldworker comes to identify the field in which they
might work.
20 Doing Fieldwork

RESEARCHING THE FAMILIAR

For some researchers, the identification of an appropriate field for research is
straightforward. Much of present-day research based on fieldwork has been con-
ducted in settings with which the researcher has some familiarity for one reason
or another. For example, studies located within a particular institution or which
focus on a specific occupation may reflect the past experience of the researcher.
Heley (2011) was a ‘local boy’ who returned to the village in which his family
had resided for centuries to conduct fieldwork in that same community. Walford
(2004) used his adoption of the role of University Procter as an opportunity to
conduct an autoethnography. Roderick (2006) used his background as a former
professional footballer as a means to explore professional football in his sociology
of work monograph.
There are many other examples upon which we could draw where the
researcher chooses to revisit situations with which he/she is very familiar, but
then seeks a different view of what may previously have been taken for
granted. In these situations one might surmise that the identification of the
field was based upon the previous experience of the researcher – a desire to
look at familiar situations differently and to pose the kinds of questions which
they were perhaps unable to pose when they were living and/or working in
that environment.
For many other researchers, however, there was not such a direct link between
themselves and the area in which they chose to conduct their fieldwork. For
example, Foster’s (1990) Villains, which examined petty crime and general low
life in south London, was conducted without any first-hand experience either
of the geographical area or of petty crime on the part of Foster. Similarly,
Barker’s (1984) study of a religious cult, the Moonies, was conducted at the
invitation of that church and did not draw on any first-hand experience of the
Moonies which Barker had prior to starting the research. Distinctly, US-based
sociologist Loïc Wacquant immersed himself in the boxing world – within
which he was considered an unlikely member – to conduct a rich, longitudinal
ethnography (Wacquant 2003). Delamont’s research on capoeira, alongside
Stephens, required collaborative and extended field [Link] was essen-
tial in order to not only engage with the language and terminology surrounding
the Brazilian dance and martial art, but also its form, practice and the nuances
between its performance (Stephens and Delamont 2010). There are many more
examples of this kind, where researchers do not have first-hand experience and,
consequently, may be regarded as strangers to the field.
Whether the researcher has first-hand experience of the field or not, the
objective remains the same. The fieldwork is conducted with the intention of
collecting information which provides a detailed insider’s view of whatever
occurs within the field. In the broadest sense it is this curiosity that drives the
research and it is not dependent on prior experience. In order for there to be
 Finding the Field 21

a curiosity, however, it is likely that the researcher will have some familiarity
with the field. As we have seen, this may not be familiarity at first hand,
but may be based on a range of things which have originally ignited the
imagination; for example, reading accounts of previous research in the area,
attending lectures or talking with researchers who have previously conducted
research that was of interest. Whatever the reason, there is usually something,
let’s call it a spark, which acts as the catalyst for the research. In this sense, we
would argue that the researcher always has a degree of familiarity with the field.
Moreover, we would go so far as to say that without that familiarity, then field-
work would be difficult and perhaps [Link] familiarity, whether gained
from reading and studying accounts of previous research or from first-hand
acquaintance with the field, is important in guiding the fieldwork in terms of
identifying a focus and identifying strategies for the most effective means of collect-
ing data. As we noted in the opening chapter in our discussion of Malinowski’s
principles, the ability to ask good questions in fieldwork is important. In addition,
a degree of familiarity may be particularly useful when seeking to gain access
to the field.

WHAT AND WHERE IS THE FIELD?

In order to conduct fieldwork, the researcher has to gain access to the field. The
importance of being there and experiencing the field – as near as possible as a
participant – places great emphasis not on merely gaining access but also gaining
the right kind of access. By this, we mean the kind of access that allows the
fieldworker to take part, to question and to observe at close quarters, the range
of activities, structures and interactions that constitute the field. Expressed
another way, to immerse themselves in the field.
In emphasizing the importance of gaining access to the field we refer not
merely to the field as a location (for example, a school, a police station or a
specific geographical area), but also in terms of the focus of the research. Any
specific setting such as a school or a police station is likely to present the
researcher with a wide range of issues and topics upon which to focus his/her
research. It would be impossible to study all of them in detail. However, the research
process is such that it is unlikely and in most cases we would say unwise, for
the researcher to identify the location and then begin searching for a focus
within it. As we have already argued, all research requires the foundation of a
clear rationale, and as part of this is a need for a clear focus. In identifying and
seeking access to the field, therefore, we are concerned not merely with the
physical location in which the research is to be based, but also with a concep-
tual notion of field. By this we mean the way in which the focus of the research
is identified and defined. Returning to an example may be useful in elaborating
this point.
22 Doing Fieldwork

Whilst we might identify a particular school as an appropriate location for

fieldwork this in itself does not take us very far. A school is a complex organiza-
tion, which presents an opportunity to study many issues. In identifying the
field, therefore, our concern is to identify a specific topic or set of themes within
the location. For example, Bagley and Hillyard (2011) in their research in two
rural villages focused upon the role of the school in fostering a sense of com-
munity (or not) as a means to refine their explorations. Other ethnographers,
when conducting research in schools, have focused upon a particular group
within that setting. Hillyard (2003) for example shadowed one form-group in
their first year at secondary school. Allan (2009, 2012) forged a close fieldwork
relationship with girls at an elite school in their senior years, including spending
time with them outside of the school environment. Clifton (2007) was looking
specifically at a sample of the school population – army kids – and hence drew
in themes about school provision and policy, but also the wider framework of
the institution of the Army. Similarly, other educational researchers have been
focused upon particular aspects of school work, such as homework. So, the field-
work and data collection may not always, nor necessarily, take place in the
institution within which the focus was initially provided.
In each case, the field was identified in terms of the substantive focus of the
research and also the physical location, in these cases, the schools. Whilst there is
a close relationship between location (the schools) and substantive focus, in each
of these examples the field is defined primarily in terms of the substantive focus.
The location is central to the way in which the research is conducted, to the
collection of data and to the conclusions drawn from it, but in each case, it is
fair to say that other locations could have been chosen whilst the substantive
focus was maintained.
In finding the field and gaining access, therefore, the researcher is concerned
with the interplay of locational, technical and conceptual issues. Only when an
acceptable fit between these three concerns has been achieved can a field for the
research be said to have been identified.

LOOKING FOR A WAY IN

Identifying the conceptual field in which to locate your research will mean
engaging with the literature in your chosen field. For example, making use of
libraries and archives to find out what previous research has been conducted in
your area of interest and what has been written. In this way you will become
familiar with current debates and also the way in which what is known about
your topic has changed and developed over time. As Atkinson and Housely
(2003) remind us, it’s really important to avoid reinventing the wheel because
you have not conducted sufficient reading before undertaking your field
research. This process of familiarization and focusing may take a long time.
 Finding the Field 23

Whilst it may be something you set out to do as a distinct part of the research
process, it may also be something that develops as your interest in an area develops.
The idea is that by engaging with literature and ideas that inform your area you
begin to identify a substantive or conceptual focus for your research. It is likely,
however, that the focus will continue to be defined as the research progresses:
that it shifts or that additional foci may also emerge. This is all part of the uncer-
tainty of social research and also part of its richness. Nevertheless, we would
argue that before fieldwork can be said to have commenced in any formal sense,
you are already thinking about and refining your ideas. This may even be before
a specific location is identified, because it is important to have a good idea of
what you intend to focus upon. It is at this stage – when considerable thought
has already been invested – that fieldwork, in both a locational and conceptual
sense, may proceed.
Identifying the conceptual field and gaining access to the locational field
involve quite different research skills. However, as we have seen, they are both
integral to the conduct of fieldwork. Where identifying the conceptual field
relies on traditional study skills based on library research, identifying the loca-
tional field often depends on the researcher’s capacity to negotiate, to appear
convincing and to be persuasive towards those who may grant access to the
location. It is also important that we flag up here that access is a long and on-going
process in fieldwork, because it is about establishing and maintaining a rapport.
We say more about this later.

IDENTIFYING THE CONCEPTUAL FIELD

As we have said, identifying the conceptual field involves engaging with ideas,
theories and previous research conducted in a particular area of interest. The
objective is to come gradually to a clear idea of what to focus your fieldwork
on. In this context, Glaser and Strauss (1967) introduce the idea of progressive
focusing. By this, they refer to a process in which the researcher(s) starts with an
idea of the general area in which he/she wishes to work and then by a process
of interrogating the literature, conducting preliminary data collection, posing
questions about the data and what is already known about the area, it is possible
to arrive at a focus.
In identifying the conceptual field, the intention is to highlight the area in
which we intend our research should make a contribution to knowledge. In this
sense, the process by which this is achieved relates back to our discussions in
Chapter 1 about identifying the rationale for the research. At this early stage, the
focus is not cast in stone and may be refined as the research progresses. Moreover,
identifying the conceptual field is of direct relevance to the locational field. Only
when the researcher has a good idea of what the research is to be about, will it
be possible to negotiate and gain access to the field location.
24 Doing Fieldwork

GAINING ACCESS TO THE FIELD

Each piece of fieldwork is different, which makes giving advice on negotiating
and gaining access (in anything other than general terms) very difficult.
Moreover, our discussion so far has assumed that it is always necessary to nego-
tiate access. However, researchers may sometimes decide that this may not be the
case. For example, there is considerable debate (see Hammersley and Atkinson
2007) on the necessity to negotiate access when fieldwork is to be conducted
in public places or using publically accessible social media. If, for example, we
decide to conduct fieldwork in the high street of a major town or city, which
involves observing passers-by, or may require us to enter shops or car parks or
any other public domain, we may decide that there is no necessity to seek formal
consent from those who have an administrative or legal responsibility for those
locations. Although we are conducting fieldwork, we are simply doing what
other members of the public are doing: shopping/parking the car/walking the
street – simply being in a town or city. We may decide, therefore, that we, like
everyone else, have a right to be there. However, whilst this may be the case, our
principal reason for ‘being there’ is quite different from other members of the
public. As fieldworkers, we are there to observe others. Depending on the con-
ceptual field of our research, it may be possible to conduct fieldwork in these
public places without those who are the subjects of the research knowing about
it. Consequently, there may be no practical reason to seek their consent as, on
the face of it, our behaviour involves nothing out of the ordinary. However,
practical concerns are not the only consideration facing the fieldworker.
In situations such as those above, the decision of whether to seek formal access
to the subjects, or perhaps more accurately the objects of the research, will come
down to the personal ethical code of the [Link] there are many important
ethical codes and guides issued by professional and learned societies (e.g. British
Educational Research Association 2011, British Sociological Association 2002)
which advocate that wherever possible the consent of those being researched should
be gained, fieldworkers are not bound in any legal sense to adhere to such guides
and codes. The decision ultimately rests with the individual fieldworker, or in
some cases, a research team may make such decisions collectively.
In coming to a decision, fieldworkers have to make a number of judgements.
For example, about the extent to which the fieldwork and the research have the
potential to harm or to embarrass or in any way adversely affect those who are
its subjects. Scholarly opinion seems to fall into three general camps on this issue.
In the first place there are those like Erikson (1967) who argue from an absolut-
ist position that researchers should always get permission from those who are
being researched. The basic argument is that not to do so is a violation of indi-
vidual rights and a belief that the researcher can never fully appreciate the range
of possible affects that the research may have on the life of the researched. At the
other end of the spectrum are those libertarian scholars represented by people
 Finding the Field 25

like Douglas (1976), for whom anything [Link] operate a kind of ‘smash and
grab’ approach where anything and anybody are regarded as ‘fair game’ for the
[Link] logic is that the ends justify the means. Consequently, the rights
and the interests of the individual are sacrificed at the expense of the benefit that
the research may bring to society in general and the contribution that it will
make to knowledge about a given social phenomenon. Between these two
extremes is the relativist position where the majority of researchers operate. This
compromise position holds that the researcher should evaluate each case, weigh-
ing the costs to the individual against the benefits to wider society of conducting
research on people without their knowledge. The trouble with this is that we can
never be sure either about the costs or the benefits, nor any unintended outcomes
that may be beyond our control.
Ultimately, decisions about whether to gain explicit consent to research or not
come down to the ethical and moral code of the individual researcher. Learned
societies can provide guidelines and advice, but ultimately they are toothless tigers.
They have no authority over researchers. Membership of a society is not a require-
ment for researchers, who do not require a practising certificate in order to conduct
their work. We would also add that universities usually have their own internal
ethics committees, from which approval must be sought before any research con-
ducted through the university begins. In the great majority of cases, however, whilst
there will always be debates about what is ethical and what is unethical social
research, our feeling is that very little research currently conducted makes serious
breaches of ethical codes and guidelines. The problem with this statement is that it
is only our belief, and who is to say whether something is serious or not?
In addition to ethical and moral concerns around gaining consent, there remains
the question of whether it is physically possible to gain consent from people in
public places when seeking access. For example, let us consider the research con-
ducted over several years by John Williams and colleagues at the University of
Leicester into football hooliganism and crowd behaviour. As we have reported
earlier in this volume, much of this involved John Williams participating in the
crowd behaviour. His intention was to observe and experience at first hand the
same things as football supporters. On one occasion this even involved him being
arrested by Spanish police and held in jail! Given his intention of ‘blending in’, not
wishing to affect or change the behaviour of the supporters, he did not seek their
consent for the research and, therefore, he carried out his work covertly. However,
leaving aside the ethical questions, let us consider how Williams could have negotiated
access in such a way as to gain consent.
Prior to entering the football ground he did not know exactly which people
he would focus on or even what kind of activities they would become involved
in for sure. Could he have issued a general statement to all members of the
crowd as potential subjects of the research that they may be the focus of his
observations, perhaps over the public address system in the stadium or in the
match programme? This would have been a possibility but what would it have
26 Doing Fieldwork

achieved? What if some people had objected? Would Williams have been able to
omit them from his observations and concentrate on others? Or, if he was truly
seeking consent rather than merely informing people that they were being
researched should he have left the stadium and abandoned the research?
Another example is a longitudinal study by Gavin Smith and the closed circuit
surveillance cameras in Aberdeen city. Smith (2012) was studying the operation
of those cameras and centrally their management and was hence located in the
CCTV control office. During his fieldwork, he became privy to the criminal and
violent activities that those cameras recorded, including witnessing (albeit
remotely) bystanders being savagely beaten whilst caught up in Aberdeen’s night-
time economy. Give his dual status as both observer and remotely via the city’s
CCTV system, he was personally unable to intervene. As in the case of Williams,
above, would he have been allowed to observe if he had intervened in such
instances? Could the occupants of the city centre at night have been informed
that they were not only being watched by the council officers working the cam-
eras, but also by a social scientist? Would those who were drunk and disorderly
have been in a position to grant their own informed consent?!
Finally, there is the work of Erving Goffman, a Canadian sociologist who
qualified as a black-jack dealer in order to study casinos and gambling. Given the
vast size and scale of many casinos with card tables, should Goffman have sought
to ask the permission of every gambler, or only those at the table? Or should
passing spectators and casual on-lookers also be included? And would the casino’s
managers and owners welcome a roving fieldworker in their midst?! In relation
to the latter, it proved not to be the case and Goffman was evicted! Whilst it is
rare for a fieldworker to be effectively run out of town, it is a real possibility, as
Colin Bell and Howard Newby found in a small community they visited in
Australia and began to ask – as it turned out – unwelcome questions about major
cotton-growing farms in New South Wales. Newby (2008) recounts they:

rented a car, and went to a small rural town called Weewah, and started to look
about. These were major multinational cotton companies, dreadfully exploiting
aboriginal labour, who were living in corrugated tin structures, rather like you
see for free-range pigs in this country. And we started to ask around, and we
had the unnerving experience of being run out of town. We were told if we
didn’t get out, we would suffer the consequences (Newby 2008: 93–4).

These examples may be unusual and extreme but they do serve to illustrate the
dilemmas facing the negotiation of access and [Link] practicalities are often
difficult, and the definition of what is a public and what is a private space can be
blurred. Neither is access straight-forward or guaranteed. For example, Williams
may have taken the view that a football stadium is a public place and there was
no reason to seek consent, as might Smith regarding CCTV camera surveillance.
Ultimately, once again, the decision came down to their personal, ethical and
moral code and whether they felt the research ends justified the means.
 Finding the Field 27

For many of us, however, working in private or restricted access locations,

within institutions or with discrete groups of people, there is no decision to be
made about whether or not to negotiate access. Much of our research, for exam-
ple, has been based within educational institutions (cf. Bagley and Hillyard 2011,
Deem at al. 2007, Edwards and Hillyard 2012, Pole 1993), where there is little
alternative but to formally seek access to whatever it is you wish to research
within that institution. Negotiating access and securing the consent of people in
authority, within or over the location is, therefore, a pre-requisite of much – and
probably most – social research. The decision the fieldworker faces therefore is
not, shall I negotiate access, or, is it necessary to negotiate access? But rather how
can we negotiate access in a way which will facilitate our participation and
observation of as much of the life of the institution, the location or the group
and for potentially as long a period of time as possible?
In many cases, the prospective fieldworker will face a formal hierarchy
through which to negotiate access. In one case (Pole 1993), this started with
officers of the Local Education Authority who said they would support an
approach to any school within their area. Pole then approached the head teacher
of Benton School and after various telephone conversations, a meeting and a
written account of what he wanted to do, access to the school was secured. Or
so he had originally thought.
Being granted access to an organization (whether it is a school, a factory, a
shop or sports and social club) by someone in authority may guarantee your
physical presence at the location, but it does not guarantee co-operation from
everyone within [Link] would argue that without co-operation, access can be meaningless.
Moreover, where co-operation is coerced then this too can be meaningless. In
effect, negotiating access must be seen as an on-going process rather than a
singular, isolated task or moment. It occurs at all levels throughout the fieldwork
site and with everyone who is a subject of the research. Even though the field-
worker may have the support of those in authority over the location, he/she
would be naive to assume that all doors will be willingly opened as a result. On
the contrary, some individuals may resent the researcher receiving support from
those at the top. They may see him/her as a spy, an informer, or as someone to
treat with caution, rather than to embrace and tell your secrets. In the case of
Pole’s study of Benton School, the Head granted him permission to be in the
school whenever he wished and to have access to whatever classes, documents
and most meetings held in the school. To realize this very generous gesture and
to take full advantage of it, however, Pole also needed to secure the co-operation
of teachers, administrators and pupils throughout the school. To do this meant
developing and maintaining good field relations. We will discuss this issue in
detail in the following chapter, but for now it is important to make the point
that access is not a one-shot event and that access without co-operation may not
be good access. Reluctant or enforced co-operation, perhaps more accurately
seen as obligation, is unlikely to facilitate the collection of good data. In practice,
access to the field is something that is negotiated and re-negotiated constantly,
28 Doing Fieldwork

for example with different people, at different times with the same people and
with the same people in different places. In the case of Hillyard’s research,
between 2009–11 in a Norfolk primary school, the head teacher changed three
times during the fieldwork!

RESTRICTING ACCESS
A) STRUCTURAL
In some locations there will be an established procedure through which access has
to be negotiated. For example, research in hospitals will usually require the consent
of an ethics committee and research in schools will often require the consent of
the school governors and parents. This may delay matters as it is unlikely that
governing bodies and ethics committees will meet just to consider your proposed
research. Knowing the likely access procedure in advance and building this into
the research plan is, therefore, essential if the research is to adhere to its timetable.
It is also important to keep in mind that official bodies or committees which
grant formal access can also refuse it outright or they can impose restrictions on it.
For example, school governors may not allow access to pupils during the examina-
tion period or a medical ethics committee may allow a researcher access to the
wards (cf. Atkinson 1995) but it may restrict access to patients’ notes or other offi-
cial or personal documents. Edwards also found that in his different case study
school sites, he had different levels of access to lessons and pupils (Edwards and
Hillyard, 2012). It is also worth keeping in mind that access to work with young
people in any kind of institutional setting, will usually require the researcher under-
going a check from the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) (formerly Criminal
Records Bureau (CRB)). Administratively, this can take some time to process, for
example, approval of Hillyard’s CRB clearance through Durham Constabulary
took almost ten weeks. Simple logistics may act as a barrier to the field. For
example, it may be that there is goodwill, but the school lacks the time and resource
to participate fully. Similarly, Hillyard had negotiated access to a school in north
Norfolk, but which proved impossible when their move into a new-build was
delayed and clashed with the proposed fieldwork timetable. Where restrictions are
imposed, the fieldworker may have to think carefully about their impact on his/her
capacity to collect effective data. It may be possible to work within the restrictions
by making changes to the research design or shifting the focus slightly. Alternatively,
the restrictions may be so significant as to render the research impossible. If this is
the case the researcher will need to think carefully about why the restrictions have
been imposed, perhaps he/she was just asking for too much or perhaps those with
whom he/she was negotiating were not convinced of the need for the research. It
may be that access could be sought at a different location or alternatively, the
research may be too ambitious and need to be re-designed. In this sense, ethical
 Finding the Field 29

consideration may act as an indicator of the general efficacy of the proposed study,
the salience of its design or even its very rationale.
In all research, there is a need for flexibility and compromise. Indeed, it is
worth remembering that fieldwork’s flexible character is one of its strengths.
However, the extent to which it is possible to change either the focus or the
research design will depend on the judgement of the researcher. Where the
fieldwork is dependent on access to a particular institution, or where the focus
of the research depends on access to a particular event at a particular time in the
year, then compromise will not be possible. However, in many instances it will
be possible for the researcher to seek access to an alternative fieldwork location
which meets the identified selection criteria.

B) INTERACTIONAL
Access may also be restricted by the fieldworker him/[Link] may take a number
of different forms. Given the desire to blend into the situation and to be accepted,
as far as possible, by those who are the focus of the fieldwork, the researcher may
just be the ‘wrong’ person. He/she may be ‘wrong’ because of a number of per-
sonal and/or social characteristics which make blending in and acceptance by the
participants too difficult or even impossible. For example, the fieldworker may be
the ‘wrong’ sex, the ‘wrong’ age, the ‘wrong’ size or shape, he/she may be the
‘wrong’ ethnicity or nationality or social class. The list could be longer or shorter
depending on the specific focus of the research and the fieldwork location. The
issue relates to the extent to which any one, or a combination of personal and/
or social characteristics, preclude the participation of the fieldworker in the
activities of the [Link] may mark him/her out as so different as to prevent
acceptance by the research participants as someone who could understand and
empathize with their situation. Issues of ethnicity (Beach and Lunneblad 2011,
Pole 2010) and gender (Butler and Charles 2012, Cohen et al. 2011, Skeggs 2001)
as well as age (Christensen et al. 2011, Hogan and Warren 2012) have been the
focus of much debate in this respect. Not only in relation to gaining access, under-
standing and co-operation, but also in terms of the capacity of the researcher who
is the ‘wrong’ gender or is of the ‘wrong’ ethnic origin, to do the research.
Whilst some of the literature in this area (Fonow and Cook 1991) sees differ-
ence as a problem which precludes effective fieldwork, others (e.g. Agar 1996)
have made a virtue out of difference by suggesting that having the ‘wrong’ per-
sonal or social characteristics makes the fieldworker more likely to question what
he/she sees and experiences and not to accept situations as ordinary, everyday,
uninteresting events. Difference would be seen, therefore, as a positive character-
istic which would assist the researcher in questioning and examining the field in
great detail. Moreover, if we extend, to its ultimate conclusion, the model of
research which stresses the importance of similarity in the quest for understanding
and empathy, then we reach what Merton (1972) describes as a situation of
30 Doing Fieldwork

methodological solipsism. In a similar vein, as Goffman said: ‘Only a schmuck

studies his own life’ (Fine 2009).Where this occurs the only person the researcher
can confidently research is him/herself! Ultimately, the fieldworker has to make
a decision about how much difference is possible or desirable in the pursuit of
rich and detailed data. It may be, however, that the decision is made for him/her
as the participants either refuse access or fail to co-operate with the fieldwork.
When a researcher is in the field, a great deal may depend on the extent to
which he/she presents a credible and acceptable face or self (Goffman 1959) to
those being researched. Again, we will pick this up in the next chapter, but at
this stage it is worth stating that effective fieldwork does not necessarily rest on
levels of similarity or difference between researcher and researched. Much depends
on the capacity of the fieldworker to gain the confidence of those he/she wishes
to research. To metaphorically play the field!

C) EMOTIONAL
Issues of similarity and difference remind us, that social research is conducted by
people and is about people (Coffey 1999). Unlike the white-coated natural scientist,
the social scientist attempts to untangle the complexity of human social lives by
seeking to get inside the social structures and interactions which construct them. In
doing this the lives of the researcher and the researched become inevitably entwined.
Given this close relationship it is important for the researcher to think carefully
about how he/she is likely to react to the research and what impact it is likely to
have on his/her personal life. We all have prejudices, beliefs, issues which we find
difficult, things that we feel strongly about and things that we find boring. In
thinking about research and our capacity to conduct effective fieldwork, we need
not only to be aware of who we are, in relation to such issues, but also to think
about how they are likely to impact on and interact with the research that we
wish to conduct. Could we, for example, cope with fieldwork in an abattoir as
part of a community or local area study where the abattoir provided a significant
proportion of the area’s employment, if we were a committed vegetarian? Could
we cope with the undoubted emotional stress of a hospital ward for terminally-ill
children, as part of our ethnography of a children’s hospital? Could we cope with
participant observation in a study of a Conservative Party constituency office
during a general election if we were a committed socialist?
Clearly, there are some topics which, because of our personal beliefs and biog-
raphies, we could not or should not research. In such cases it is our emotions
that restrict access to a particular field. In going through the process of progres-
sive focusing in order to identify both the substantive and the locational field, it
is important to think not only of the research subjects but also of ourselves as
the researchers. Much attention is given in methods texts to the likely impact of
research on those who are being researched, but much less is paid to its impact
on the researcher. In seeking to gain access it is important to recognize that
 Finding the Field 31

research which is based on fieldwork relies on a productive relationship between

researcher, researched, location and substantive focus of the study. As we will
discuss in Chapter 3, without this synergistic relationship, fieldwork is unlikely
to yield the empathy and insight which are its hallmark.

FIELDWORK AND FLEXIBILITY

The nature of fieldwork is in many ways fluid. The informality of being there,
participating and doing whatever is being done, often makes rigid planning of
fieldwork difficult. Ideally, the researcher needs knowledge of the locational and
substantive field prior to starting the data collection. Whilst, to a certain extent
this may be possible via accounts of previous research, it is likely that the specific
detail and the peculiarities of the individual site will remain unknown until field-
work has started. Consequently, unlike any other approach to research, fieldwork
requires the researcher to think on his/her feet, to make and change plans as the
social action unfolds before him/her. It demands on the spot judgement about
the way data should be gathered, the way to approach research participants in
what may be sensitive areas, the identification of actions and events which are
important and those which are not. Fieldwork, like the social life it is attempting
to capture, is underpinned by uncertainty (Thrift 2012). Its successful conduct
depends, amongst other things, on the researcher’s capacity to manage this uncer-
tainty by remaining flexible. Again some examples will help to make the point.
John Hockey’s (1986) study of new recruits to the British Army involved
participant observation on exercises in Northern Ireland. In one poignant part
of the study, Hockey describes an attack on his unit by a para-military group
which resulted in one of the soldiers whom he had studied being seriously
injured. Although Hockey, as an experienced ex-soldier himself, may have
anticipated, even expected such an attack, there was no way in which he could
have planned for it. The event is extreme but it highlights the need for flexibil-
ity in the field because Hockey needed to respond. In addition, it highlights a
number of issues which question the very essence of fieldwork. For example,
was Hockey to maintain the role of researcher whilst people were bleeding
around him? What does research and fieldwork mean in this situation? Is the role
of the fieldworker any different from that of the others present when faced with
such extreme circumstances? Should Hockey have continued to collect data?
Did he have a responsibility to collect data? If so, how should he do it? Was
Hockey a voyeur rather than a researcher? These are just some of the questions
which we can imagine that Hockey faced. Moreover, he probably wasn’t even
aware that he faced them until he started to think about the fieldwork after this
particular [Link] point to be made is that Hockey was there and the richness
of his book is testimony to his skill as a fieldworker, his capacity to be flexible,
to respect those whom he was studying and to his own personal strength to cope
32 Doing Fieldwork

with the trauma which unfolded before him. There was no way he could have
planned for the event, no series of questions prepared in advance or observation
schedule prepared for such an event. The situation called on all Hockey’s
resources not just as a fieldworker but as a human being who had got to know
the research participants extremely well over the course of the fieldwork.
Andy Sparkes’ research on spinal injuries amongst sportsmen, where the scale
and severity of their injuries make it unlikely they will walk again, let alone
participate in high-level sport, is another instance where the research is delving
into a physical mortification of self (after Goffman 1963) in which the indi-
vidual is being asked to reflect upon their own ability to come to terms with
the impact of injury upon the lives and futures of the research participants.
Sparkes’ work has therefore moved to utilize a series of representational tech-
niques and scenarios in order to capture the intensity of emotion in these actors’
lives and to be able to critically analyse their accounts. For it was the fieldworker
who was able to literally walk away after conducting such in-depth interviewing,
whilst the research participants, tragically, were not.
From the many examples of fieldwork-based studies which have found their way
on to library shelves over the years there are countless examples of flexibility, on the
spot decision making and compromise. Sometimes the need for flexibility and
compromise means that access is denied to situations which would have been inter-
esting and useful. Sometimes it means the opposite. For example, Hillyard (2010)
doing research in a north Norfolk school, discovering the school records dating
back to 1912 was a useful and unexpected additional source of data. In this case and
with many others, flexibility meant making the most of the opportunities which
presented themselves. It may mean that data are collected which do not fit neatly
into the original research design, that there is much more data than was originally
anticipated and the data are of different kinds. Again, all of this adds to the richness
of fieldwork-based research and in so doing, adds to the richness of fieldwork. In
many ways it also makes it a messy process. Never being sure what will happen in
the field, how many data will be collected or even what constitutes data, means the
researcher needs to be flexible not only in the field but also in methods of data
analysis, a topic we consider in Chapter 7. Unlike the natural scientist or, for that
matter the quantitative social scientist, the fieldworker is generally unable to apply
controls to the data, to conduct experiments or to subject findings to statistical tests
which establish degrees of accuracy for his/her results. We should not, however,
spend too much time lamenting this. Such precision is not the objective of field-
work, primarily because it does not reflect the pattern of social life.
Think for a moment about your own life. How much certainty is there in that?
We may know generally what we intend to do each day, but our guess is that
many unexpected events occur every day. Perhaps some of these things are
minor, for example like bumping into someone in the street whom you haven’t
seen for some time or the onset of some serious weather cancelling a much-
anticipated trip or [Link] are not major catastrophes, but they contribute to the
 Finding the Field 33

uncertainty of [Link] demand a different course of action to the one previously

intended. In addition there are also big, more serious unknowns and unantici-
pated occurrences which punctuate life and demand flexibility and a change in
behaviour. For example, the death of a relative, failing or passing an examination,
falling in love, starting or ending a romantic relationship or being made redun-
dant. All of these, potentially major occurrences, mean your life could be difficult
for a time. In the face of such uncertainty, the problem is the same for the field-
worker as it is for whoever experiences the changes. How to cope with the
uncertainty and how to locate the changes within the pattern of everyday life
that we all live on a daily basis. In terms of methodology, the fieldworker needs
to think about what counts as data, and how is it best collected? How do the
changes and the uncertainty relate to other aspects of the life and lives being
studied? To expect a neat and tidy approach to fieldwork and yet still expect it
to convey the detail and richness of social life would be like expecting tomorrow
to be exactly the same as today. The only certainty about this is that it won’t be!
Recognizing that fieldwork needs to be flexible is important not only in terms of
the time spent in the field, but also in terms of what we expect from the research as
a whole. If, as we have said, fieldwork is about finding a way to contribute to knowl-
edge, the fact of its flexibility has a bearing on the very kind of knowledge it
produces. Again, this is a topic which will be addressed in greater detail in Chapter 7,
but for now it is worth keeping in mind that fieldwork is in many respects, con-
cerned more with uncertainty than with certainty. Its subject matter is social life,
which we have seen is generally uncertain and the methods it uses to reflect this
have to be accordingly flexible. Consequently, it would be unrealistic to expect the
results of fieldwork to yield knowledge which imposes any kind of strait-jacket to
our understanding of whatever is being studied. By this, we do not wish to imply
that research based on fieldwork fails to yield knowledge in which we can have
confidence. Far from it. We believe that knowledge from fieldwork is that which
is grounded in the real life experiences of those who have been studied and in this
respect it is real life knowledge. As we shall see in Chapter 7, it seeks to convey the
richness and complexity of the field to which it relates. It is complex knowledge or
knowledges which do not attempt to enumerate, assign findings to rigid categories
or to establish macroscopic laws of human behaviour. Neither is it concerned
merely with empirical description, though this is an important aspect of it, in order
to convey the complexity of a social setting. It is, however, concerned with con-
ceptualizing behaviour in ways which go beyond the specific situation from which
data were collected. As Craib (1992) describes it, all forms of description are the
beginnings of theorizing. In doing this it moves away from the kinds of inflexible
knowledge that look for linear relationships between social phenomena and for
explanations which reduce social behaviour to basic common denominators. The
knowledge fieldwork seeks to access is richer and more complex. It is not necessar-
ily easy to handle, but then neither is social life. But as Delamont et al. (2010) argue,
when your focus and fieldwork come together, it can be magic.
34 Doing Fieldwork

CONCLUSION
This chapter has attempted to take us further into the field by thinking about
ways in which researchers identify their field of study both substantively and
locationally. It has stressed the importance of finding a focus for fieldwork – a
foreshadowed problem – and in this sense it has been concerned with its limits
and possibilities. These are important not only in assisting with the focus to the
fieldwork, but also in the context of gaining access to the field and in the collec-
tion of data. The chapter has discussed the idea of flexibility in the field and has
emphasized the uncertainty of social behaviour which fieldwork attempts to
capture. Above all, the discussion has sought to stress that however fieldwork is
defined and however fields of study are identified, it is still centrally about looking
for ways of understanding and explaining social [Link] this end, it needs: to identify
boundaries; identify appropriate methods; and gain access to people’s lives.
Because fieldwork is about people and people are unpredictable, flexibility is its
touchstone.
The chapter should also have conveyed something of the integral character of
fieldwork (and fieldworker!). From initial ideas of a topic through the identifica-
tion of substantive and locational fields, the gaining of access and managing the
collection of data, fieldwork is concerned with a close and particular relationship
between the researcher, those who are being researched and the knowledge that
fieldwork produces. This highlights how key the fieldworker is to the fieldwork
process. The relationship reaches across all aspects of the research, is central to its
success and much of the strength of fieldwork as a methodology, rather than a
method, can be attributed to it. It is this particular theme which will now be
explored in-depth in the context of field relations in the following chapter.

FURTHER READING

Pettinger L (2005) Friends, relations and colleagues: The blurred boundaries of

the workplace. The Sociological Review, 53(s2): 37–55.
Beaulieu A (2010) Research Note: From co-location to co-presence: Shifts in the
use of ethnography for the study of knowledge. Social Studies of Science, 40(3):
453–70.
 3
FIELD RELATIONS

Chapter overview
• Fieldwork enters into the everyday lives, routines or ‘rounds’ of a
research site.
• Fieldwork relationships foster a rapport that is balanced between
friendliness and formality.
• Ethical symmetry is an ideal type, rather than achievable in research
practice.
• The fieldworker remains a professional stranger – an outsider trying
to gain insider status.

Fieldwork is about people and a key element of successful fieldwork is the capacity
of the researcher to manage relationships in the field. This may involve a critical
relationship between the researcher and a gatekeeper or a key informant, relations
between researchers and those being researched or relationships between members
of a research team. In the course of doing fieldwork there are many relationships
which will influence and in some cases determine its success. The management of
these relationships usually involves the researcher playing-out a number of different
roles or, in Goffman’s (1959) terms, presenting a number of different selves to the
people he/she comes into contact with. In most cases, researchers have no automatic
right to enter a particular research field. Bell (1969: 417), for example, talks about
the ‘openness’ of a research site. Allan (2012) similarly discusses problematic
‘moments’ in her research where she struggled to maintain certain levels of control
in her project. Therefore researchers are present only with the permission and
goodwill of those who do have a right to be in the location and only as long as
they do not become troublesome to the day-to-day life of the field or its partici-
pants. Moreover, in many fieldwork situations, the researcher works with, if not
the explicit, then the implicit knowledge that he/she could be told to leave the
36 Doing Fieldwork

field at any time. By contrast, for Hutchinson (2014), it was one of her research
participants who left the field, when they were deployed to Afghanistan. In this
sense there is a degree of insecurity about field relations, as the researcher seeks
to balance the need to collect data in a timely fashion against the need to maintain
a good relationship with those who have granted permission for him/her to be
there. One thing for sure is that the researcher will not be able to collect good data
unless there are good field relations.

BEING THERE
In many ways, fieldwork is like being a guest in someone’s house, someone who
perhaps you don’t know terribly well, but has been kind enough to offer you
accommodation. It may be the kind of relationship that exists when a family
plays host to a foreign visitor as part of an exchange scheme or a town twin-
ning arrangement. The intention is usually that the house guest is treated like
one of the family, is able to experience ‘life in another land’ and to appreciate
the difference and similarities between his/her home and that of his/her host.
Whilst there may be special events and visits arranged for the guest, which will
demonstrate something of the local and national flavour, the intention is that
he/she also experiences the everyday life of the home and those who live there.
That is, the ‘normal’, everyday routine or round. The fact is, however, that the
guest remains just that, a guest. For the guest to have a good time he/she needs
to get on well with the host(s). He/she needs to like the hosts and to be liked
by them. When this happens, the relationship can move away from some of the
formality which surrounds the situation and people can start to relax and really
get to know each other. Even if this means that the fieldworker’s experiences
include coping with the host’s ‘cat that rubbed incessantly against my leg’
( James 2012: 571). Fieldwork involves wanting to become ‘at home’ in a setting.
Seeking to become part of the field, to participate in what goes on, both the
special and the everyday events and to facilitate all this, the fieldworker aims to
be liked by those who have made their stay possible. From Goffman’s (1989)
point of view, they would also get to like the people in that field, too.
If we are liked by and if we like those with whom we are working, then the
chances of not only getting rich data, but also of getting more data are increased.
As we argued earlier in Chapter 2, a key goal of fieldwork is to get an insider’s
view. A good example to consider, which is very close to this analogy of the
house guest, is the study of step-parents by Christina Hughes (1991). Over a
period of several months, Hughes studied five different families in her attempt
to understand relationships and family organization where stepchildren and
parents were living [Link] Hughes did not actually live with the families,
she spent large amounts of time with them, in their homes, on outings and
generally doing what the family did. The research relied on a close relationship
 Field Relations 37

between Hughes and the families. She needed to be accepted and also to feel
comfortable with them. Without this it was unlikely that Hughes would have
been given access to the range of different data that she was. Christensen et al.
(2011), in their research with children, talk about the time their research team
spent with the children. Although it was not possible to observe children at
home, the research team closely involved themselves in the children’s school
[Link] familiarity and rapport that they achieved was vital in the use and success
of the Global Positioning System (GPS) devices they asked children to carry –
and to tell them when they went wrong! Hillyard (2003) in her research with
children of a similar age in their first year in a UK secondary school also became
a familiar figure through the time spent with the form-group in and out of their
lessons – akin to becoming their form-group ‘mascot’.
However, the analogy with the house guest, visitor or school mascot can only
be pushed so far. It is appropriate in the case of Hughes and for Hillyard, but even
then, there was more to the relationship than that of guest and host. A crucial
difference from the analogy of the house guest is that the researcher is present in
the field for the specific purpose of collecting data which will be analysed and
used to further the understanding of social phenomena. Moreover, it is unlikely
that the researcher will have been invited into the field without first going
through a process of negotiation during which he/she will have needed to reas-
sure the host of the integrity of his/her work and have provided a convincing
rationale for it. The fieldworker does not merely turn up and hope to be taken
in with open arms. Furthermore, to speak of field relations between researcher
and researched as friendship or as a question merely of being liked, is to fail to
recognize many of the complexities of the relationship. Whilst it is important to
be liked and friendship may occur as a result of the fieldwork, field relations are
about much more than this. Moreover, field relations based on friendship may
have the potential to hinder the research and in turn, the friendship may become
challenged. We shall return to these specific issues later in the chapter.

RAPPORT
Rather than friendship, it is better to think of field relations as the process of
establishing and maintaining rapport between the researcher(s) and those who
are being researched. Rapport may lead to a friendship, but in using the term
we are implying a relationship which is both more straightforward and more
complex than friendship. Given the complexities of friendship, this is a ‘big’
statement to make about rapport. In doing so, we are stating that rapport refers
to a relationship, in this case between researcher and researched, which is based
on mutual understanding and respect, where the parties are able to communi-
cate openly and honestly about their different roles in the field and the ways in
which they interact. Rapport may be friendly, but equally it may be business-like
38 Doing Fieldwork

and conducted more formally. Moreover, some qualitative researchers have

sought to integrate participants into the research process itself for them to
become the researchers. This has variously been termed participatory research
(O’Neill 2012, Smith 2009), participatory action research (Kindon et al. 2008)
and critical ethnography (Madison 2011). These emphasize that research is
mutually-achieved, co-production of knowledge. Critical ethnography, particu-
larly, suggests that this is a democratic process, in which researcher and researched
have an equal input in the process. There are pros and cons to each of these
positions. Above all, rapport is about facilitating a relationship which will allow
the fieldworker to collect data in a way that is acceptable to the participants
(rather than subjects) of the research. Furthermore, rapport is dynamic insofar as
it is likely to develop and change as fieldwork itself develops and changes. It may
get better, facilitating the collection of more and ‘better’ data, equally it may get
worse resulting in obstruction for the researcher. Rapport involves what
Goffman termed impression management and we would argue there is no per-
fect approach to rapport that guarantees success. Crucially, rapport that is
established for the purposes of research relies on the parties understanding and
accepting the relationship for what it is.
Relationships in research are not and cannot, in our view, be equal. Field
relationships are based on the premise that the researcher will look for and
gather information and that the researched will provide it or at least facilitate its
collection, either consciously or unconsciously. Whilst the relationship has often
been framed by other approaches which, quite laudably, have attempted to over-
come the inequality of researcher/researched relationships, there remains in our
view a structural barrier to equality based on one party giving and the other
party taking. Certainly, some researchers give something back to those from
whom they have taken and those who have provided or facilitated information
may benefit from participation in the research process in many ways. Indeed, this
is positioned as one of the central tenets of critical ethnography (Madison 2011).
There are also important debates that discuss the possibility of including par-
ticipants, such as children, in a more symmetrical relationship with researcher
and the field (Christensen and Prout 2002, Uprichard 2008). However, it is usu-
ally the researcher(s) who derive the most benefit from the relationship and for
whom the process proves most valuable. Publications, conference presentations,
establishing a field of expertise and a successful career cannot, in many cases, be
realized without good rapport and effective field relationships. Moreover, pre-
cisely because field relationships are not the same as friendship, these are things
that the researcher needs to work at constantly. Researchers cannot make
assumptions about the likely cooperation of those who are being researched,
neither should they take liberties. They must be constantly aware that rapport is
central to the success of fieldwork and that to abuse it is to risk losing the good-
will and cooperation of those who grant access and provide the data. Wolcott
(2005) states: ‘Maintaining rapport presents a continuing challenge through the
 Field Relations 39

very presence of an intrusive and inquiring observer forever wanting to know

more and to understand better’ (Wolcott 2005: 84). In this sense, rapport is a
tool which the researcher uses to ‘know more and to understand better’. If this
is then the case, two important questions arise. In the first instance: Can fieldworkers
be taught how to develop and maintain effective rapport? If the answer to this question
is yes, then a follow up question would be: If rapport can be taught and learnt can
it be applied in every field and with all participants?
In answer to these questions it is perhaps best to hedge our bets. In answering
in the affirmative we might say that to some extent rapport can be taught and
learnt. There are enough methods textbooks around which give pointers to
establishing good rapport to suggest that many people think it is possible. And,
if it is possible, then why shouldn’t it be achieved with all, or at least the great
majority of people? In a negative or more cautious answer we should not forget
that we are talking about human relationships, as Madison (2011: 39) describes,
these skills are both ‘an art and a virtue’. Therefore, whilst there may well be
pointers towards achieving good rapport, it ultimately comes down to some-
thing which is at the same time both quite simple and very complex. That is the
way two or more people get on which each [Link] cannot control for human
nature or regulate human emotions.
A number of commentators have taken the time to reflect upon what has and
has not gone well in their research and rapport has been an important aspect.
For Scott (2004, 2011) this involved reflecting upon her own characteristics and
tendency towards shyness and the impact this had upon her capacity to engage
other, self-defined, shy people to explore that very issue. Allan (2012), ‘studying
up’ had the problem of brokering a rapport with an elite group of young people.
She reflected upon the ‘dry remarks’ she received from them during the course
of the research, worried that her research approach (including visual techniques)
had been hijacked and recalled the ‘barrage of questions’ she received whilst
negotiating access (Allan 2012: 4.5, 4.2). This elite, Bourdieurian capital-rich
subject group clearly differentiated themselves from Allan, whereas Scott felt
shared characteristics. Hence our point here is: there is no assured or ideal route
to good rapport.

PRESENTING OURSELVES
In his first book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Erving Goffman
discusses the ways in which we present different impressions of ourselves to the
world in different situations and at different times. In so doing, we emphasize
different aspects of our personalities and play out different roles according to the
context in which we find ourselves. The idea that we all present different selves
to the world is central to the conduct of fieldwork and in particular to the
manage­ment of field relations. As we have already discussed, fieldwork relies on
40 Doing Fieldwork

effective rapport between the research participants and the researcher(s). The
way we present ourselves to those with whom we wish to work is central to that
rapport. Whilst we cannot change who we are, we can, to some extent, manage
the way in which we present ourselves to the world. Moreover, as Goffman
(1959) argues, this is something that we all do every day largely without real-
izing it and as researchers seeking to gain access to a particular field and to
establish a rapport with those we wish to research, we present a version of our
self which is probably quite different from that which we present in other
situations. This may be a presentation or managed impression which is partly
sub-conscious and partly deliberate. For example, as we have already seen in
Chapter 2, although we cannot discard our personal biographical baggage,
in the sense that we are who we are, we can, however, choose to emphasize
certain things about ourselves and to downplay or disregard others. In doing
this, we seek to make ourselves more acceptable to those we wish to study and
more generally, produce a better fit between ourselves as the principal research
tool, and the field. It may be useful to illustrate this process with reference to
our own careers as fieldworkers conducting research in educational settings.

THE KNOWLEDGEABLE BUT NOT THE

KNOW-IT-ALL SELF
Let us take the example of the 1993 study conducted in Benton School (Pole
1993).The plan was that I should spend three days a week in the school, keeping
the same hours as the teachers, engaging in the rhythms of the school for a
whole term, approximately four months. My intention was to get to know as
much about the school, its routines, how it was run, its ethos as well as the actors
within it, as possible, by being there, observing, participating and talking to
teachers, pupils, secretaries, parents, virtually anyone who had a role in the
school. The intention was to provide a context for the focus of the study which
was concerned with the way in which the school assessed and recorded the
performance, activities and abilities of its pupils. The research was about a par-
ticular process within the school which could have been reduced to a set of
bureaucratic procedures, but it was also as much about the pupils and the staff
who created and worked within those procedures.
As a field researcher I needed to appear friendly and approachable to the
different people that I came into contact with. I wanted them to like me because
if they did, I might be able to persuade them to give me information, or to
provide avenues through which I could obtain it. More than this, however, I
needed to appear credible as someone who not only knew about and under-
stood schools and education but would also empathize with the pressures that
teachers faced. However, although reluctant to admit it publicly, many educational
researchers are aware of a degree of suspicion towards their work which exists
 Field Relations 41

amongst practising teachers. In my experience, this is based partly on a fear that

research findings can be used as yet another tool with which to criticize their
work and partly from a belief, which again in my view is mistaken, that no one
can really know about schools and education unless they are a practising
teacher. Against this background, seeking access to schools in which to conduct
research can be difficult. In order to be accepted by the teachers, the researcher
needs to demonstrate that he/she knows something about schools and is not,
as some teachers might think, stuck in an ivory tower at university. At the same
time, he/she does not want to appear too knowledgeable as this may seem
threatening to some staff who may see him/her as someone else trying to tell
them how to do their job. In addition, there is the problem of the pupils. A
classic ‘Whose side are you on?’ (Becker 1967) dilemma existed in my case,
which many educational researchers before me had faced (e.g. Benyon 1985,
Corrigan 1979, Mac an Ghaill 1988, Willis 1977). My intention was to appear
not as a teacher or as someone in authority over the children, but as an adult
friend whom they could talk to openly and who would not report what he
heard back to the teachers. This was a role which some children would find
difficult to handle, based on the belief that everyone in a school, unless they are
wearing overalls, is a teacher or someone like a teacher (Epstein 1998).
Moreover, some staff would find it equally difficult to handle, expecting the
allegiances of the researcher to rest automatically with the other adults in the
school. My task was, therefore, to present a friendly, approachable self who,
whilst knowing and understanding the stresses and strains faced by teachers,
did not know more than the teachers about education. At the same time I
was not to be an unworldly academic or someone who either the teachers or
the pupils would mistrust. In addition, my credibility both with pupils and
staff also rested on providing not only a convincing rationale for my research
and the time spent in the school, but also one which suggested that the out-
comes of the research would have some useful, tangible benefits for schools and
education. Balanced against all of this were my own sociological interests in
education and my role as a relatively young academic, anxious to contribute to the
stock of knowledge of assessment of pupil performance. No problem!
The fieldwork required me to present several different selves at different times
and with different people in order to maintain credibility throughout my time
in the school. Above all, I tried to keep the situation simple by being as honest
as I could with the different participants. With the teachers, I spoke of the
research contributing to Local Education Authority practices on assessment and
recording pupil achievement via reports and staff development [Link] the
pupils, I spoke of writing a book about the way Records of Achievement were
used. Both accounts of why I was doing the research were true. However, they
did not tell the whole story. The truth was that I didn’t know the whole story.
Few researchers can say for sure what the outcome of their work will be or how
it will be used once it has been published and is, therefore, in the public domain.
42 Doing Fieldwork

This is regardless of how well formulated your ‘foreshadowed problems or

working-hypothesis might be (Delamont et al. 2010). I could not have foreseen,
for example, that many years on I would be using my experiences in Benton
School as examples in a book concerned with fieldwork.

THE SELF AND STATUS

The Benton situation presented a series of issues which most fieldworkers will
have faced at one time or another. Whilst they are not unusual, in that fieldwork
is often concerned with such issues of credibility, they serve to demonstrate the
way in which a fieldwork situation needs to be carefully managed and monitored.
As Delamont (2009: 61) argued: ‘It is hard. It is physically tiring, intellectually
taxing, demands a high level of engagement, and at every stage crises can arise.’
The examples are concerned principally with the presentation of self in the
context of establishing credibility for the research and the researcher and also for
establishing and maintaining rapport. In many situations, however, the presenta-
tion of an acceptable self is crucial to the negotiation of access. Another example
from a school-based study illustrates the point. On this occasion I was negotiating
access to a prestigious boys’ grammar school where, as with Benton School,
I wished to spend a full academic term. Negotiations took the form of an inter-
view with the Headmaster which I attended with the project director, a Professor
of Sociology. We were shown to the Head’s study and whilst awaiting his arrival
we observed many items which depicted the school’s academic reputation and
prestige (Pole and Morrison 2003). The Head’s gown hung on a coat peg,
photographs of King’s College, Cambridge on the wall, a bookcase holding many
examples of ‘great’ literature. Prior to the Head’s arrival, we were informed by his
secretary that he (Dr Smart) would only have fifteen minutes to spend with us.
Our conversation with Dr Smart did not go particularly well. He was not con-
vinced of the rationale for our study or of the merits of our qualitative approach.
However, the tenor of the meeting changed dramatically when we were joined
by the Deputy Head. Dr Smart introduced us to his Deputy as Mr Barker and
Mr Pole from Mercia Polytechnic. At this point Bob Barker interjected to cor-
rect Dr Smart informing him that we were in fact Professor Barker and Dr Pole
form Mercia University.1 The interjection changed the character of the meeting
immediately. Barker had appealed to Dr Smart’s concern for academic standards.
Our personal academic status and that of our institution fitted very well with
the ethos of the academic boys’ grammar school. Rather than a burden on the
institution, the research was now seen as interesting and worthwhile. Our
negotiations were successful and we were granted open access to the school.
Barker had not lied or embroidered the truth in any way. He had merely reflex-
ively chosen to emphasize aspects of our biography which would appeal to the
situation we faced. The selves which we presented were entirely in keeping with
 Field Relations 43

the school’s academic ethos. As members of a respectable university, a Professor

and a Doctor of Philosophy, we shared the status and structure of academia
within which Dr Smart sought to locate his school. Similarly, in her fieldwork in
primary school (Bagley and Hillyard 2011), in meetings with the head teacher of
the school, Hillyard’s affiliation with Durham University made good access to the
school as the head teacher’s son was a Durham graduate.
In using these examples, we are not suggesting that you should now adopt the
title of Professor or that attending Durham University opens every door when
seeking to gain access. Not only would this be unethical, but to do so in some
situations would certainly do more harm than good. What we are suggesting,
however, and what the examples illustrate, is the need to present a version of self
in such a way as to appeal to those who you wish to work with and thus gain
cooperation from. The examples are ones where the would-be researchers pre-
sented a high-status self, both personally and in terms of their institution and this
appealed to the principal gatekeeper, in this case head teachers. There would be
occasions, however, where presenting a lower status self is likely to be beneficial
to rapport and field relations. For example, Roderick’s (2006) research on profes-
sional footballers drew heavily upon his own background as an ex-professional.
Roderick, in his preface, summarizes his own career pathway very carefully as a
means to deconstruct the professional lives of footballers in which very few will
enjoy highly lucrative careers. This allows him to reflect upon his many visits to
footballers’ homes and the forms of wealth on display there, such as the
Lamborghinis and Ferraris displayed on the drive. He notes that, at that time, he
drove a Ford Fiesta but what was key for his fieldwork was his personal intimacy
with the professional game. This enabled him to gain insight and informed his
nuanced sociological analysis of footballers’ work, beyond the front stage world
of premiership footballers that dominates popular perception. Similarly, Cox’s
participation in the field trialling community facilitated his and his colleagues’
access into the relatively closed world of game shooting and rural land use (Cox
et al. 1996). In these examples, the researchers felt that rapport would not be best
served by emphasizing a self constituted by academic experience and a desire to
contribute to a sociological understanding of football or field sports.
On other occasions, researchers have sought to present a neutral self to the
field. For example, Epstein (1998) in her research on gender roles in schools,
sought to avoid the adult-in-school status as a means to get close to the everyday
schooling lives of the girls there. This invited questions from the participants,
who were used to pre-defined roles of ‘pupil’ or teacher’, which institutions
such as school re-enforce. Hey (1997) was similarly determined in her ethnog-
raphy of girls’ friendship patterns to resist associating herself with any form of
production of hegemonic power, the workings of which she was seeking to
expose and critique. Alternatively, fieldwork situations can invite the
researcher to downplay the roles they are ascribed in school. Edwards, for
example, in his fieldwork examining school-sport partnerships, went out of his
44 Doing Fieldwork

way to play down that he was ‘evaluating’ pupils’ sporting achievements

(Edwards and Hillyard 2012). This was to the extent that he had to become dis-
attentive during his observation of physical education lessons, when pupils
behaved increasingly competitively.

THE WELL TURNED OUT SELF

Whilst some aspects of self relate to the role the researcher seeks to play or aspects
of his/her life and experiences he/she wishes to emphasize, others are more mate-
rial and relate to the way a person looks or even sounds. Again, the emphasis is on
acceptability in the field. For example, Foster (1990) feared that her southern,
middle-class accent would hinder a close rapport with the regulars of the Grafton
Arms, the pub in the then undeveloped Docklands area of London, where much
of her research into criminal behaviour was based. Rather than seek to alter her
accent, Foster explained it in terms of coming from Bournemouth where ‘every-
one spoke like that’. Whilst Foster was unable to blend in with her research
participants, her explanation sought to neutralize the social class difference
between herself and her participants by explaining away one of its most obvious
outward signs. Blending in was, however, essential in the demanding work of
Hobbs et al.’s (2003) study of bouncers and the night-time economy. As Lister
et al. (2001) explain, as the research was covert, it was essential for the researcher
to take on the role of a bouncer in its entirety. Looking the part was essential in
respect of clothes, body form, language, gesture and a capacity to use violence
effectively and appropriately when called upon to do [Link] the researchers refer
to as ‘body capital’ was central to the role of the bouncer in the often violent field
of the nightclub, the bar or the pub. It was, therefore, central to the conduct of
successful fieldwork. Hillyard (2009) travelling across the country researching the
impact of the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease epidemic amongst cattle in the UK,
variously visited working farms, union regional headquarters and government
offices, all of which required quite different transport and attire. Indeed, whilst wait-
ing to meet one of the project’s participants she was mistaken for a vet!
Many researchers have discussed the importance of appropriate clothing for
the field. Hobbs (1988) bought a supply of Polo shirts which sported particular
‘acceptable’ motifs on the breast as these were the kind worn by the participants
in his field. Patrick (1973) had to ensure his jacket was buttoned correctly in
order to blend in with other gang members, and Corrigan (1979) gave consider-
able thought to the length of his hair in order to be acceptable to both teachers
and pupils. In my case, the fieldwork in the boys’ grammar school, described
earlier (Pole 1993), necessitated that I, like members of staff and the sixth form,
wore a suit when on school premises. In contrast in her doctoral fieldwork on
pupil groups, Hillyard (2003) wore more casual, ‘student’ clothing of the same
colour scheme as the school uniform.
 Field Relations 45

It is difficult to offer firm guidelines about what to wear and when to wear
[Link] is particularly difficult when you don’t necessarily know what the informal
‘dress code’ will be. For example, attending a Parish Council meeting in a small
Norfolk village for the first time, Hillyard erred on the side of formality and
wore a jacket – whilst several council members arrived in shorts! Often the best
way of assessing the situation once in the field is to look at yourself and look at
those you are researching. Assess the differences, and if it is important to look
the same or to modify your appearance for the sake of rapport and good field
relations, then our advice would be to do so, even if this does involve com­
promise on your part. Perhaps the final example on this topic should be drawn
from Scott’s (2010: 164) study of swimming pool etiquette and the fragility of
those managed encounters whilst being ‘near-naked’. Whilst obviously choosing
what to wear was relatively straightforward, finding somewhere to keep her
notebook was not!

RELATIONS AND RELATIONSHIPS

So far, we have talked about field relations, cooperation and [Link] these
are important issues we may be in danger of adding a scientific gloss to some-
thing more fundamental than these labels would imply. In using these terms, we
are referring to relationships that occur in the field between people who happen
to be researcher(s) and researched. In some respects relationships in the field may
be similar to relationships in many other situations. However, there is also a
fundamental difference. The primary reason for field relationships is that they
facilitate the research. Whilst they may be enjoyed and genuinely valued by all
concerned, they remain a tool of the research. In this respect, there will always
remain an element of field relations and relationships which could be seen as
imbalanced and exploitative. For the researcher who needs access and data it
is easy to see what he/she will get out of the relationship and what its real
value is. For the research participant it may be more difficult. Furthermore,
whilst the researcher may see the relationship as a means of facilitating data
collection, and be happy with this, the research participant may not. Where
this degree of ambiguity occurs, the researcher needs to exercise caution for
fear not only of jeopardizing the research, but also on an interpersonal level by
remaining mindful of their responsibilities towards the wellbeing of others.

GETTING TOO CLOSE

Although the researcher may be clear about the nature of a relationship that develops
in the field and furthermore, he/she may be prepared to exploit it for the benefit
of the data it might yield, there is no guarantee that the research participant will
46 Doing Fieldwork

see things in the same way. In particular, those who act as gatekeepers, providing
and facilitating access for the research or as key informants working closely with
the researcher, may experience a particularly ambiguous situation.
In performing a role as gatekeeper or facilitator, participants may not see them-
selves as part of the [Link] may be surprised, shocked or even feel betrayed
on seeing themselves feature in a research report, a book or paper based on the
research. For example, after spending a full academic year studying a further edu-
cation college in the UK as part of a study funded by a Local Education Authority
(LEA), during which I had received considerable support from a LEA adviser, I
produced a report for policymakers (Pole 1990) as was required to under the
conditions of the research contract. The report gave a detailed account of
assessment methods used in a number of specified courses offered by the college.
The report was critical of college policy and practice and inevitably of the role
of the LEA adviser as she was central to the new assessment schemes. In particu-
lar, her role was discussed in terms of poor communication between the LEA and
the college. On receiving the report, the adviser informed me that she was
shocked to see herself feature so prominently in the report. She felt that I had
failed to inform her that she was also part of the focus of the research as well as its
facilitator. What had been a productive working friendship ended quite acrimoni-
ously and perhaps she was correct. Perhaps I failed to impress upon her that she,
or at least her role, was part of the research. Ultimately, on reflection, I felt that we
had become too close. Our relationship had crossed the line from researcher and
researched to one of collegial friendship which, furthermore, was understood dif-
ferently by the parties involved. Whilst I was always clear that the role of the
adviser was central to the research and consequently saw our relationship in this
context, for her, the situation was more complex. As the study was funded by the
LEA, of which she was a senior member, she saw it as something being conducted
for her benefit. Consequently, she felt that her role, despite its centrality to the
substance of the research, should not have been part of the study. It may have been
that I failed to communicate my view of the research properly to her. Furthermore,
she would be remaining in that professional role and environment long after I had
concluded my fieldwork. Alternatively, it may have been that her view of the rela-
tionship was based on unfounded and unexpressed assumptions. Whatever the
interpretation, the end of the research was messy (Pole 1995). The adviser tried to
discredit my work and to prevent its publication. The relationship was too close
and we obviously understood our roles in the study very differently. I did not
ensure that the adviser realized that she was part of its focus.
Deem et al.’s (2007) research within their own professional community also
generated its own dilemmas in terms of role and rapport, including within the
research team. Deem (2014) reflected upon the informal and formal moments
researching in situations and environments within which there is an insider’s
knowledge. Hillyard, as a junior member of that research team, has subse-
quently worked with several academics who were part of the original research
 Field Relations 47

sample – echoing Lodge’s (1984) Small World. Therefore, tensions with the team
(Deem 2002) or about maintaining good field relations are not merely con-
cluded when the end-of-award report is submitted, but flow across settings
which involve ‘anthropology at home’. As Hillyard noted in her fieldwork in
Norfolk, you may become privy to confidential and salacious information
(Edwards and Hillyard 2012) and therefore discretion and diplomacy are key
skills in managing field relations.
Managing research relationships is therefore a difficult business. On the one
hand, the situation often demands a closeness and trust through which access to
information is gained. At the same time, it will usually demand a professional
distance which allows the researcher to stand back from the relationships in an
attempt to preserve his/her independence and that of the research. In this
respect, the researcher, whilst seeking a familiarity with those he/she is research-
ing will also need to remain a stranger. Indeed, Agar (1996) goes so far as to
characterize the role of fieldworker in the pursuit of ethnographic research, as
the professional stranger. In his use of this term, Agar seeks to convey the notion
of the fieldworker as an outsider attempting to gain insider status. As such, he/
she must negotiate a way into the social action he/she wishes to research by
means of various ‘stranger-handlers’ (Agar 1996: 85–7). In gaining their confi-
dence, the fieldworker finds access to information much easier to acquire.
However, it is important to remember that all field relationships are different.
This makes the task of providing guidance for their management, in anything
more than very general terms, difficult. Getting too close may be a problem in
some circumstances, in others it may not. Whether it is or isn’t depends on the
specific focus and context of the research, together with the capacity of the
researcher to handle the relationship. Fieldwork is people work and the compe-
tent fieldworker will need to be able to interact with many different kinds of
people during the course of a study. Moreover, field relations, like any other
social relations are by their very nature, dynamic. Relationships between indi-
viduals are constantly changing. This is true not only of relationships between
those who are the focus of the research but also of relationships between
researcher and researched. Relationships may change for the better or worse, or
may simply develop into a familiarity as individuals come to know each other.
Where this happens, there may be a danger of the researcher losing some of his/
her researcher-identity as he/she begins to take things for granted. Moreover,
the very presence of the researcher may contribute to the way in which relation-
ships develop between individuals in the field. Researcher effect is a
phenomenon which is often discussed in the research literature, but fre-
quently the concern is with the impact that the presence of a researcher has on
the social action which he/she is there to research. Intrinsic to this could be the
impact which the presence of the researcher has on relationships between par-
ticipants in the field. For example, to return to the example of Hughes’ (1991)
study of stepfamilies, one can quite easily imagine how the prolonged presence
48 Doing Fieldwork

of a researcher in the home could affect relationships between family members.

Stresses and tensions might easily develop to the extent that they begin to affect
the nature of the family unit, the very thing that Hughes was studying.
Where it is clear that the presence of the researcher is adding to the strains of
a particular relationship, or influencing the research setting in a particular way,
the researcher may decide it is time to stop the fieldwork and to leave the field.
In such circumstances, the decision to leave the field may reflect the researcher’s
personal ethical code which underpins the research. The decision of when to
leave the field is unlikely to be something the researcher can decide in advance,
beyond an awareness of what the research funding will permit. Leaving aside the
constraints of time and money, only once the researcher has entered and become
part of the field can he/she come to any real judgement about researcher effect,
and whether or not it would be ethically and morally correct to withdraw.
The fact that relationships are dynamic, that research is often conducted in
sensitive areas, that situations change and above all that people are unpredictable,
makes the provision of guidelines for field relations very difficult. Fieldwork
demands that the researcher gets close to those he/she is researching. Sometimes
this is fine, sometimes it isn’t. Only the researcher’s judgement can be used to
decide which of the two it is.

‘WHOSE SIDE ARE WE ON?’

Becker’s (1967) simple yet very searching question, posed more than forty years
ago, remains central to any consideration of field relations. In asking the question
in the context of fieldwork, we begin to challenge the notion that research can
be regarded as a neutral activity. The question presumes that there are sides for
the researcher to take and implies that these different sides have different, perhaps
competing interests. The complexity of the relationships which constitute
research and the research process mean that there can be many sides. For example,
the source of funding for the research may mean the research is prescribed in a
certain way and in some cases the researcher is little more than what Finch (1984)
described as a hired hand. Here, the researcher is merely a functionary, carrying
out particular tasks to provide particular kinds of information and, in some cases,
particular kinds of analyses, for the research sponsor. Burgess (1993) characterizes
such research in terms of contractors and customers. Where this happens, the
researcher may have no option other than to be on the side of the sponsor.
Pressures on higher education may mean that there is a financial imperative for
researchers to accept such work. However, for many, the idea of conducting
research which merely reflects or represents the interests of a particular sponsor
may be unacceptable. If this is the case, then the researcher chooses only to seek
work which offers freedom to pursue their own interests. In such cases, the
researcher is clearly on nobody’s side but that of scholarly endeavour.
 Field Relations 49

Beyond issues of research funding, field relations and relationships may lead to
particular assumptions about allegiances and whose side the researcher is per-
ceived to be on. A concern to prevent the perception of any particular allegiance
developing, may mean the researcher takes specific steps to avoid over-association
with any individual or group of research participants. Furthermore, there
have also been more recent moves to conduct fieldwork on ourselves – via
auto-ethnography or utilizing fictional narratives and theatrical performances.
For example, highly-experienced educational researcher Walford (2004) used
this technique to explore the role and routine of a University Proctor when
appointed to this role. Similarly, Bagley (2009) positioned himself – as a non-
artist researcher – clearly within the production of a piece of arts-based
educational research and the generation of a piece of performance art. More
radically, Smith (2013) and Sparkes (2007) have blended fictional narratives,
interview data and personal experiences as a means to explore the challenges of
the academic profession in an audit-culture. There are those who have been
critical of such moves (Delamont 2009, Hammersley 2008, Walford 2009).
In many studies, however, there is no clear demarcation of ‘sides’, but this does
not mean there can be no allegiances. For example, where fieldwork is con-
ducted within an institution, assumptions will be made about who the researcher
is seen talking to, eating lunch with, sharing a joke with and generally spending
time with. Similarly judgements will be made as to why the researcher is not
spending time with other people. Although the reason may simply be that the
people he/she spends time with are those who have shown friendship or inter-
est in the research, assumptions are likely to be made not just about the
researcher, but also about the nature of the research and whose ‘side’ the research
represents. Whilst it may not be easy, the fieldworker needs to give careful
thought to patterns of association in the field. It may be easy to spend time with
particular people, whilst others may be more difficult and unwelcoming, but no
one said fieldwork or field relations would be easy. To avoid the assumptions of
allegiance to a particular ‘side’, the fieldworker may need to spread his/her
attentions around. As Payne (1996) noted, researchers need to speak to both the
nice and the nasty.

THE RESEARCHER AS A TOOL FOR LEGITIMATION

Access to information about individuals and institutions which fieldwork
affords often means that the researcher can be seen to have a degree of ‘power’ or
influence over those individuals and institutions. This ‘power’ is most frequently
realized through the publication of material based on the research. Those who
participated in the research could find that decisions are made about them by
their managers, based on the findings of the research, or they may decide to
change their own practices based on their reading of the research output or
50 Doing Fieldwork

simply their participation in the research. However, after a research report is

made public, or material from a study is published in journal or book form, the
researcher loses control of the research, in as far as he/she cannot dictate or
influence what interpretation the reader makes of it, or how it is used. Indeed,
the research may be used in ways which are contrary to the objectives of the
research and the wishes of the researcher. Deem’s (Deem et al. 2007) work on
new managerialism in higher education institutions in the UK attracted
questions about the outcomes of the research and its application for achieving
‘better management’. Hillyard, as the junior member of a very experienced
team of academics, witnessed how this occurred at many stages of the
research process: in negotiating access into universities; the arrangements for
dissemination at the institutional level; and even during the negotiation of the
subsequent book contract Deem’s team were clear that the project would not
produce a ‘management manifesto’, but this was not what all those interested
in the project always wished to hear. In such a ‘small world’ (Lodge 1984) as
the academic community, it was important that Deem reflected upon the
impact of the research and its use-value. This was as important during a data
collection process, that included highly informal moments in the field
(Deem 2014), as for consistency across the fieldwork collected by an inter-
disciplinary research team (Deem 2002).
A more direct and blatant use of the researcher as a tool, or in this case as
legitimation for a particular course of action, can be seen from Pole’s work based
on the period of fieldwork conducted in Benton School (Pole 1990, 1993).
Following the period of fieldwork, a report on the findings was prepared for the
LEA, the head teacher and the staff. Although not part of the contract, I agreed to
return to the school after the staff had been given a chance to read the report in
order to discuss its findings at a full staff [Link] organization of the meeting,
by the head teacher (Mr Fox), cast me firmly in the role of his ally. The staffroom
was organized in such a way that I was required to sit at the front of the room,
behind a desk, next to him. Mr Fox introduced the meeting and did most of the
talking, inviting me to comment on the report and to respond to his reading of it.
As the meeting progressed he began to refer to specific instances in the report
where individual members of staff had taken particular actions. Although all mem-
bers of staff, pupils and the school itself were referred to only by pseudonym in
the report and I was careful to maintain their use throughout the meeting, the
head teacher, like many of his staff, had managed to identify the real identities of
the pseudonyms and made no attempt to use them in their discussion of the
report, preferring to refer to individuals involved by their real names. It soon
became apparent to me and I suspect to the staff, that the head teacher intended
to use my report as legitimation for his concerns about practices deployed by staff
in the context of pupil assessment. On the basis of the critical comments made in
the report and the data which supported them, Mr Fox proceeded to take up
 Field Relations 51

issues with individual staff members throughout the meeting, in front of me and
their colleagues, using their real names. I found the situation unacceptable, as indi-
vidual criticism of staff was not one of my intended outcomes of the research.
However, having made the report available and agreeing to the meeting, I could
do little to temper the actions of the head teacher. He was in control of the meet-
ing and, furthermore, he had evidence (or perhaps more accurately, ammunition)
by means of my detailed and carefully-conducted research to use against his staff.
Whilst I made objections during the meeting to his insistence on using real names
as opposed to the pseudonyms, I could not object to his references to the data used
extensively in the report, or to its overall conclusions. To do so would have been
to cast doubt on the findings of my research.
The examples from two cases illustrate that research may be used in a way which
is unanticipated by the [Link] show that the way in which the findings of
the research were used, placed the researchers in difficult positions, which they
found uncomfortable and potentially unacceptable. Their work and, by association,
the researchers themselves, had been used in such a way as to legitimate certain
actions and behaviour. Moreover, in the case of Pole, the research report was used
to imply an allegiance between the head teacher and the researcher against the
teachers. Both were also examples where both Pole and Hillyard were members of
larger research teams where they also had obligations towards the success of wider
projects. In terms of whose side are we on, in such contexts, the researcher can feel
as though they have few options available to them and limited choice.

THE RESEARCHER AS COUNSELLOR OR

CONFIDANTE
Whilst the previous two sections have addressed what might be seen as structural
issues in the context of field relations and relationships, much of what occurs in
the day-to-day experience of fieldwork is shaped by micro-level interpersonal
relations. Like any relationship, this makes it difficult to fully understand how
researcher–researched relationships work in any generalized way. What is also
clear is that the relationship may be perceived differently by the researcher and
the researched. Indeed, we have already seen that in situations where researcher
and researched become close, the researched may fail to realize that they are
actually part of the researcher’s gaze. Where this happens there are clearly differ-
ent interpretations and expectations of the field relationship amongst the actors
involved.
Other instances of different interpretations and expectations of field relation-
ships are evident in situations where the researcher is cast in the role of
confidante or counsellor by those who are being researched. Researchers are
often privy to large amounts of detailed and personal information. In particular,
52 Doing Fieldwork

this tends to be the case where unstructured interviewing has been a principal
method of data collection and especially in the context of life history, where
researcher and researched spend many hours together over what might be a
period of months or even years. For example, during research with black teachers,
using a life history approach, Pole interviewed one young, black teacher with
whom he shared many similarities in background (Pole 2010). This engendered
a close rapport, where Pole was able to gain an insight into his respondent’s early
experiences of university life which were very different from those approved of
by his parents (Pole et al. 1999). During her fieldwork on academics, Hillyard
was told ‘off-tape’ on several occasions, of instances where academics had per-
sonally or knew of colleagues who had suffered breakdowns due to pressures at
work. Pressures of work were particularly acute for academic women who
lacked the domestic support they witnessed amongst their male colleagues.
There are also instances where fieldworkers might become privy to wider cir-
cumstances or opinions that surround a research setting, for example, perhaps
relating to its future. In her fieldwork in a Norfolk primary school, Hillyard
knew the opinion of the school’s head teacher as to its future viability as he
approached retirement and a replacement was being sought. Fieldwork often
involves listening to and balancing opposing views. Some of these can be very
personal. Certainly, during her fieldwork in the wake of the foot-and-mouth
disease epidemic in the UK, Hillyard (2009) collected a great deal of deeply
personal information about the impact of the epidemic upon individuals,
communities and professional groups, much of which was necessarily off-record.
On some occasions, the role of the researcher as confidante may develop a
step further to become one of counsellor. Where those at the focus of the
research share sensitive and/or personal information with a researcher, the rela-
tionship may, in some respects, be compared to that which exists between a
counsellor and his/her client, or in some cases between a priest and a confessant.
Not only does the researched trust the researcher with sensitive and confidential
information but the researcher is also recognized as someone of intelligence and
integrity who has an interest in the topic around which the fieldwork is based.
As a consequence, it may be that the subject of the research seeks advice from
the researcher about a particular situation or the course of action he/she might
take. Again, an example from our own research may be useful here.
As part of a study of the socialization and supervision of doctoral students in
the social sciences (Burgess et al. 1992), Pole was conducting a lengthy inter-
view with a Business Studies student where the interviewee became tearful
and very distressed not only about the lack of progress she had made during
her first year of study but also about the nature of her relationship with her
supervisor. In revealing a situation where she felt threatened and powerless in
relation to the disciplinary and institutional status of her supervisor, she asked
me, almost at a point of desperation, for advice about how she should deal
with the situation and whether I felt she should abandon her studies. Aware that
 Field Relations 53

I had interviewed many first year PhD students, she regarded me as having
relevant knowledge which I could use to help her to, as she put it, ‘escape from
this man’. Had I seen myself merely as a receptacle for the collection of infor-
mation, unable to interact with those I was researching beyond the posing of
questions in an interview, I would have found her requests difficult. However, I
saw this as a situation in which I could offer advice and support to the student
and promptly did so. I also met her on several other occasions to talk more about
her situation. On each occasion she thanked me for taking time with her and
said she valued the opportunity to talk with me as someone knowledgeable
about her particular situation but at the same time, distanced from it. In doing
this I may be seen to have moved beyond my role of researcher to one of coun-
sellor or friend, one that I was probably not qualified or properly positioned to
perform. Nevertheless, the example is useful in illustrating that we react to situ-
ations that occur in fieldwork not as inanimate research tools, but as sensitive,
concerned, emotive human beings.
Finally, there are instances where the researcher has blurred the distinction
between confidante or even counsellor. Wolcott (2010), a hugely experienced
fieldworker and methodological commentator, reflected upon his own relation-
ship with one of his respondents (Delamont 2009: 58). Using life history
techniques, he had become very close to one of his participants, to the extent
that they entered into a sexual relationship even though Wolcott was then living
with a long-term partner. The new relationship was not successful and there
were extreme consequences. Their relationship had soured to the extent that the
participant burnt Wolcott’s house down! Here, clearly the personal and profes-
sional distance Wolcott could have maintained in his roles with the young man
he termed ‘Sneaky Kid’ was compromised with dramatic consequences.

CONCLUSION
Discussion in this chapter has demonstrated that field relationships can be
unpredictable and difficult to manage. Whilst books like this are, hopefully, use-
ful in providing an insight into the process of fieldwork, their limitations lie in
the extent to which they can offer hard and fast guidelines for the management
of field relations. Perhaps the only guideline that can be offered with any con-
fidence is best summarized by the cliché ‘Expect the unexpected’.
Fieldwork and field relations are, in our experience, characterized by uncer-
tainty. Moreover, they change and develop as the fieldwork progresses. In this
respect, they are little different from the many other relations and relationships we
experience in other areas of our [Link] crucial difference, however, is the reason
or rationale that underpins them. In the great majority of cases, field relations are
constructed for the duration of the fieldwork. There are of course exceptions
where, for example, researchers and researched have kept in touch after the
54 Doing Fieldwork

research has been completed and on very rare occasions field relations have
developed into more permanent partnerships (e.g. Gearing 1995 (cited in
Coffey 1999)). However, most field relations will come to a conclusion which
usually coincides with the end of the research project. Nevertheless, we have also
acknowledged how, on occasions, such relationships can endure far beyond such
a point.
Whilst reading this chapter will not guarantee that you will now be able to
forge and manage effective field relations, it will hopefully mean that you are
more aware of the complexity and the sensitivity which they embody. It is also
to be hoped that the chapter will promote a reflexive approach to field relations
in which you, the researcher, take time to consider your role in their creation
and management. In doing this, they become not merely a means of facilitating
data collection, but a source of data in themselves.

NOTE

1 The names of Dr Smart, Professor Barker, Mercia Polytechnic and Mercia

University are pseudonyms.

FURTHER READING

Parker A (2006) Lifelong learning to labour: Apprenticeship, masculinity and

communities of practice. British Educational Research Journal, 32(5): 687–701.
Lofland L (1989) On fieldwork. Erving Goffman. Journal of Contemporary
Ethnography, 18(2): 123–32.
Bell C (1977) Reflections on the Banbury restudy. In: Bell C and Newby H (eds)
Doing Sociological Research. London: Free Press, pp. 47–62.
 4
TOOLS FOR THE
FIELD

Chapter overview
• Fieldwork is an inclusive approach that encompasses a wide array of
research tools.
• Fieldwork can involve different scales of immersion – active to passive.
• Methods or tools are not chosen in isolation, but are part of the
integrated nature of research as an activity aimed towards particular
objectives.
• Fieldwork tools are not atheoretical and therefore have implications
for the kinds of knowledge generated.
• Given the messy, unpredictable nature of research, it is likely that
fieldwork will need to be flexible.

Having discussed processes by which researchers identify the field for their work
and manage field relations, we now turn to the business of doing fieldwork by
considering some of the principal tools which researchers use for collecting data
in the field. However, it is not our intention to provide a step-by-step instruc-
tion manual to the key methods which are available to the fieldworker. There
are many excellent methods books already in print which do this and we can
see little point in merely adding to this stock. However, it is our intention to
offer a critical account of how some of the key research tools are used in the
field by drawing on actual examples of their use and in doing so, to acknowledge
some of their strengths and limitations.
56 Doing Fieldwork

In many respects, doing fieldwork is like doing any other kind of job, insofar
as to do it properly and effectively requires appropriate tools. However, in
making this statement, we do not wish to suggest that fieldwork in particular, or
research more generally, can be reduced to a collection of specific methods or
tools. To do so would be to fail to understand the holistic nature of research
and to appreciate the relationship between fieldwork, data and the kind of
knowledge that it yields. In addition, it would also be to emphasize the impor-
tance of fieldwork, method and technique above other aspects of the research
process. The intention of this chapter and the one that follows is to provide an
appreciation of some of the key research tools available to the fieldworker and to
locate them in the context of the overall research process. As with the discus-
sion so far, the intention is to emphasize the integrated nature of the research
process and to discuss the ways in which decisions about which research tools
should be used cannot be separated from issues of knowledge and epistemology.
Nevertheless, recognizing that tools are only part of the story we will begin our
consideration of research tools with a simple analogy about plumbing!

TOOLS AND TOOL BAGS

Imagine you have a dripping tap in your bathroom. Having little inclination for
DIY and a healthy bank balance, you decide to call out a plumber to change the
tap washer and stop the drip. The plumber arrives with a large toolbox. He/she
enters the bathroom, surveys the dripping tap and confirms your suspicion that
a new washer will solve the problem. He/she opens his toolbox and selects a
hammer. He/she takes the hammer and begins to hit the tap with some force in
an effort to remove the worn out washer. Quite quickly it is apparent that his
approach is not working. He/she has failed to remove the washer and what’s
more, the tap is seriously damaged. You look on in horror, speechless in the
knowledge that the plumber clearly has little idea of what he is doing and has
selected the wrong tool for the job.
Although exaggerated and over-simplified and like many such analogies, it is
not difficult to see a connection with fieldwork and research methods. The
plumber has a job to do, he assess what needs to be done and makes a decision
about the tools required to do the job. He/she selects from a range of tools
available and begins work. In this case it is clear that although his assessment of
the task is correct, he has selected the wrong tool and as a consequence, is
unable to do the job effectively. For the fieldworker the situation is similar. An
assessment is made of the research task, usually through a research proposal and
the research design. Some initial assessments are made about the nature of the
job and the field and the research tools are selected from the range available. Like
the plumber, sometimes researchers select the wrong tool and the job is either
impossible or its outcome is very different from what was first envisaged.
 Tools for the Field 57

The point to be made from this rather simplistic comparison is that like the
plumber, the fieldworker has a choice of tools at his/her disposal and the task
is to fit the most effective tool to the requirements of the job. For example, if
the researcher needs to collect a fairly limited amount of factual information
from a large number of people who are dispersed throughout Europe then the
best way to do this seems likely to be via a survey. Alternatively, if a researcher
requires detailed attitudinal information from a small number of people
located within the same city, then some form of interview may be his/her best
bet. There may, of course, be circumstances when what seems likely to be the
most suitable tool proves not to be. For example, back with the plumber, if the
tap has become corroded or has seized up in a way that does not allow the use
of a wrench, then the hammer may be the best way to fix the problem,
although as a result it will be necessary to fit a completely new tap. Considering
a similar situation in the context of research we might say that if a researcher
wishes to collect data which allows wide-scale generalizations to be drawn
across a large population then it would be inappropriate to think of fieldwork
based on participant observation as a means of doing this. Participant observa-
tion does not usually yield the kind of data that can be easily coded and
quantified in such a way as to produce statistical generalizations and comparisons.
In order to collect data which will allow him/her to do this, the researcher
must choose another tool. Failure to find the most appropriate tool for the
task, in plumbing and in research is likely to result in the task done poorly or
not at all.

TOOLS AND THEORY

Continuing the analogy with the plumber may be stretching things a little here,
but let’s see how it plays out. When the plumber makes the decision to use the
hammer in an effort to mend the tap, he/she makes it on the basis of a theory
of what kind of action is required to remove the worn-out washer. He/she
decides the best way to do this is to beat the tap into [Link] assume that
he must have some idea of the likely outcome of these actions in respect of what
the tap will look like after the beating and the chances of producing a flood in
the bathroom. Despite this, he/she presses on and discovers quite quickly that
he/she is not able to change the washer using a hammer and, moreover, that the
tap is dented as a result. He/she reviews the situation, replaces the hammer in
the toolbox and takes out a wrench. He/she proceeds to apply the wrench to
the tap and succeeds in removing the worn washer and replacing it with a new
one. Eventually, he/she achieves the desired end. His/her initial theory of brute
force was seen, by experience, to be inappropriate. The plumber’s evaluation of
the experience led to a change of tool, based on a change in the theory and its
replacement with one which was much more subtle, based on the principles
58 Doing Fieldwork

of threads and screws. Whilst the plumber may not articulate the theories upon
which his/her work is based in any explicit way, they are clearly what underpin
the practice and inform the desired outcome.
Again, there are some similarities with the fieldworker. There are also some
fundamental differences. As part of the research design process, the fieldworker
will need to make a series of decisions about the tools he/she will use in order
to collect the data. However, the situation may be more difficult than that faced
by our plumber, not least because the desired outcome of the tasks may not be
so obvious. Indeed there may be a number of different desired outcomes to
choose from which compete with each other as the most appropriate for the
task in hand. In the context of research, the desired outcome relates to the
nature of the knowledge which it will yield. For example, the researcher may
decide that the most appropriate kind of knowledge will be that which pro-
vides rich and detailed insights into whatever is being researched. Alternatively,
he/she may decide that the most appropriate knowledge is that which yields
generalizations and allows the identification of specific factors of cause and
effect. Depending on what is regarded as the most appropriate outcome for the
research, the researcher will choose one research tool over another. Alternatively,
it may be decided that a combination of methods or tools should be used in an
effort to produce different but complementary data and hence a different out-
come again. The example serves to illustrate that the methods or tools of
research are not chosen in isolation from the desired outcome. Just as the
plumber discovered that his tool was inappropriate for the desired outcome, the
researcher may also discover the same. For the researcher, however, it is not so
easy to disregard one tool and pick up another. Therefore, before deciding on
the most appropriate tool with which to collect the data, the researcher will
need to answer the following questions:

• What do I want to be able to explore by conducting my research?

• What data are required?
• What is to count as data?
• Where are the data located?
• Is their collection feasible?
• How should the data be analysed?

The answers to the questions may not determine the methods of data collection
which the researcher will use, but they should be influential in guiding that
decision. For example, a researcher who wished to produce generalized repre-
sentative findings as a result of his/her research would be ill-advised to opt for
small-scale, highly qualitative methods such as life history or detailed documen-
tary analysis. Alternatively, the researcher who discovered that his/her principal
source of data was a series of confidential documents would not be able to get
access to their contents using survey methods. Similarly the same researcher may
 Tools for the Field 59

discover that access to the documents to which he/she requires is highly

restricted for matters of national security and consequently the original research
design may not be feasible and an alternative method may be devised. The
examples illustrate the integrated nature of research design and emphasize the
inextricable links between research process and outcome. The desired outcome
cannot be left to chance and successful research relies on carefully planned data
collection in which the relationship between process and product is fully under-
stood. However, given the unpredictable nature of the subject matter of social
research this may not always be possible and the researcher, like the plumber, is
forced to make changes to the research design and to the methods he/she wishes
to deploy in the light of the research experience. Indeed, it is unlikely that a
project involving fieldwork would not undergo some kind of change: whether
a result of the researcher’s actions or unforeseen issues.

TOOLS AND METHODS

There may be lots of tools at his/her disposal but as we have seen above, the
researcher needs to choose in the context of the task that needs to be done, from
the many and varied tools that are available. At this point it may be useful to
remind ourselves of the overall aims and objectives of fieldwork which we iden-
tified in Chapter 1, as these will be instrumental in establishing the tools that
might be used in an effort to achieve these aims and objectives. These are:

• To observe and experience at first hand what is happening (including virtually).

• To examine the significance of events and activities, beliefs and rituals
(including the mundane and the ordinary) to people involved.
• To examine the ways in which activities and events, beliefs and rituals relate
to each other and to the participants in the location.
• To look for the significance and meaning of social behaviour.
• To look below the surface of events and activities, beliefs and rituals for patterns
and theories which can begin to explain social life in ways which go beyond
the particular fieldwork location.

Whilst these aims may be seen as fairly general, the common thread which runs
through them is their concern with the interior world, be this of people’s beliefs,
attitudes and experiences, the ways in which structures within organizations
operate or the significance of individual or group action and interaction. The
concern is not usually with merely describing static, isolated events or structures,
but with explaining and understanding the social processes which construct
them. Therefore, fieldwork is orientation towards an interactionist theoretical
tradition that emphasizes the capacity of the individual agent (Atkinson and
Housley 2003). In this sense, fieldwork tools need to be more than blunt instruments
60 Doing Fieldwork

which capture data. Given the sensitivity of the task of fieldwork, therefore, it is
probably more useful to speak of methods rather than tools. In doing this, we
also seek to convey a sense in which the data collection in fieldwork involves a
process, where sequential steps are taken in an attempt to find a way of captur-
ing whatever is identified as the focus of the fieldwork. Fieldwork therefore also
has a temporal dimension. Consequently it is useful to see method as more than
a tool that one might use for a specific purpose and then return to the tool bag.
Method is intended to reflect the relationship that exists between the data, the
theory which underpins the nature of that data and the means by which it is
collected. Certain kinds of method will, therefore, be used for certain kinds of
data which in turn contribute to understandings of the field within which the
research is based. In that sense, methods or tools are not atheoretical, rather they
have implications for the kinds of knowledge that are generated, in so far as the
resulting research findings will only be as good as the data upon which they are
built; hence the tools you use will shape the knowledge created.
We have already characterized fieldwork as an approach to research which
seeks to discover and understand the interior world of those who construct
and inhabit the fieldwork site. If this is the case, then clearly appropriate data
collection methods will be those which facilitate access to and enable the
researcher to work within this interior world. At this stage it would be fairly
straightforward to begin to outline such methods and to provide guidance as
to how best they might be operated in the field. However, as we said at the
beginning of this chapter there are already many research methods texts which
do this admirably and there seems to us little point in adding to this stock of
information. Moreover, it is not the purpose of this text to offer a step-by-step
guide as to how to do fieldwork, but more to communicate the ethos of doing
good fieldwork and how it might be done better. This is not to imply that this
discussion of method, or the book more generally, has no practical application;
this is clearly not the case. The intention is to encourage would be and practising
fieldworkers to think critically about their work and to consider methods as
more than a set of techniques or tools and to realize the integrative nature of
fieldwork as an activity aimed towards particular objectives.

WHICH METHODS?
Given the fairly broad remit we are using to characterize fieldwork it would be
tempting to say that any means of collecting information from a particular field
would be appropriate and as long as it tells us something about the people,
process or institutions that constitute the field, then the method is acceptable.
However, to adopt such a position would be to ignore, in our view, what is the
most important principle of fieldwork. That is to observe and experience at first
hand what is happening in the field. It is this notion of first-hand experience
 Tools for the Field 61

which differentiates research that is based on fieldwork from other more distant
kinds of [Link] is important here is closeness to the field, whatever setting
that might be. By closeness, we mean the ambition of fieldwork to generate an
understanding of the location or setting where it is [Link] means placing
a value upon the interactions within that setting and the sense-making activities
of the social actors inside it. The methods or tools you use are therefore strate-
gically employed to ‘get at’ or achieve access to that meaningful action. This
ambition to be close to the field therefore does not dictate what methods you
use to proceed, but we would argue that it is rare that fieldwork relies upon
only one form of qualitative method. Consequently, the methods that field-
workers use must be those which facilitate this first-hand experience, that seek
to achieve an intimacy between the fieldworker, the field and those who con-
stitute the field. The general theoretical orientation that underpins fieldwork
is one that emphasizes the importance of the lived experience of the social
actors who are the subjects of the research rather than the objects. It concep-
tualizes the social actor as an agent with some capacity to reflect upon and
change their social situation. It is an orientation which values the subjective
experience of those social actors above attempts to capture the objectivity of
their situation. It is not necessarily concerned with producing large-scale
generalizations or tests for statistical significance. Fieldwork may form the basis
for future, more wide-scale research. It is, however, concerned with rigorous
efforts to understand the detail of given situations and their significance to the
actors. There are many methods which facilitate such an approach and others
which do not. We are concerned here with those that do. Therefore, it may be
useful to identify those methods which do not allow this degree of intimacy and
to exclude them from this discussion on the grounds that they are simply not
appropriate for the task in hand by virtue of the fact that they relate more easily
to a different theoretical orientation.
Having said this, there are not large numbers of specific methods that can be
easily excluded on the grounds that they cannot tell us something about the
subjective reality of the lives of social [Link] it is possible to exclude operate
at a physical and emotional distance from the field and its participants, where
also there is no prolonged face-to-face contact either with those who inhabit
the field. We would also add a caveat regarding the importance of place and
context to our perception of the [Link] feel this has been somewhat neglected
within more technical debates about particular methods. What is key for us is
the emphasis upon understanding the social setting of the field sui generis. That
is, more than the sum of its parts. What is ‘the field’ will of course be shaped by
its place and context, be it a school, a village or an online virtual world such as
Second Life. In essence, this rules out self-completion questionnaires, highly
structured market research style interviews, secondary analysis of statistics and
other data sets and also official statistics. However, although none of these methods
require the physical presence of the researcher in the field and as such are
62 Doing Fieldwork

excluded from our characterization of fieldwork, it would be wrong to imply

that they are never used by fieldworkers. As a means of supporting or adding to
data collected by face-to-face methods they may make an important contribu-
tion to what is known about a particular field. For example, a researcher
conducting fieldwork into school exclusion by means of detailed interviews and
school-based observation, may find useful data with which to contextualize the
picture emerging from the field by examining national trends and statistics in
school exclusion. For example, Hillyard’s research in Norfolk included an analysis
of changing demographic patterns and the village population over the centuries,
including maps and aerial records. Whilst this may not add to the picture of the
interior world of the field or of the lived experience of the social actors therein,
it would, nevertheless, offer the fieldworker a guide to whether observations in
the field were in any obvious way unusual or special. They may act to suggest a
different or additional set of issues to be pursued by the fieldworker, in the field.
Similarly, fieldwork may form one part of a wider research programme which
combines a range of different research strategies, something which Burgess
(1982) terms multiple strategy research. For example, Christensen and her
research team employed a wide array of methods to capture children’s networks
around a geographical area (Christensen et al. 2011). This crucially involved
some members of the research team becoming familiar faces at the schools in
their case study area and conducting interviews with the children, but it also
involved using technology (in the form of mobile telephones and GPS devices).
Therefore this was a complex, multi-faceted mixed-method approach which
involved researchers in direct face-to-face contact with members of the com-
munity being studied (the children) but also drew in other techniques where
[Link] overall intention is to produce a detailed insight into the community
or group which exists within the particular location or [Link] combination
of different methods allows different kinds of data to be gathered and in turn
different kinds of knowledge can be produced from it. The point to be made
here is that although some methods can be excluded from what are regarded as
fieldwork methods because they do not allow the researcher to get close enough
to the field, they may nevertheless contribute to a more general research pro-
gramme of which field-based research is a part.
Given there are not large numbers of research methods which are ruled out
from fieldwork, it may be tempting to suggest that ‘anything goes’ as long as it
brings the fieldworker into contact with the field and those who inhabit it. This
has not been the intention of this discussion. To do so would be to place field-
work closer to tabloid journalism than to social research. In that it would treat
the fieldwork site and those who inhabit and construct it as mere objects of the
research, subject to the fieldworker’s gaze, rather like microbes in a biologist’s
Petri dish or mice in a psychologist’s maze. Approaching fieldwork in such a
way leaves the researcher open to claims not just of unethical work, but also of
an insensitive or arrogant approach.
 Tools for the Field 63

In seeking to collect information from the field, the fieldworker has numerous
responsibilities which shape the process of data collection. There are responsi-
bilities to those from whom data are collected and who construct and constitute
the field, to the data themselves in that they should be detailed, comprehensive
and provide a fair representation of the field. Fieldworkers also have a responsi-
bility to social science more generally in that they should endeavour to leave the
field with the reputation of social science research and indeed fieldwork intact.
In many ways, the future of fieldwork will depend on the way it has been con-
ducted in the past. In addition, there are also responsibilities that the fieldworker
has to him/herself insofar as fieldwork is only part of the research process and
is conducted in order to facilitate analysis, writing and publication (Delamont
2009). Unless fieldwork is conducted effectively and appropriate methods are
selected and used, then the fieldworker will be unable to fulfil these other
essential aspects of the research process. With this in mind it will be as well
to remember the need for effective research design and for planning. For
example, doing excellent fieldwork will be of little use unless there is effective
data analysis and in turn, none of this will be worthwhile unless there is some
kind of ‘product’ or output from the research, usually in the form of published
work of one kind or another. Moreover, rightly or wrongly, research is usually
judged on the quality and quantity of published work it yields.
The success of the fieldwork and of research project more generally depends
on these two features. First, choosing the methods which allow the researcher
access to the interior world of the field and second, giving due regard to ethical
considerations and responsibilities referred to above. In making such choices the
researcher will do well to find out as much as possible about the field and those
who inhabit it before he/she enters it. However, this may be difficult. Unlike
other forms of research such as that which utilizes the survey or the highly
structured interview method, fieldwork cannot usually be piloted. In capturing
the essence of the field, the fieldworker has to be present as and when things
happen, to witness things at first hand, as far as possible in the natural setting.
Fieldwork is, therefore, largely one-shot research. There is no possibility and no
point in repeating or staging activities for the benefit of the fieldworker who
may have missed them first time around. Consequently, this may present some-
thing of a dilemma for the fieldworker. Conducting effective fieldwork requires
planning in advance of entry to the field but fieldwork itself does not permit
detailed [Link] do not feel this is a negative for fieldwork, but rather that
flexibility to respond to the demands of fieldwork is a strength of the approach.
Once in the field, the researcher seeks to become part of what is happening
around him/her, to observe, record and interpret activities and events
within the field, but not in a way which influences, directs or shapes them.
Once in the field, the researcher is necessarily reactive to the characteristics, events
and the actions of those who constitute [Link] requires the researcher to respond
to situations as they emerge by adapting data collection methods to suit
64 Doing Fieldwork

whatever situation he/she may [Link] the fieldworker may have formulated
elaborate plans in advance of entering the field, once in there, circumstances may
change and unanticipated events may occur. This may mean plans have to be
abandoned or changed in ways which meet the demands of the unexpected
situations. Whilst methods have to be clearly identified and thought through
before entering the field, as we have discussed earlier in this volume, there needs
to be flexibility in the way in which they are used and the researcher must under-
stand that he/she has the latitude to abandon the use of planned methods and to
substitute others which are more appropriate to the demands of the field. We
need also to note that the social world is descriptively inexhaustible. More simply,
the lone fieldworker cannot be everywhere and capture everything at once!
In highlighting the need for flexibility in the field it is not intended to suggest
that fieldworkers’ approach to their work should in any way be casual or that
they should adopt an ‘anything goes’ approach. Coping with the changing
demands of the field and not least with the need for flexibility makes fieldwork
a particularly demanding form of research. Moreover, it is in part this flexibility
and its changing demands which gives fieldwork its structure and contributes to
its definition as a distinctive approach to research.
Characterizing fieldwork as an approach rather than a method leads us to
think about fieldwork as an activity rather than as a set of activities. Whilst the
methods that a fieldworker employs may be common to qualitative research in
general, it is the fact that they are deployed in a fieldwork situation that is significant.
For example, although a qualitative researcher may use forms of observation or
conversation techniques as part of his/her data collection process, on their own
these do not constitute fieldwork. In terms of our definition of fieldwork which
we rehearsed earlier in this chapter, the methods deployed can only contribute
to the conduct of fieldwork, they do not define it. On their own they remain
techniques or tools rather than methods. In defining fieldwork in terms of first-
hand experience and the capacity to ‘be there’ (Geertz 1988, Wolcott 2005) we
have imbued it with a sort of holism or synergy which implies that it is some-
thing more than a collection of methods. In doing this we have at the same time,
suggested that there is an element of the experience of fieldwork which is in
some way intangible, or at least greater than the sum of its parts. Whilst we can
examine its methods and talk about design and output from fieldwork, this does
not necessarily mean we are able to convey a sense of the experience of field-
work to those who have not ‘been there’ as it has been conducted. Wolcott
(2005, 2010) talks of the art and opportunism of fieldwork in an attempt to
convey a sense in which it is more than a mechanistic or formulaic assemblage
of techniques. In discussing methods, therefore, we need most usefully to focus
on how they facilitate the notion of ‘being there’ and in so doing contribute to
this holistic experience of the field.
In very general terms, the methods which contribute to the conduct of field-
work may be identified under two categories. However, the categories are not
 Tools for the Field 65

self-contained and some methods may be located in either or both categories.

The categories may be identified as:

• Those that facilitate active participation.

• Those that facilitate passive participation.

The two broad categories are intended to help make the fieldwork process,
which we have already described as somewhat intangible, become more tangible.
Given that fieldwork is, as far as possible, concerned with the holistic experience
of a particular field, the methods which it employs should seek to capture the
total experience of the field. Characterizing fieldwork methods in this way
avoids the temptation to identify neat and tidy sequential steps, a sort of cook-
book approach, which would fail to capture the essence of the experience.
Somewhat ironically, therefore, broad categorization of the methods seems both
a more honest and a more accurate way to attempt to represent the fieldwork
process. In addition, the two categories are also, in part, an admission that a pre-
cise representation of the experience of fieldwork may be beyond any written
medium such as this. To fully understand the experience you need to do it.
However, having recognized these shortcomings we do not wish to push them
too far, as to do so would be to raise questions about the capacity of fieldwork
itself to capture or represent the experience of the field. Without wishing to fall
into a trap of methodological solipsism it is, nevertheless, important to recognize
the limitations of any approach to social research which is being used as a means
to understand human behaviour. Having drawn attention to these limitations let
us proceed by looking in more detail at each of the categories.

METHODS THAT FACILITATE ACTIVE

PARTICIPATION
The key word here, and in both categories, is [Link] (2005) argues
that to understand what is happening in any given field, the fieldworker needs to
do more than just be there. He/she must take part in the activities of the field.
Participation is, therefore, the best way of experiencing the field and this has long
been recognized not only by anthropologists (e.g. Malinowski 1922, Spindler
1970, Watson 1999) but also by sociologists (Atkinson 2005, Atkinson et al. 2008,
Delamont and Stephens 2006, Duneier 1992, Scott 2009, Wacquant 2003). The
lists could almost be endless. These few examples illustrate not only the enduring
significance of participation in fieldwork but also its capacity to be deployed in a
range of contrasting fields – from the boxing ring to the opera [Link] features
that all these studies have in common is that not only were their authors there in
the field, but they actually took part in the principal activities of the field. In
Scott’s case, literal immersion in a swimming pool! All of these and many other
66 Doing Fieldwork

studies like them are characterized by the fieldworker(s) engaging in the everyday
activities of their particular field. As a method, it is not possible to say what active
participation involves in any detailed or definitive sense, simply because it will
vary according to the activity or activities in which the fieldworker is participating.
Therefore, amongst the studies cited above, participation involved very different
kinds of activities for the fieldworkers concerned. Stephens and Delamont
adopted a division of labour during their research into capoeira, but one in which
both were very closely involved in the atmosphere and culture of their research
field. This extended into ‘private’ time and space and included attending political
activities in support of capoeira communities. Scott (2009) discusses her ‘regular’
status as a swimmer and Atkinson (2005) begins his monograph by situating his
interest in opera within his own autobiography – as an enduring passion. In many
of these instances, the field is akin to a total institution (Goffman 1968), demanding
a ‘total experience’ or commitment by the fieldworker. For example, Wacquant’s
(2003) study of boxing and gym membership took him into the ring after
many months spent training and acquiring the skills of a boxer, despite his
diminutive stature. In one bout, he broke his nose, but gained respect within the
club for having reached a standard capable of participating in an amateur bout
(Wacquant 2003).
In some instances it is possible to identify limits to participation in the field,
both in terms of location and time. In Wacquant’s case, the gym was effectively
a workplace – it was not opening twenty-four hours a day and therefore par-
ticipation was, in the main, limited by the physical gym setting and the hours
Wacquant spent there. A similar situation was experienced by Scott, but we also
note that her field notes were not restricted to observations made in the swim-
ming pool itself, but include arrival, post-swim shower room and changing
room conversation. Stephens and Delamont (2006) also interweave the action of
capoeira with the lessons and also the atmosphere (the smell of sweat and rum) –
and even poor time-keeping that collectively constituted their field. The
structural demands of these locations meant participation was very different
both in terms of the time it took and in respect of the kinds of activities that it
involved. However, there are perhaps more similarities to these two different
examples of participation than is first apparent.
In essence, they are both concerned with the same [Link] is, the experience
of the interior world of the participants who constitute the field and of the social
rhythms, constraints and demands presented by the particular field in which they
were immersed. In taking part in the principal activities of the field, in essentially
the same way as the social actors in the field, these authors were engaged in active
participation. Not only were they being (there) but they were also doing.
Something of which Wolcott (2005) would clearly approve as a means by which
fieldwork is actually constituted. Similarly, Atkinson, Delamont and Housley
(Atkinson et al. 2008) all stress the engaged and interactive nature of the three
fields they had respectively researched. Although in each of these cases participation
 Tools for the Field 67

was overt and the subjects of the research knew that they were being researched,
the researchers sought to blend in with them and, as far as possible, to become
one of them by actively experiencing the field in the same way that they did.
Clearly, there would be limits to the extent to which total immersion in the field
would be possible. For example, Atkinson would make no claim to be a profes-
sional opera singer (Atkinson 2005, Atkinson et al. 2008)! Rather the intention
of this kind of participation was to be active in the same way as the research
subjects, in essence and in the context of the field, to be ordinary.
Beyond characterizing this form of participation as active and as perhaps the
art of being ordinary, it is difficult to give more specific details as to what it
entails or how it should be conducted as a method of collecting data. However,
whilst every instance of active participation will be unique to the field in which
it is located, there will nevertheless be a number of structural and interactional
constraints by which it will be shaped and influenced. For example, at a very
basic level what is done in terms of active participation will be determined
largely by the activities of the field. The researcher will not wish to influence
these in any way and will, therefore, seek to do only what those whom he/she
is researching are doing. In addition, participation will be constrained by feasibil-
ity. In the same way that Delamont (2002) discusses feasibility in relation to
access, effective participation generally relies upon the feasibility of adopting an
acceptable and unobtrusive role in the field. Whilst this may depend on the
specific characteristics of the field it will also depend on the individual charac-
teristics of the fieldworker. For example, whilst fieldwork has been conducted
in hospitals (Atkinson 1981, Becker et al. 1961) the fieldworkers concerned did
not adopt an active role as practitioners of medicine. To do so would have been
beyond their personal capabilities and not least, would seriously infringe the
various responsibilities that fieldworkers have, of which we spoke earlier in this
chapter. In short and quite obviously, participation must be within the bounds
of the fieldworkers’ competencies and whilst this may be determined by the
nature of the field, as in the hospital example above, it may also be shaped by the
personal characteristics of the fieldworker. Courtney (2008) for example, was a
young British white man researching Englishness, but in his hometown where
his own accent was discernibly from that region. Stephens was himself acquiring
the ‘insider knowledge’ of capoeira during his fieldwork and making sense of
and writing about that very acquisition (Stephens and Delamont 2009).
Therefore, there are interpersonal and physical demands made by active partici-
pation upon the fieldworker. Not all researchers would have been able to cope
or attune to them; if they were unable to swim for instance or had a dislike of
opera. Hence, participation in these fields would not have been feasible for all.
Other personal characteristics include gender, ethnicity and age. For example,
whilst some researchers claim to have integrated with and been accepted as
equals by groups of children as the basis of their fieldwork, examples of this are
difficult to find and those there are, usually draw attention to their role as what
68 Doing Fieldwork

Corsaro and Molinari (2000) describe as a typical adult, rather than as child
equivalent (e.g. Epstein 1998, Uprichard 2008). At the other end of the age
spectrum, fieldwork with old people generates its own issues with access and
appropriate method that demands special attention by would-be fieldworkers
(Warren et al. 2010). Whilst we could go on considering other characteristics
such as religion (Brewer 2000), or political beliefs (Fielding 1981) which either
prevent or facilitate active participation in fieldwork, the point remains the same
and has already been [Link] is, feasibility has many guises, but remains central
to the conduct of effective and active fieldwork.
Other constraints on active fieldwork will emerge from the way in which the
researcher is perceived by those he/she is researching and the role which he/she
may be attributed. Issues of gender, age, ethnicity, etc. may again play a significant
part here. For example a female fieldworker may only be given access to stereo-
typical female roles within an organization, for instance, those of a secretary or
administrative assistant rather than on the shop floor. There may also be a sense
in which those granting access to the field may not see the fieldworker as having
the necessary skills, abilities or experience for full active participation. This can
be in respect of age, as well as gender (Edwards and Hillyard 2012). Consequently,
although participation may be active, it may also be somewhat restricted and
tokenistic. The fear of this may be what leads fieldworkers to undertake covert
research, thus avoiding being cast in a particular role which would limit their
access to certain parts of the field. Whilst there are many examples of successful
covert participation, some of which we discuss in Chapter 5, we should not
assume that a covert role automatically gets around problems of limited partici-
pation or access in the field. Covert participation may give initial access to a field
which might otherwise be denied (e.g. Goffman, see Trevino 2003, also
Holdaway 1983, Humphreys 1970, Patrick 1979) but does not give the field-
worker total freedom to roam. Indeed, in some circumstances, the covert
researcher may be more constrained than the overt researcher by virtue of the
fact that he/she will usually have a particular or expected role to perform within
the field. In addition, other participants in the field will expect him/her to have
a certain level of knowledge or degree of familiarity with the field from the
outset, as this will have formed the basis of the access which has been gained.
Depending on the circumstances of the particular field, to seek to move beyond
the role which legitimates the researcher’s participation, or to ask too many
naïve questions about the central activities of the field, may result in questions
being posed about the unusual behaviour of the fieldworker which could ulti-
mately lead to him/her being exposed as a researcher. As a consequence, the
research may have to be abandoned.
Active participation may also take the form of interviewing and conversational
techniques. Again, it is not the intention to provide a ‘how to do it guide’ to
these data collection methods, as there are many such guides that do this
more than adequately. It is, however, appropriate to consider some of the issues
 Tools for the Field 69

surrounding the use of interviews and conversations in the context of active

participation not least because they represent two of the most frequently used
fieldwork methods.
Whereas active observation is largely about participating in whatever activities
take place in the field, interviewing and conversations are about active talking
and listening. This may also be seen as a form of doing rather than merely being,
However, it would also be true to see it as a form of artificial doing. By this we
refer to the fact that interviews that take place in the field are situations which
are arranged, in the great majority of cases, by the researcher, as a vehicle for
the collection of information from the researched. As such they are not natu-
rally occurring events which would happen whether or not the fieldworker
was [Link] are established precisely because he/she is there. Nevertheless,
given they are tools which interface directly with the field by seeking infor-
mation, views and reflections from actors in the field, it is legitimate to
consider them as a form of active fieldwork. Given the many different circum-
stances in which interviews are used as a means of data collection, for example
in academic and market research, in selection for jobs and places at university,
by the police and other agencies and even as a form of entertainment, the
interview is, by and large, familiar to most people. It is likely, for example, that
most people reading this book will at some time have been interviewed, even
if only by a market researcher wishing to promote a particular product or
service. As a form of fieldwork, therefore, despite being artificial, interviews are
usually a familiar and generally acceptable way of gaining detailed insight into
a particular field.
Having said that a range of different kinds of interview exist; those that are most
frequently, and arguably most appropriately, used in the context of fieldwork,
require the establishment of a good rapport between interviewer and interviewee.
As part of this, they may also involve an exchange of information between the two
(or more) parties. Whilst highly structured interviews which follow a precise and
predetermined format may gather some information that is relevant to finding out
about the field and so ‘qualify’ as fieldwork, the way in which fieldwork has been
characterized in this text, as an holistic exercise which attempts to understand the
interior world of the field, leans very clearly towards the use of less-structured or
even unstructured interviews. Here, an exchange of views between researcher and
researched is encouraged and the possibility to explore issues which arise during
the course of the interview means discussion can be shaped to address the issues
that are important to participants in the field, rather than just those which the
fieldworker considers to be important. A semi-structured schedule may be used to
guide such an interview or a much looser list of topics may be identified as a possible
direction for the interview with the interviewer seeking to cover the topics on the
list but not necessarily in any prescribed order.
As an alternative to exchanges of verbal information which are clearly identified
as interviews, active fieldwork may also include what has become known as
70 Doing Fieldwork

‘conversations with a purpose’ (Burgess 1988, Cottle 1977). Here, the emphasis
is on an exchange of information in a seemingly natural conversational style.
However, for the fieldworker the ‘conversation’ is pursued for specific reasons
with the intention of addressing particular issues commensurate with the
focus of the research. Consequently it is deemed to have a purpose. Whilst in
a very general sense all conversations may be regarded as having a purpose, in
the context of fieldwork the researcher takes steps to steer the conversation,
to ensure that the purpose is met. In some instances the person with whom
the conversation is being conducted may be aware that there is a purpose to
it and that it is not just a casual exchange. In other cases he/she may be unaware
of this. Where this is the case, questions may be posed about the ethical integ-
rity of the method, similar to those which surround the use of other forms of
covert research.
An extreme or concentrated form of interviewing, which may combine
structured and semi-structured approaches together with conversational tech-
niques is the life history interview. This may be conducted over many weeks,
months or even years with the intention of gaining as full a picture of the life
of the individual as possible. The approach is demanding of the time and the
concentration of both researcher and researched and in many ways can be seen
as a concentration of many of the aspects of fieldwork discussed so far and
some of which will come in later chapters of this book. For example, negoti-
ating and gaining agreement of people to commit to participating in such
research should not be underestimated. The management of field relations
takes on a greater intensity in a prolonged one-to-one situation, as does the
maintenance of good rapport. Furthermore, as Pole discovered in his life his-
tory study of black teachers (Pole 1999, 2001) the life history may unearth
sensitive issues which can be challenging both for the interviewee and the
[Link] detail of the approach may involve the interviewee in a re-appraisal
of his/her life as he/she constructs and reconstructs a personal narrative. In
this sense, the life history is more than a life story as the reflection that the
interviewer encourages the interviewee to engage in may be seen as part of an
analytical reconstruction of the events of the interviewee’s life. If this is the
case then the life history may be seen as a means of active participation not
only in a technical sense of data collection, but also in respect of the generation
or construction of data. Of course, here we also need to note the limitations
of such techniques. Delamont (2002), for example, reminds us that such interviews
are ‘rehearsed’ accounts – the front stage of people’s lives that they are prepared
to show to interviewers.
The point to be made from this brief discussion of participation and oral
techniques is that they are methods deployed in a strategic way with the intention
of collecting data which will facilitate an holistic understanding of the field.
Consequently, like the discussion of participation above, they may be regarded
as active methods.
 Tools for the Field 71

METHODS THAT FACILITATE PASSIVE

PARTICIPATION
Whilst active participation and the concept of ‘doing’ is central to the conduct of
effective fieldwork, other forms of participation, those we might call passive may
also be useful and appropriate methods of data collection. Inevitably, being pre-
sent in any given field, will result in exposure to data (Wolcott 2005). However,
the participative fieldworker does not rely solely on absorbing data that may
come his/her way, but must put him/herself in a position which ensures the
possibility of collecting data from simply being there is maximized. In this way,
the emphasis is still on participation but the fieldworker is engaged in a passive
role in as far as he/she is not actively involved in the activities of the field.
Typically or most frequently, passive participation involves observing and
listening. For example, the fieldworker may negotiate access to a particular field
on the understanding that he/she simply watches and records what happens
(e.g. Hillyard (2003) during her observation of lessons in a secondary school).This
may be done informally as the fieldworker tries to capture the essence of what
he/she sees, in detailed qualitative field notes (Delamont 2002, or in a more
structured way Croll 1986) where specific observation schedules are drawn up
prior to activities identified as relevant for observation begin. Arguably, observation
of this nature is still a form of participation as the researcher’s physical presence
in the field inevitably means that the field will be different from times when he/
she is not present. In addition, there is likely to be a degree of direct interaction
with the research subjects who, at the very least will be curious about the field-
worker’s activities. It remains passive, however, as the fieldworker does not take
part in the activities of the field. In the way that it has been described above, it
also remains overt, although in some instances researchers have resorted to the
use of covert observation methods, where the research subjects (or in these cir-
cumstances it is probably more accurate to refer to research objects) are unaware
that they are being researched. The use of two-way mirrors and hidden cameras
(CCTVs) offer the researcher access to a field, but from a distance (e.g. Smith
2012). To describe such instances of covert observation or surveillance as forms
of participation would probably be inappropriate as the researcher may be
engaged in a form of doing, but this does not involve physically being in the
field. In addition, passive listening may involve the fieldworker in activities
similar to covert observation where secret microphones record conversations
of research subjects and similarly, it may not be seen to constitute participa-
tion. Alternatively, fieldworkers may seek to summarize conversations from the
field as part of their field notes (Delamont 2009, Pole 1993, Scott 2010). In these
instances, verbatim accounts of what was said will not be [Link] aim will be
to convey enough detail from the spoken word in a way which not only provides an
accurate account of its content but also a sense of the context in which it occurred.
72 Doing Fieldwork

Again, as the researcher is not taking part in these verbal exchanges in any direct
sense, this form of participation is most appropriately classified as passive.
However, as it requires the physical presence of the fieldworker in the field, by
our definition, this does make it a form of fieldwork.

ACTIVELY PASSIVE PARTICIPATION

In addition to the methods discussed above, there are also a number of methods
which incorporate both active and passive characteristics. Lee (2000) in his
interesting book Unobtrusive Methods in Social Research draws on the work of
Kellehear (1993), Sechrest (1979) and Webb et al. (1966) to outline a number of
possibilities for collecting data from the field in ways which do not involve
direct interaction with the participants of the field. These range from what he
terms ‘found’ data which may include measurements of the frequency with
which particular artefacts are used by participants in the field (the classic exam-
ple being the one given by Webb et al. (1966) who observed the extent of wear
on floor tiles surrounding exhibits in a museum). Such ‘found’ data have long
had a place in the tradition of empirical research – for example Thomas’ ‘discov-
ery’ of a bundle of Polish immigrants’ correspondence to their homeland
(Thomas and Znaniecki 1918–20). More recently, we would add Savage and
Burrows’ (2009) call for digital and new social media resources to become part
of our research apparatus. So, for example, recent research by the Culture Lab
connected to Newcastle University has used technology to record the move-
ment of everyday kitchen items (the fridge or kettle) in order to explore
consumption patterns of older people. Similarly, Scott and a research team from
Sussex University studied museum visitors’ movement patterns with interactive
art displays in contrasting museum environments (Scott 2011). Perhaps in a
more orthodox manner, Lee (2000) also discusses unobtrusive observation in a
range of different circumstances, the use of personal records and documents such
as letters and diaries. What underpins the work which Lee (2000) draws on is a
concern to capitalize on everyday objects, activities, situations, basically anything
which may be considered to contribute to the field. A final example would be
the use of photographs by children of their own labour, as a means to record
their working lives (Mizen 2005). As they do not involve the researcher instigat-
ing the conditions necessary to produce data, they are essentially passive methods
reliant on techniques of gathering. They do, nevertheless, rely on the researchers’
capacity to see the possibilities of eliciting data from every day and perhaps
unexpected situations and activities, using or drawing upon what might be
termed a research imagination and in this sense we would regard them as active.
In addition to the active use of found data, there are also a number of other
sources of data that the fieldworker might [Link] the unobtrusive methods
discussed by Lee (2000) rely, in the main on ‘found’ sources of data, or devising
 Tools for the Field 73

methods to measure the level of human interaction with an object in the case
of accretion and erosion techniques, these methods rely upon the researcher
requesting that research participants engage in specific activities which will yield
specific forms of data. In these situations, the research participants are required
to be active but the fieldworker’s role, after initiating the activity, remains largely
passive. Data collection methods which fall into this category would include
activities like diary-keeping where research participants are asked to keep a sys-
tematic diary of activities they have been involved in or even of their thoughts
around a specific issue. Often, diary methods can be used to complement other
methods used in the field such as participant observation or interviews. This was
the case in a study by Mizen et al. (1999) into working children where research
participants, seventy young people aged between 13–15, were asked to write
diaries on specific issues which related to their experience of paid work. It is
worth commenting here that although in this particular study the use of diaries
was very successful, problems of attrition and poor completion are common. In
the study of working children the research team managed to overcome problems
of attrition by paying their research subjects for every completed diary they
received (Pole et al., 1999). Similarly Hillyard encountered difficulties in the
consistency across a form group of Year 7 (eleven year olds) pupil diaries that
made collecting data equally from all pupils problematic (Hillyard 2003).
However, paying participants raises other issues which relate to ethics and reli-
ability of data which will be considered in Chapter 5. Leaving such issues aside
for now, the essence of the specifically completed diary method is that the
researcher asks the researched to write about and reflect upon particular events
or activities in which he/she has been involved in some way or another. It is,
therefore, a personal account that the researcher seeks and as such it allows access
to the interior world of the social actors at the focus of the research, albeit at a
spatial and temporal distance. The researcher plays a passive role, although he/she
is responsible for setting up the diary process by giving instructions to the
diarist(s), whilst the research subject(s) are in active mode.
In some ways, a similar approach underpins the use of photography and other
visual imagery such as video and painting/drawing as a form of fieldwork. Here
it is usually common for researchers to ask research participants to represent
aspects of their lives using a specific visual medium. Harper (2002) used photo-
graphs as a means to prompt, for example, the memories of retired farmworkers
in his interviews exploring working patterns amongst farmworkers during the
1950s in the United States. O’Neill and Hubbard (2010) used ‘walking’ video
tours with participants as a means to explore the experiences of immigrants in
a British city. Again, the study by Mizen et al. (1999) provides a useful example
of this approach. The same seventy young people who were asked to complete
diaries throughout the period of a full year, were also given disposable cameras
and asked to take photographs of any aspects of their working lives that were
74 Doing Fieldwork

significant to them. Bolton et al. (2001) argue that the resulting collection of
photographs offered a different insight into the world of children’s work and
economic lives, often portraying detail not merely of work processes but also
shedding light on methodological issues relating to the role of children in
research (Pole et al., 1999). Again, there are ethical issues surrounding the use
of photographic and other visual images which will be discussed in the fol-
lowing chapter, notably around privacy and confidentiality. However, leaving
these issues aside for the time being, such approaches may offer insights into
particular aspects of social life, unobtainable in other ways. Indeed, the grow-
ing literature on the use of visual methods (e.g. Grimshaw 2001, Pink 2012,
2013, Pole 2004) as a means of understanding the social, clearly identifies
techniques such as photography and video as capable of contributing to field-
work in ways which lead to a better understanding of the significance and
meaning of social behaviour. Again, with such approaches it is the researched
rather than the researchers who are in the active role. As the subheading to this
section of the chapter indicates, these are methods in which the fieldworker’s
passivity facilitates the active generation of data (Mason 1996) by the research
participants. Indeed, it is the passivity of the fieldworker and the privileging of
the research participants, as the means of generating data, which may be seen
as a means of democratizing the research process (Pole et al. 1999). Where
such approaches are taken, it is the research participants who determine what
is to be included in their accounts of the social action and hence, what is to
count as data.
Other fieldwork tools which fall into this hybrid category of active passivity
might include adopting a conscious awareness of the surroundings in which
social action takes place. For example, some sociologists and social geographers
have emphasized the significance of the use of space to understanding aspects
of social life. This is particularly apparent in the context of childhood research;
for example, Christensen and James (2008), James and James (2008), Uprichard
(2008, 2010), have in their different ways taken account of the ways in which
the use of different kinds of space is able to reveal something about the material
and symbolic position of children in late modern society. Similar approaches
could be taken in respect of researching other social actors such as elderly or
disabled people. Moreover, we need not confine ourselves to space as a physical
entity or as an organizing concept, we could, for example, extend our observa-
tions to the interface of specific groups of people with architecture or with a
wide range of artefacts. The point to be made here is that fieldwork, in addition
to collecting data from individual social actors is also about the development of
a sensitivity to and significance of, the surroundings and objects that shape and
contextualize social action. In this respect, the fieldworker needs to remain
open to possibilities for the collection of field-based data as and when they
occur. Returning to one of the themes identified in Chapter 1 of this text, the
need for flexibility in fieldwork design and practice is evident, as we consider
 Tools for the Field 75

the data potential not just of the research participants but also of the physical
and social context in which they are studied. In our own work, we have noted
the impact spaces have upon the frequency of contact – or infrequency in rural
areas also acknowledged by John Urry (Hillyard and Bagley 2014). Urry under-
stands that space and nature possess a certain kind of agency that exerts an
influence upon us. This is subtle, almost non-­cognitive, in the sense that we
become so familiar with our surroundings that in fulfilling some activities
we are almost on ‘automatic pilot’. Fieldwork, we would argue, needs to be
aware and acknowledge Urry’s argument. Most recently, the work of US
scholar Katherine Hayles, takes this even further, exploring our pre-conscious
cognition.

CONCLUSION
From this wide-ranging discussion of different types of data and the active and
passive methods by which they may be collected, we may conclude that there
are few limits to the methods or techniques used in fieldwork beyond the very
general qualification that they should facilitate the collection of data which will
help us to explain and understand the social processes that constitute the field.
In addition, there are also limits imposed by the various responsibilities that we
discussed earlier in this chapter, which the fieldworker has. It should also be
obvious from our foregoing discussion that some fieldwork methods are insti-
gated by the researcher and as such may be seen as the creation of artificial
situations. For example, whilst interviews may be the prime and most common
example of such manufacture, others such as requesting that research participants
keep diaries (Morrison and Galloway 1996), take photographs (Bolton et al.
2001, Mizen 2005) or draw pictures (Christensen and James 2000) are also
examples of fieldwork methods. With the production and collection of textual
data, be it visual or written, the fieldworker is usually cast in a passive role as
direct participation in events which are represented in the text is in these
circumstances, limited. However, other methods which might be regarded as
artificial or manufactured and are perhaps not commonly used by fieldworkers
offer the possibility of more active participation. For example, the work by
Sparkes (2007, 2009, Sparkes et al. 2012) combines a range of activities in which
he is centrally involved in researching, in order to stimulate the collection of
what many would regard as unconventional data and representational forms. For
example, this may include forms of dance, storytelling and drama. Hutchinson
(2014) involved interviewing as well as visiting sites and having a virtual pres-
ence in a virtual environment during her fieldwork exploring the online world
of Final Fantasy IV. The intention behind the activities being the same as that
which underpins more traditional fieldwork methods, namely access to the interior
world of those who constitute the field.
76 Doing Fieldwork

Whilst the intention of this chapter has been to illustrate some of the principal
approaches to doing fieldwork, it is also hoped that a sense of fieldwork as
something dynamic and exciting has been conveyed. The rules of fieldwork are
minimal and part of the task of the fieldworker is to actively look for new possi-
bilities of gaining access to the interior world of the field and those who
constitute it. The abiding principle of fieldwork must be to represent as fairly as
possible the life of the field. Having said this, it is not the intention to suggest
that fieldwork represents a possibility of objective, value-free research. The very
presence of the researcher in the field rules this out. Moreover, the complexity
of the field and the inevitability of multiple perspectives on it from those who
constitute it, add not only to the impossibility of a value-free representation but
also to the undesirability of it. The fields in which social research takes place are
highly complex and fieldwork is an attempt to acknowledge and represent that
complexity rather than reduce it to an incomplete notion of certainty. The
messiness of fieldwork is merely a reflection of the messiness of the forms of
social life which it is helping to understand.

FURTHER READING

Atkinson P (2013) Ethnography and craft knowledge. Qualitative Sociology Review,

9(2): 56–63.
Christensen P, Mikkelsen MR, Nielsen TAS and Harder H (2011) Children,
mobility, and space: Using GPS and mobile phone technologies in ethnographic
research. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 5(3): 227–46.
Back L (2012) Tape recorder. In: Lury C and Wakeford N (eds) Inventive Methods:
The Happening of the Social. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 245–60.
Thurnell-Read T (2012) What happens on tour: The premarital stag tour, homo-
social bonding, and male friendship. Men and Masculinities, 15(3): 249–70.
 5
FIELDWORK:
VALUES AND ETHICS

Chapter overview
• Implicit in fieldwork is a broad ethical position allied to an insider,
interactionist research tradition.
• The fieldwork account is produced by the researcher on the basis of his/
her judgements rather than something that occurs naturally – there is
no escape from the values upon which it is constructed and conducted.
• Thinking carefully about two central aspects of the research process –
method and knowledge – will contribute to a robust research design
and be essential to the effective defence of the research.
• Access and informed consent require constant attention throughout the
research process and entirely covert research can very rarely be justified.
• The fieldworker’s task is to find his/her own perspective and to use
this as a means of interpretation and representation of the social
action in the on-going research process.

WHY DO FIELDWORK?
Implicit in the argument that researchers should be afforded access to other
people’s lives is a belief that there are good reasons for such access. This in itself
is an ethical standpoint which rests upon a general belief in the value of research
as a worthwhile activity. This leads us to attempt to unpack the reasons why
research, which uses fieldwork to provide that view of the lives of others, should
be seen in such a way. In short, what are the reasons for research and fieldwork?
78 Doing Fieldwork

There may be many reasons why people engage in research. For example, for
reasons related to social policy or a need for information upon which to base
action or intervention, for reasons related to evaluation of a particular set of
activities or policies with a view to taking action for improvement or to put
things right. Alternatively, it may be undertaken for more fundamental reasons
which are about understanding social life not merely at a policy, practical or
descriptive level, but at a more conceptual or theoretical level, which is more to
do with understanding for understanding’s sake, driven by curiosity, than for any
practical concerns. Underpinning all of these reasons is a desire to know and to
understand particular and more general aspects of social life. In the way that
fieldwork is defined in this text (see Chapter 1), its role in collecting and gen-
erating data places it at the centre of research endeavour, as a means of
facilitating this quest to know and to understand. Implicit in this portrayal of
research and fieldwork as a means of knowing the social, is a belief that it rep-
resents not only an effective and reliable way of finding out about aspects of
social life, but also that providing certain conditions are met, it is an acceptable
way of acquiring knowledge. By this we mean that fieldwork as an activity
directed towards certain aims and objectives, is seen as legitimate activity as a
basis for finding things out. Indeed, we might argue that fieldwork has itself
become an accepted and broadly understood aspect of global capitalism. How
many of us, for example, have not been asked to co-operate in some kind of
fieldwork, either randomly, perhaps being stopped by interviewers in the high
street, or having been selected as part of a research design because our personal
characteristics fit the profile required of the study that is being carried out?
Who doesn’t have some kind of record collating their social transactional data?
Unlike other forms of research, for example experimental psychology, certain
forms of medical research or research associated with say, theoretical physics, we
would suggest that not only is there a broad acceptance of fieldwork amongst
the general public as a worthwhile activity, but also a utilitarian understanding
of what it might entail and what it intends to achieve. In short, we have become
participants in and consumers of fieldwork to the extent that it now forms an
unexceptional aspect of many people’s lives. In this sense there is a general
recognition of it as something that is worthwhile or at least has the potential
to make a positive contribution to social life. This general, common sense per-
spective of fieldwork may, therefore, be seen as a broad ethical position, as
although we may wish to add many caveats, fieldwork is not something that
should automatically result in objection or rejection.
However, saying that, many members of the general population are now
familiar with some aspects of fieldwork, having experience as the focus of it, is
not to imply that they are themselves fieldworkers, but it is to suggest that they
may have been part of the focus of someone else’s fieldwork. As we have seen
and shall see in later chapters, fieldwork is about much more than the collection
or provision of data. Nevertheless, the fact that many are familiar with some
 Fieldwork: Values and Ethics 79

aspects of it serves to demystify fieldwork and to make it understandable by

those who are often at its focus. Again, in general terms this familiarity may be
seen as an ethical issue as fieldwork may not only focus on ‘ordinary’ life or
particular aspects of it, but is also accessible to ‘ordinary’ people. The fieldworker
does not hide behind a white coat or a laboratory bench. The practice of field-
work does not require special, experimental conditions or expensive equipment.
For the most part, as we have already seen, fieldwork relies on the capacity of
the researcher to be there (Geertz 1988, Wolcott 2005), to be aware and to
record what happens, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes after the event. In
this sense, we would argue, the fact that fieldwork is usually concerned with
aspects of everyday social life gives it a sense of the ordinary, rather than the
exotic. As such it is not attempting to deceive, to misrepresent or to appear
esoteric. Its very purpose is to pursue understandings of social life by concentrating
on the ways in which real people live their lives.

PERSPECTIVES AND POSITIONS

In broad terms, the approach which is outlined above, and in earlier chapters in
this volume, may be seen as an ethical position in itself, as it attributes greater
value to an interactionist perspective which is based upon attempts to understand
human behaviour through an analysis of meaning, interaction and interpretation
than it does to perspectives which privilege social structure. This is not to imply
that it fails to recognize the importance of structure in shaping social action
(Archer 1995, 2007, Giddens 1979, 1984). Archer (2007), for example, conceptu-
alizes social agents within their situations via a three-stage model. The first
includes the structural and cultural, the second the agent’s own subjective reac-
tion to order and finally, the third perceives a reflexive, subject deliberation upon
both their subjective reflections and their objective circumstances (Archer 2007:
17). Archer’s (2007) concern was to prioritize the third stage as in need of serious
sociological attention. We might see ‘traditional’ ethnography (Atkinson 2012,
Walford 2009) more attuned to the second stage. Like Archer (2007), we are
concerned here with the lived experience of aspects of social life, the way in
which individuals make sense of and encounter social structures as they go about
their lives. To this end, we would suggest that there is an epistemological and
technical fit between fieldwork and the methods employed in order that it may
be conducted. Implicit here is a broad ethical position allied to an insider, inter-
actionist research tradition, the antecedence of which has a tendency to be
overlooked (Atkinson and Housley 2003, Maines 2001).
As we have seen so far, research based on fieldwork is not usually large scale,
it is not concerned to produce generalizations as means of social explanation, or
statistical analyses which can be tested for forms of reliability and significance.
Fieldwork is usually concerned with discrete social settings which are time and
80 Doing Fieldwork

space bound, within which the detail of social life is studied. Consequently, as
we have seen in Chapter 4, the research tools used by those who engage in
fieldwork are designed to provide rich and thick (Geertz 1986 [1973]) detailed
descriptions of what occurs within those discrete locations. From this, however,
it should not be inferred that fieldwork is concerned merely with accounts of
observable events and phenomena in some kind of crude positivistic way. The
methods deployed are also concerned with tapping into the ways in which indi-
viduals interpret and make sense of events. In this sense, they are concerned with
the unobservable and the intangible aspects of social life alongside the observ-
able and tangible. Characterizing fieldwork in this way, locates it within the
broad spectrum of interpretivist and naturalistic research which:

refers to social research which attempts to minimize the degree to which it

interferes with the situations and processes being studied and which attempts to
produce findings which are consistent with the view of social reality of respond-
ents or people within the research setting (Pole and Lampard 2002: 290).

It is this view, therefore, which establishes the broad political and ethical parameters
of fieldwork. From the outset, therefore, we can argue that research based on field-
work is subjective research. It is subjective in that it seeks to reflect the experiences,
values, beliefs, prejudices, hopes, fears, etc., not of the fieldworker, but of those at
the heart of the fieldwork – the research participants. In this sense, fieldwork could
be said to be partisan research merely by virtue of the fact that it identifies this
insider perspective as interesting and important. By attaching value to this it
inevitably privileges the perspective of the insider over any other. This starting
point is, therefore, a value position. Having said this, it is important to add some
notes of qualification here. By saying that fieldwork reflects the beliefs, values,
prejudices, etc., of those being researched, this is by no means to imply that this is
done uncritically or that such values are reflected as anything other than those of
the researched. It is important to stress that the researcher is not, usually, in the
business of espousing, promoting or necessarily rejecting them. From this we
might conclude that the researcher is, therefore, no more than a conduit for what-
ever he/she sees, hears or experiences, that he/she has no role other than that of
scribe or reporter. However, to do so would be to misunderstand the purpose of
fieldwork and of the role of the fieldworker as we shall explain below.

VALUES
THE FIELDWORKER AS NEUTRAL OBSERVER
Whilst the foundation of fieldwork may be the collection and reporting of data,
drawn from first-hand experience of the research location (the field), it is also
 Fieldwork: Values and Ethics 81

about analysis and interpretation. As we have said above, the very reason for
fieldwork is to explain and seek to understand aspects of social life. To provide
explanations, the researcher must make a number of decisions about the data
that have been collected, about how they have been collected and perhaps most
importantly, what they say about the lives that they reflect. These decisions take
us to the essence of concerns about the ethics and politics of fieldwork, for in
making such decisions, the researcher is involved in a process of [Link]
judgements he/she makes about how to interpret the data, what to regard as
significant and what not, what to include in the analysis and what to leave out,
are central to the picture of social life that the researcher is able to construct
from the research. The account of the social action that has been the focus of
the fieldwork is something that is produced by the researcher on the basis of
his/her judgements rather than something that occurs naturally. As this is a
human process, it brings into question the basis upon which the researcher
makes the judgements upon which the account is [Link] fact that it is about
judgements made by the fieldworker means that it has the potential to be
highly problematic. The judgements made will, inevitably, be founded on the
beliefs, ethic and moral codes, interests and experiences not only of those who
are being researched, but also of the fieldworker. Consequently, it is the coin-
cidence of the values of the researcher with those of the researched which is
central to the outcomes of research based on fieldwork, in that the accounts of
the field will, inevitably, be a product of both sets of values. As the social actors
construct their social lives, so too does the researcher construct the accounts of
them (Atkinson 1990). Whilst the researcher may not consciously seek to
imbue the accounts with his/her own values the fact that fieldwork is a social
process, as is the means by which it is represented, means inevitably that the
accounts will be riven with the values that have underpinned the research pro-
cess, its methodology and the epistemology upon which they are founded. It
might be argued, therefore, that all research is subjective in that there is no
escape from the values upon which it is constructed and conducted (Hammersley
2000, Weber 1948 [1919]).
To illustrate our own stance in relation to Weber, it might be useful to consider
the fundamental purpose of fieldwork in which we characterize a process
designed to produce knowledge of a given situation from an enlightenment
perspective (Hammersley 2000). In choosing to engage in research we, ipso
facto, believe it is a worthwhile activity which can help us to get to grips with
or to the heart of the matter. Or, to put it more directly, we believe that
research and the systematic process upon which it is based can take us towards
the truth. Whilst eschewing crude positivistic notions of certainty, we agree
with Hammersley (2000, 2010b) and his collaborators’ (Cooper et al. 2012)
suggestion that the reasons why social scientists invest time and considerable
effort in careful and robust research design, ensuring that the method fits the
focus of their research, must be because they believe they are able to achieve
82 Doing Fieldwork

explanations and understanding of social behaviour which are conclusive.

Their intention is to provide or perhaps discover (Glaser and Strauss 1967)
knowledge which is robust and will withstand scrutiny from the scientific
community. From an enlightenment perspective, therefore, research is founded
on a belief that the research process is capable of producing conclusive
knowledge. This belief is in itself a value position, as it assumes that such
knowledge is attainable. Implicitly, such an assumption also demonstrates that
research cannot be value-free. Moreover, if we add to this debate by consider-
ing, as Hammersley (2000, 2008) does, the challenge to research brought by
post-enlightenment theories to the idea of conclusive knowledge, then the
case for value-free research is further weakened. In short, such theories ques-
tion the very notion of certainty or truth. They claim that all knowledge is
partisan, in that it is reflective of a particular perspective. At best then, it is only
ever possible for research to yield a version of the truth. Objective knowledge
does not exist and, therefore, if this argument is taken to its logical conclusion,
it would be pointless for researchers to strive towards it. If one were to accept
this position, then the whole rationale for social research would be called into
question and it would seem reasonable to pose the question; if there can be
no certainty in the accuracy or truth of research findings, then why should
anyone wish to conduct research at all?
If we choose to answer this question from a pessimistic position, which
would be to agree that research knowledge is inevitably subjective knowledge
and therefore of little use, then we would be accepting a relativist perspective
on knowledge. This would be to argue that given there is no possibility of cer-
tainty in the knowledge to come from research, then research is little different
from propaganda, conjecture, rhetoric, journalism or even fiction. Our position
would be one that saw no distinction between research knowledge and any
other kinds of knowledge, all of which would be of equal value and have
similar claims to truth. Concerns about absolute relativism such as this have
punctuated social science for many years (Atkinson 1990, Atkinson et al. 2001,
Atkinson and Housley 2003) and may have led some researchers to lose faith
in their work and in the integrity of research per se. Alternatively, a relativist
position may lead us towards a postmodern perspective on research (Lather
2001, MacLure 2011, Stronach and MacLure 1997) which rather than seeing
relativism as problematic, regards it as axiomatic and in which case it may not
be something about which we should agonize unduly. However, for many
researchers, positions of relativism or postmodernism are potentially ruinous
because of their disintegrating character:

In the case of constructionism, there is an important distinction to be drawn

between, on the one hand, those versions that suspend assumptions about the
reality of the constructed phenomena, or about the truth of the discursive
claims being examined, in order to focus exclusively on how these phenomena
 Fieldwork: Values and Ethics 83

were socially constructed, and, on the other, those that treat constructionism as
a sceptical philosophical position throwing into doubt or uncertainty all claims
to knowledge or judgements about existence and truth. The first is a reasonable
strategy, though it may imply a disciplinary difference in focus from conventional
social science. By contrast, the more radical position breaches the essential
assumptions of any kind of inquiry. If we cannot take it that the phenomena
investigated, and this includes discursive practices, exist independently of any
account we give of them, and/or if we are barred from assuming that reasonable
judgements are possible about which account is more likely to be true, then
enquiry is impossible. Whatever the philosophical value of scepticism of this
kind, it is not a position that a social scientist can adopt: it is incompatible with
empirical research (Cooper et al. 2012: 10–11, original emphasis).

We therefore prefer to share MacLure’s (2011) recognition that ‘truths are

always partial and provisional’ rather than her metaphor of the enlightenment
project as a ‘crumbling edifice’ (MacLure 2011: 997). Yet if the researcher is
determined to hold on to the belief that research is worthwhile and that the
knowledge to come from it has some value, he/she must have a means of coping
with such challenges to research and its output. Furthermore, adopting a
position which challenges the possibility of truth does not free the researcher
from concerns about value positions. Asserting that truth is not possible is in
itself a value position, as is a belief in the multiplicity of truth. If the search for
truth is seen as a value position, then so must its antithesis which denies that
truth is possible.
For many social researchers, debates about multiple truths or no truths at all
may be a luxury, only afforded to those who write and think about research
rather than those who do it. Rather than merely being a cheap jibe at the
expense of social theorists or professional methodologists, there is a common
sense logic to this statement in that presumably those who engage in research
hold an implicit belief that it is worthwhile and that it has a capacity to produce
something that is of value, be that useful or interesting. If this is not the case,
then the researcher must be committed to wasting his/her time. Given that this
seems unlikely, it is probably safe to conclude that although researchers are aware
of the challenges brought to their work by post-modernist, post-enlightenment
and relativist positions, they are, nevertheless, committed to research as a worth-
while activity.1 Moreover, given this text is essentially about doing research, this
is also the position which we take. However, this is not to espouse what might
be seen as a kind of blind-faith approach to the conduct of research, or a belief
that all research always and inevitably produces outcomes that are worthwhile.
As researchers committed to conducting work which will further knowledge in
our chosen field, we must surely be able and prepared to make judgements about
research knowledge and the value that should be ascribed to it. In doing this we
are, however, getting close to re-opening the debate about relativism, as coming
84 Doing Fieldwork

to a conclusion about what is and what is not worthwhile will be as difficult as

declaring what is the truth. Indeed, we might argue that research output can
only be deemed to be worthwhile if it is the truth.
However, one important way in which researchers may come to a conclusion
about the degree to which research outcomes are worthwhile, and in this con-
text, we may take worthwhile to mean the contribution the research knowledge
makes to the given discipline, is to look to the research rationale, design and its
method. Here, the researcher should be able to point to a robust foundation for
his/her work which will differentiate it from the likes of journalism, conjecture
and fiction discussed above. He/she must be prepared to open the work to close
scrutiny from his/her peers and from whatever user communities may be
involved in the study in respect of the rationale for it and the way that it has
been conducted and data analysed. The close reading not only of the findings of
the research but also its methodology will help to establish its reliability, to locate
it within the cannon of existing knowledge in its field and contribute to debates
about the extent to which the research has moved the field on. Although peer
scrutiny is an important aspect of all aspects of the research process and of its
output, it should not however, be regarded as a panacea in respect of debates
about truth and certainty. Indeed, if the degree to which research findings and
output can be regarded as worthwhile is determined, to a large extent, by its
interpretation, interrogation, acceptance or rejection by members of user and
research communities, then the question of values remains central. The judge-
ments made of the research and its conclusions at this stage, as at all others, are
based on the values of social actors, in this case members of the academic and
user communities to whom the research has relevance. In defence, we might
argue here that those making judgements at this stage are outside of the imme-
diate research process, may not have any vested interest in the research outcomes
and have not been party to the micro-politics of the research setting which may
affect any reading of the findings. Nevertheless, the judgements that are made of
the research do not emerge from an intellectual and social vacuum. They are,
inevitably, a product of those who make them and will, therefore, be imbued
with their values. Scrutiny is, therefore, important but it does not remove the
research process or findings from concerns about values or from charges of rela-
tivism. Indeed, it might be argued that it merely introduces more values to the
process, those of the wider academic or research community and members of
the various interest groups who may evaluate the research.

AVOIDING RELATIVISM
At this point a feeling of futility may be setting in. If the research process is riven
with values from start to finish then we may, reluctantly, come to the conclusion
that any contribution it makes to our knowledge of the social world will always
 Fieldwork: Values and Ethics 85

be contingent on the values that underpin the research process. Ironically, this
may be a truth or a fact that we have to accept. However, before we decide to
abandon all ideas of research as pointless and decide to write a novel instead,
there are a number of issues we should consider which may serve to temper the
idea that research is mere opinion and conjecture on the part of the researcher.
Firstly, we should return to the question of research design and research
method, as it is important to stress that decisions about methods of collecting,
generating and analysing data are not made arbitrarily. Researchers have a wide
array of research tools at their disposal and as we have seen in Chapter 4 of this
text, the decision of which tools to use in the field is made on the basis of care-
ful consideration of the nature of the research focus, limitations of the research
site, research funding and its timescale. In addition, as Hammersley (2008) is
clear, decisions about the type of method to use are made not solely on the basis
of the technical issues such as cost and location but are also underpinned by
epistemological considerations about the nature of the knowledge that the
methods will yield. For example, a researcher wishing to produce wide-scale
generalizations across large research populations will require different methods
from those who are concerned to produce thick description (Geertz 1986
[1973]). The choice is not merely about tools but also about the nature of what
can be said of the social world as a result of the research. Whilst we have already
acknowledged that all decisions are based on values, the coincidence of techni-
cal and epistemological concerns at the research design stage necessitates careful
consideration of the range of options open to the fieldworker. Whilst we would
agree with Cooper et al.’s (2012) assertion that we are working at a time of
paradigm wars, like Bryman (1984) we would find it unusual for any researcher
to cleave, unquestioningly to the same set of methods or a theoretical position
regardless of the particular characteristics of the specific study. Being attuned to
the various possibilities and their consequences, therefore, is likely to temper any
rush to research without thinking through the likely outcomes. Although this
dual concern for method and knowledge will not remove the values from the
study, they will nevertheless, be exercised within what might be seen as a ration-
ale framework. Moreover, thinking through the way in which these two central
aspects of the research process link together will contribute to a robust research
design, which will be essential to the effective defence of the research.
The second point to note in this defence of research against accusations of
futility, conjecture and absolute relativism relates to the standpoint of the
researcher. In some instances, for example feminist research (Delamont 2003,
Skeggs 2001, 2011), there may be a clear imperative on the part of the
researcher to conduct research and present its findings in a way that advances
a particular political or social cause. Both Delamont and Skeggs are very clear
in that their approach is based upon their own feminist politics and intellectual
autobiography. Hence ‘it is impossible to have one water-tight definition, as
ethnography is used to mean different things when it emerges in different
86 Doing Fieldwork

disciplinary spaces’ (Skeggs 2001: 426–7). But even Skeggs acknowledges, at

heart, there remains the concern to unravel the process by which capitalism
generates new sources of value – for example through the structure and organ-
ization of social classes. This then provides an impetus for fieldwork to explore
this new source of value’s affects upon our everyday lives (Skeggs 2011).
Fieldwork becomes a means to investigate how we are doing value differently.
Within ethnography there has been an emergent ‘critical ethnography’ that at
its core seeks to make a difference to the social lives of those researched
(Madison 2011,Thomas 1993). Similarly, there are many researchers who regard
their work as central to bringing about change in a particular field and whose
research may be funded by or operated in collaboration with organizations
(e.g. charities, NGOs) who are committed to bringing about such change; for
example, O’Neill’s (2012) account of bringing together ethnographic practice,
participatory arts and public scholarship. Alternatively, for some, their work
might be motivated by the urge to highlight the needs and agency of excluded
or marginalized groups, such as the elderly (Hogan and Warren 2012) or mar-
ginalized homosexual rural residents (Fenge and Jones 2012) by exposing the
patterns of social exclusion they are forced to endure. Where this occurs, then
the values of the researcher with respect to motivation for embarking on the
particular study are clear from its outset. Moreover, the objectives of the research
are usually spelled out explicitly in terms of what the intended impact of the
research will be. In the case of Hogan and Warren (2012) this would be to redress
the negative and pejorative body-image and social expectations associated with
ageing in contemporary society and for Fenge and Jones (2012) to raise aware-
ness and understanding of the presence of a gay community in the English
countryside. Consequently, those who engage with the ensuing publications –
both written, visual and in film – and evaluate the contribution of the research
may do so against its clearly articulated aims. In such instances, the values of the
researcher are integral to the social and political imperatives of the research.
For most researchers, however, their work is not underpinned by such a
clearly defined catalyst. This is not to say that most researchers are disinterested
in the issues that they research or in any policy and practice outcomes that might
flow from their work. In fact the opposite is more likely the case, with interest
and genuine curiosity providing the original impetus and motivation for engag-
ing in the research. For many researchers, however, their intention is to
understand the field and the lives of the social actors that constitute it and not
necessarily to change it. This may be the role of practitioners and policy makers
who make use of the research, but it is not necessarily the raison d’etre for the
research. This is similar to the distinction made by the Economic and Social
Research Council (ESRC) in its understanding of impact that distinguishes
between impact upon social and economic wellbeing and contributions towards
scientific knowledge. In this sense it is important to draw a distinction between
researcher as advocate and researcher as inquisitor, where the former is con-
cerned to effect change in social behaviour, beliefs or attitudes and the latter to
 Fieldwork: Values and Ethics 87

understand it. However, to suggest that the two are mutually exclusive is patently
erroneous as one would clearly need to understand a situation in order to be an
effective advocate and understanding would only emerge via inquisition. The
distinction does, however, suggest that for most researchers there is not auto-
matically an explicit political or social position or cause they wish to champion
through their work. It is not, however, intended to pass any judgement as to the
worth of one over the other.
Clearly, though they may all be based on fieldwork, different kinds of
research will be conducted for different reasons and it is the reasons which may
hold particular relevance to questions of value. This takes us to the third issue
in this defence of research against charges of relativism. Here, the work of
Weber (1948) [1919] is helpful in its distinction between value neutrality and
value relevance. For Weber, value neutrality or value freedom meant a freedom
from all values. It was enshrined, therefore, in a search for the truth. However,
given that truth itself is a value, value neutrality could only ever be an ideal at
which to aim, rather than something that could be achieved. It is, therefore,
Weber’s concept of value relevance that is of greater use to our discussion thus
far in this chapter. Here, Weber believed that research could and should have
relevance to practical values and possibly to particular groups. If researchers are
to embrace this distinction, then their research will be selected according to
its relevance to particular values. The distinction is clever and useful in that it
allows researchers to hold to an idea of value neutrality whilst at the same time
recognizing that whilst this is associated with the concept of truth it remains
unattainable. Nevertheless, it also allows for what might be seen as a control
on values in that these are identified and recognized at the outset of the
research and its findings must, therefore, be judged in accordance with those
values. In the examples discussed above, the value relevance of Hogan and
Warren 2012, Warren et al. 2010) and that of Fenge and Jones (2012) of their
work was made explicit at the outset of their respective studies. Here, it was
clear that the research was intended to highlight the creativity, productivity
and authority of older people, particularly women (Hogan and Warren 2012)
and the position, identity and engagement with a community of gay older
people in rural areas (Fenge and Jones 2012).2 In each case it was clear where
the researchers stood on the issues being researched and there were a number
of specific interest groups for whom the research held particular salience. In
each case, therefore, the values of the researchers were apparent and the find-
ings of their work could be judged in accordance with them. Similar claims
could also be made for the feminist and critical ethnography standpoints
mentioned earlier and for other examples within the research literature. For
example, within the rural field, standpoints have included those advocating
more generic, broader-sweep ‘green environmentalism’ (Halfacree 2007) or
even jointly-authored articles where both sides of an argument are acknowl-
edged in an advocacy of fieldwork to explore game shooting (Hillyard and
Burridge 2012). In such cases, therefore, the research may be regarded as
88 Doing Fieldwork

partisan research but its rationale and the position of the researcher is clearly
articulated. In this context, for Weber (1948) [1919] whilst research must seek
the truth it must simultaneously recognize that the truth remains an ideal. Any
truth that is achieved, therefore, may only be regarded as such if it is value-
relevant truth. It is here, also, that the influential work of Gouldner (1973) is
relevant. Whilst he acknowledges that all positions are inevitably partisan,
Gouldner believes that a degree of objectivity is possible by the researcher
adopting an outsider’s perspective (see also Hammersley 2000). By this he is
not suggesting a methodological approach that is not commensurate with the
methods of fieldwork, rather he advocates that the fieldworker should identify
a standpoint that is different from the position of the research participants. In
doing so, Gouldner believes the fieldworker is able to do justice to the perspec-
tive of the participants and thereby achieve a degree of objectivity. Clearly,
Gouldner’s notion of a standpoint is different from that discussed above in rela-
tion to the examples of age and feminism. Nevertheless, there are some
similarities in approach. Although Gouldner is not advocating partisan research
as feminist and participatory researchers engaged with praxis do, his position
has similarities with theirs in that it enables the standpoint of the researcher to
be acknowledged and taken account of. Consequently, readers and users of any
such research are in effect, able to take account of at least some of the values of
the researcher, in the accounts of the field that he/she produces.

WHOSE SIDE(S) ARE WE ON?

From the foregoing discussion and the examples of value relevant and stand-
point research, we may come to the conclusion that although value neutrality
may be an objective of research that is based on fieldwork, in reality it remains
inevitably unattainable. This may be due to the social processes that underpin all
fieldwork, the fact it is reliant on the perception and judgement of the researcher
from conceptualization to conclusion. Alternatively it may be conducted to
make a contribution to a specific cause or interest group. If we accept either of
these positions then not only does value neutrality remain illusory but the
researcher is inevitably cast as partisan. In short he/she may be seen to be taking
sides in the research.
For Howard Becker (1967) the issue of researchers taking sides was the basis
of the celebrated paper ‘Whose side are we on?’This was followed some thirteen
years later by an equally important paper by Barnes (1979) who asked the related
question ‘Who Should Know What?’ In posing these important questions Becker
and Barnes drew attention to the significance of the researcher as a political
actor in the research process, specifically in relation to the ways in which data
are interpreted and analysed, and in turn to the uses to which the outcomes of
research may be put. In considering the ethics and politics of fieldwork these
 Fieldwork: Values and Ethics 89

two questions are important in simply acknowledging that there may be

different sides to research and that the researcher will need to make decisions
about where and how to focus his/her attentions, what weight to give to differing
perspectives within the field and how to represent contrasting and perhaps con-
flicting positions. The situation for the fieldworker is, therefore, complex and
riven with the need for judgement.
If we take Becker’s question first, there are a number of dimensions that we
should consider. In the first place, what is meant by sides? Becker makes it
clear in his paper that any discussion as to whether the researcher should take
sides or not is pointless. In short, he argues that as it is impossible to conduct
social research that is ‘uncontaminated by personal and political sympathies’
then the question should not be about whether or not the researcher should
take sides, as this is inevitable, but whose side should he/she take (Becker 1967:
239)? Becker discusses the relevance of hierarchies of credibility in social life
and in accounts of research. One of the outcomes of social research is that,
through the research process, power relations come to be exposed rather than
any deliberate intention to explore them. Hence Becker’s is an individualist,
rather than collective, sociology rather than one focused purely upon the
underdog (as Gouldner assumed). Therefore Becker argues, like Goffman
(1983), that perspectives on the reality of any given situation espoused by
those higher up the social hierarchy will usually be afforded greater credibility
than those lower down. He states:

In any system of ranked groups, participants take it as given that members of the
highest group have the right to define the way things really are. In any organization,
no matter what the rest of the organization chart shows, the arrows indicating
the flow of information point up, thus demonstrating (at least formally) that
those at the top have access to a more complete picture of what is going on
than anyone else (Becker 1967: 241).

For Becker, this is problematic and the research task becomes one of giving
opportunity or voice to those lower down the organization who may have an
alternative and perhaps conflicting perspective on the reality of the given situation.
In this respect, Becker argues that the researcher is (or should be) on the side
of those who are not members of the highest group. Becker’s position is not
one of value neutrality but may be seen to accord to one of value relevance.
The important contribution that he makes, however, is the contention that the
debate should not be about whether or not researchers should take sides as this
is inevitable. It is, however, about which or whose side they should take. This
position is one very different from those who espouse a value-free research as
the only or most desirable means of achieving knowledge of the social world.
Barnes (1979) also acknowledges that research is inevitably riven with the
vested interests of the different participants, be they sponsors, those being
researched (the citizens) and the researchers (the scientists). For him, however,
90 Doing Fieldwork

the issue is not one of taking sides but of finding a way through these different
and possibly conflicting positions. For Barnes, the scientist (researcher) has a key
role in mediation here. He states:

The research process is thus one in which several different parties are involved
whose interests and obligations are partly parallel and partly divergent. In general
it is the scientist who is the entrepreneur who takes the initiative in trying to
get the parties to cooperate fruitfully, so that the new value, in the form of
knowledge or action, emerges from the joint endeavour (Barnes 1979: 88).

Barnes’ position, whilst acknowledging the inevitability of values also identifies

what might be seen a compromise between the various interested parties, as a
means of taking things forward. Although such a role may be a reality of the
research process, Barnes does not acknowledge that achieving fruitful coopera-
tion will also entail compromise on values. In addition, he fails to recognize that
the idea of compromise is in itself a value position, neither is it clear whether
Barnes ascribes sufficient recognition to the values that the scientist will inevi-
tably bring to the process of reaching such a compromise. Nevertheless, the
position is important in identifying the role of cooperation and compromise in
the research process leading to the emergence of knowledge.
In acknowledging the inevitable existence of sides in research, both Becker
(1967) and Barnes (1979) pose serious challenges to the notion of value neu-
trality and value freedom. Their work is important in acknowledging the
centrality of values to the research process, and also in respect of the role of the
researcher vis-à-vis those values. It purports that not only are values ever pre-
sent but also that it is the role of the researcher to work with, make choices
about and negotiate those values as part of the on-going research process.
Indeed, if we were to adopt a value neutral perspective on research in which
the researcher is merely the conduit for information, then the notion of there
being any sides to consider, let alone to decide which one we are on, is surely
anathema. If the role of the researcher were to be seen merely as one of gather-
ing and relaying information, then we get close to Finch’s (1984) notion of the
researcher as technician or Burgess’ (1994) idea of the researcher as hired hand.
Here, the researcher has no responsibility beyond the collection of and report-
ing on the [Link] approach may be one which underpins some policy-focused
research in which the researcher is required merely to gather the data for inter-
pretation and use by policy makers,3 but as stated earlier, the fieldworker is
central to the research process. As the principal instrument of the research, he/
she is required to do much more than simply gather and report data. For most
researchers it is the analysis and interpretation of the data together with the
writing of accounts of social life based on that analysis that is central to their
work. Moreover, it is the fact that research is about analysis, interpretation and
presentation of findings, and not merely the collection of data, that provides the
 Fieldwork: Values and Ethics 91

motivation for engaging in research based on fieldwork. It is also here that the
notion of a side to the research is central. In analysing and writing, the
researcher is usually faced with decisions that need to be made about selection,
emphasis, inclusion and exclusion of different perspectives and experiences of
the social action. In simplistic terms, the researcher has to decide whose version
of events to represent in the analysis and writing. However, this is not merely
a question of reporting in a way that attributes equal importance to the differ-
ent perspectives represented. The issue is one which centres on different
interpretations of reality about which the researcher has to make decisions. The
researcher clearly has the capacity to be on one particular side rather than
another, by choosing to represent one perspective rather than another, or to
represent a perspective in a particular way. For the researcher the task is to find
his/her own perspective and to use this as a means of interpretation and repre-
sentation of the social action. This may mean that he/she emphasizes some
aspects of the data over others and selects what is relevant and not relevant to
the understanding of the situation. These decisions are inevitably influenced by
his/her own values. However, this is the professional role of the researcher. It is
not value free or value neutral, it cannot be. It may be value relevant in Weber’s
(1948) terms but above all it should be value sensitive. By this we refer to the
need for the researcher to be aware, as far as possible, of the range of values and
influences which come to bear on the research. Integral to this is a sensitivity
to the value position of the researcher him/herself in respect of the research
subject. As a form of value reflexivity, the intention is that as far as possible the
researcher is able to at least account for the range of values present. He/she will
not, however, be able to control them.

ETHICS IN PRACTICE
Whilst much of the discussion in this chapter so far can be seen to relate to
issues of ethics in a broad sense, as yet we have not considered the more practi-
cal issues relating to the conduct of fieldwork in what might be termed an
ethical manner. As with Chapter 4 which dealt with the tools of fieldwork, it
is not our intention to provide a do’s and don’ts guide to conducting ethical
fieldwork. There are many guides to this which can be found in the ever-
expanding number of conventional research methods text books in publishers’
catalogues. Many of these are excellent in alerting the novice, and not-so-
novice, researcher to the ethical pitfalls of fieldwork. It is not our intention,
therefore, to seek to add to this resource in particular, as it is difficult to see
what further contribution it needs or could be made to it and also because it
has been our intention, throughout this volume, to encourage readers to come
to their own conclusions and understandings of aspects of fieldwork through
questioning and consideration of the issues that underpin [Link] this in mind,
92 Doing Fieldwork

it is our intention to conclude this chapter by highlighting a number of ethical

concerns which probably have a greater relevance to fieldwork than to other
approaches to research. In some respects it is difficult to identify discrete topics or
headings under which to discuss these issues, as the nature of fieldwork makes for
a high degree of interconnection between different aspects of the fieldwork process.
Having made this point, for the purposes of this discussion and for convenience, we
do propose to consider five linked issues under specific headings: being there;
negotiating access; protecting the innocents; exceptions; and ethical guides and codes.

BEING THERE
Although we have already established the significance of being there (Geertz
1988) to the conduct of fieldwork, specifically in Chapter 1 but also at other
points throughout this volume, we have yet to consider its ethical implications.
Specifically, the implications of fieldwork’s ambition to either seek to become
part of a community, organization, institution or a more informal group for the
specific purposes of research, or of using already existing membership of such an
organization or group for the same. There seem to be two principal issues to
consider [Link] first concerns the extent to which the fieldworker is prepared
to negotiate access with the research participants and how far he/she intends
to deceive them by not informing them of the extent of the study or even
whether a study is being conducted at all. This will be dealt with under a
separate heading in greater detail below. The second concerns the very presence
of the fieldworker within the specified field.

NEGOTIATING ACCESS (OR NOT)

If fieldwork depends on being there and being a part of whatever is going on
in wherever is defined as the field, it is important to consider the basis on which
the fieldworker is actually there and how this fits with any notion of ethical
research. In any absolute ethical sense, the fieldworker will be there with the
knowledge and approval of those who are at the focus of the research and
perhaps even at their invitation. However, to adopt the concept of knowledge
and approval as a prerequisite for fieldwork would be most likely to result in
the denial of access to many locations and fields of interaction for the field-
worker. Moreover, whilst there may be a general moral stance to which, perhaps,
most of us would subscribe, that is, we should know if we are being observed,
monitored or researched in any way, to hold, unerringly, to such a position would
mean that many of the studies within the social sciences which are now regarded
as classics simply would not have been done. Therefore, their contributions and
 Fieldwork: Values and Ethics 93

enlightenment about certain aspects of social behaviour would not have been
possible and therefore not carried out. Probably the most cited example of field-
work which falls into this category is that of Humphreys’ (1970) Tearoom Trade.
Here, Humphreys conducted participant observation amongst Boston’s gay
community by taking the part of the Watch Queen during sexual activity in
public toilets. More recent examples can be taken from Hobbs et al.’s (2003)
study of bouncers and door security which entailed a fieldworker taking a job
as a bouncer in order to gain access to the aspects of the night-time economy
in a major UK city which would have been otherwise unavailable to the
research team. Although these examples are separated by more than thirty years,
the studies have in common a concern to gain detailed and intimate access to
interior worlds which the fieldworkers deemed to be impossible by other means.
Many other examples could be cited here often relating to the worlds of crim-
inality and deviance and the everyday and seemingly mundane in one way or
another: O’Connell Davidson (2008) on researching sex tourism, Hammers’
(2009) fieldwork in bathhouses and Palmer and Thompson’s (2010) research into
football fans’ alcohol consumption; and Hutchinson (2014) entered into an
online virtual environment to conduct aspects of her research. In all of these
examples, to insist that permission to be there from all those who are the focus
of the research would have been to exclude the possibility of these and many
other studies. Is this, however, sufficient justification for conducting research
covertly, without the permission of those whose lives constitute the field?
O’Connell Davidson is clear that whilst:

There are some (albeit limited) situations in which it may be both necessary and
morally defensible for sociologists to act covertly in the sense of failing to
actively seek the informed consent of research subjects, there are no circum-
stances in which it would be considered acceptable to bully, deceive or cajole
someone into participating in a piece of research after she or he had explicitly
refused to give consent to participate. If researchers are working in a context
that requires them to secure the consent of research participants, then they are
expected to understand that ‘No’ definitely means ‘No’ if they meet with refusal
(O’Connell Davidson 2008: 51).

However, in contextualizing her own fieldwork, O’Connell Davidson then

acknowledges such decisions are far from straightforward. For instance, ‘if some-
one does give informed consent to a lengthy period of participation in research
that closely interrogates and then publicly dissects the intimate details of her life,
experience and emotions, should we accept that ‘Yes’ means ‘Yes’?’ (O’Connell
Davidson 2008: 51). The period and type of immersion involved in fieldwork
therefore makes the situation complex and messy and highly variable across
fieldwork situations. O’Connell Davidson (2008) through her own ethnography
of one prostitute, talks about the emotional intimacy involved in such fieldwork
94 Doing Fieldwork

and how this would not always be clear to the fieldworker at the beginning of
a project. Additionally, the field itself shapes what is and is not possible. For
example, Hutchinson’s (2014) presence and engagement in the field was intrin-
sic to the ‘shared experience’ of this world and the basis upon which she later
conducted interviews with her [Link] it would have been impossible for her
to negotiate access with all participants present or online in that virtual world
when she entered it. On a physically more exposed level, Scott’s (2010: 164)
research settings of swimming baths were in ‘near-naked’ contexts. She was
therefore interested in how these – potentially embarrassing circumstances –
were neutralized and civilized. The very style of fieldwork, immersion in the
pool or the showers, made negotiating access with the baths’ clientele a practical
impossibility. Hammers’ (2009) fieldwork in bathhouses and the negotiation of
sexual encounters in those settings was challenging, both for the demeanour of
the fieldworker (she chose to remain clothed) but also regarding when and with
whom to discuss the research. At the other end of the scale, Palmer and
Thompson’s (2010) fieldwork involved visiting football grounds on match days.
As with that of Williams, discussed earlier, consent forms for crowds of people
would have been unfeasible and impractical. Yet the study’s focus upon fans’
alcohol consumption patterns and behaviours at match events created its own
pressures. Foremost, the team needed to be there but furthermore, to deflect
accusations of being ‘a corked up nun’ or ‘wowser’, Palmer elected to overtly
consume alcohol alongside the participants (Palmer and Thompson 2010: 427).
Therefore, because sometimes individuals were engaged in nefarious activities
on the one hand, and mundane activities on the other, is this any reason not to
afford them similar rights as those we might study in more open and less con-
tentious settings? To reach a definitive answer on this and similar questions is, in
our view, neither possible nor useful. As we have indicated elsewhere in this text,
fieldwork requires a great degree of flexibility on the part of the fieldwork in
order to conduct successful, detailed and illuminating research. Fieldwork is
concerned with unique sets of activities, relationships and interactions. It is this
which, in part, attracts the researcher to a particular field in the first instance and
sustains his/her interest once immersed within it. Seeming to legislate from the
unique to the more general would be a difficult task and one which would
become a meaningless catalogue of caveats and exceptions.
The general point to be made here is that, as with so many aspects of field-
work, decisions as to whether the research is to be conducted overtly or
covertly need to be made by the researcher in the context of the specific study.
Blanket outlawing of particular approaches may serve to prevent research that
ultimately does little or no harm to research participants and may actually do
some good. In making this statement, however, it is not our intention to suggest
that the researcher has carte blanche to blunder into any location on the off-
chance that some good may eventually come of his/her work or that covert
research may always be justified on the grounds of social scientific curiosity or
 Fieldwork: Values and Ethics 95

interest. To do so would be to elevate the researcher to a position of moral

superiority over those at the centre of his/her research. Consideration of the
impact of the research on those at its focus must be the primary concern of the
researcher when making a decision as to whether a study should be conducted
covertly. Only after due consideration to the range and scale of anticipated
outcomes can a decision be made as to whether the research can and should be
conducted covertly.
In short, this discussion has attempted to convey a cautious perspective by
arguing that whilst covert research should not be universally ruled out, it
must only be used after careful, detailed and exhaustive consideration of the
risk it poses to the research participants. In many ways this makes it little
different from the decisions that have to be made about the conduct of overt
research. In either case it is the risk to which research participants are
exposed that is of principal significance. Although it is never possible to be
absolutely certain in these matters, if the researcher can be as sure as possible
that participants will not face adverse effects in any way from the research,
then the study should proceed. Implicit in what has been said here is a con-
cern that all decisions about access are taken only after serious consideration.
That is, because the research is to be conducted overtly, it should not be
assumed that the researcher is, therefore, absolved of all ethical considera-
tions. Indeed, in several aspects, overt research has the capacity to be just as
unethical as covert research. For example, although the research participants
know they are being researched and consent has been given for the study,
questions remain over how such consent was gained, who gave the consent,
under what circumstances was it given and what were the opportunities for
individuals to opt-out. Research within any organization that is structured
hierarchically serves to illustrate these points. In a school, for example, the
head teacher may give permission for fieldwork to be conducted, or simi-
larly a Director may give consent for a study of a company. Were this to be
the case, without reference to other members of the organization, those
much lower down the hierarchy, say at the level of probationary teacher or
junior clerical officer, although aware of the research, may not have been
afforded any opportunity to object to the study. Furthermore, given it had
received approval and hence, in some senses the sponsorship, of senior personnel
within the organization, making any unilateral objection would be difficult.
This could be construed as having something to hide or being obstructive
to the plans of management. Either way not a good career move and, there-
fore, easier to go along with the decision made on their behalf by senior
personnel. Whilst the researcher may not have been involved in any deliber-
ate deception in such circumstances, access may not be seen to have been
achieved in an open, transparent and fair way. On the face of it, decisions
about overt or covert research may seem fairly clear cut. In practice, they are
anything but.
96 Doing Fieldwork

PROTECTING THE INNOCENTS

Informed consent for fieldwork may to a large extent rest on the degree to
which researchers are able to give assurances of confidentiality and anonymity
to the researched. Moreover, in seeking informed consent it is sometimes
assumed that researchers are able to give guarantees of confidentiality and ano-
nymity to those upon whom the research is focused. Similarly, within some of
the guides to ethical research or good professional conduct (see below) there is
an implicit assumption that confidentiality and anonymity should be promised
to research participants. In our experience of conducting fieldwork it is never
possible to give an absolute guarantee of confidentiality and anonymity. To do
so would be to fail to appreciate the realities of research based on fieldwork. As
we have seen in Chapter 4 of this volume, fieldwork usually entails some degree
of participation in a set of activities, or within an institution by the fieldworker.
It relies on him/her being part of the social action as it occurs. Consequently,
there is usually a high degree of social contact between the researcher and the
researched. It is, therefore, this essentially social nature of fieldwork which in
our experience makes it impossible to guarantee anonymity and confidentiality.
For example, participants in any given location or institution that might be the
focus of research will also interact with people who are not part of that location
or institution. A good example here would be the many school ethnographies
conducted on the basis of prolonged fieldwork (e.g. Allan 2009, Ball 1981,
Burgess 1983, Delamont 1984, Pole 1993). Similarly so for research conducted
in rural locales, such as small villages (Bagley and Hillyard 2011, Bell 1995,
Heley 2010, Hillyard 2009). In such instances, staff or members of these organ-
izations or communities will be inevitably aware of the research being
conducted and will, most probably, have discussed the presence of researchers
in their social world with friends, people in other schools, family and neigh-
bours, etc. Despite the researcher’s attempts to disguise the location of the
fieldwork, for example, with the use of pseudonyms and perhaps changing
other non-essential information about that locale and possibly its residents and
members, the fact that people talk about the research renders any guarantee of
confidentiality and anonymity deeply problematic. A few personal examples
will illustrate this point further.
During the early 1990s, Pole was asked to provide some training in action
research for a group of staff at a large comprehensive school. Whilst making final
arrangements on the telephone for the visit to the school with one of the
deputy heads, he asked whether Pole knew which school it was that he was to
be visiting. Thinking this a strange question, he said yes of course and reminded
him that they had met in his office at the school the week before. He replied
with almost a repeat of his original question; No. I mean do you know which school
this is? and he went on to reveal that this was in fact the school to which Bob
Burgess (1983) had given the pseudonym ‘Bishop MacGregor’ in his book
 Fieldwork: Values and Ethics 97

Experiencing Comprehensive Education. Although it had been more than 10 years

since the publication of that book and Pole had worked closely with Burgess for
some five years, not until that moment had he known of the real identity of
Bishop MacGregor school.
Similarly Hillyard, in selecting a site for her doctoral school field research was
informally ‘warned off ’ approaching certain schools, as university researchers had
recently or were currently engaged in fieldwork there. In a later project, led by
Deem in which Hillyard was involved (Deem et al. 2007), both the universities
and individuals interviewed were anonymized. The research team had also been
proactive during the sampling process and rejected some universities on the
grounds that their very specific or unique characteristics would have made
protecting their identity problematic in subsequent publications.
The point we wish to make here is that although the fieldworker can take
elaborate measures to preserve the anonymity of those he/she is researching
which (as in the case with Burgess) is very effective, it is not possible to place
a gagging order on all of those involved in the study. The researcher has little
control over his/her published work which may be discussed and represented
in many different ways. Where there is salacious value to be gained from
exposure, for example in the printed press, researchers have found their field-
work sites exposed. At the risk of exacerbating its exposure, Heley’s (2010)
village pseudonym was uncovered by a UK national daily newspaper that
then interviewed villagers about Heley’s findings about its ‘new squirearchy’.
Given Heley’s public profile as an academic and his decision to research and
publish expressly upon his own village (Heley 2011), his assumption that it
would be possible to preserve the anonymity of his village seems naïve in
retrospect.
In our own fieldwork, we have been cautious in how we have revealed the
characteristics and profiles of institutions or locales within which we have con-
ducted research. More generally, the best the researcher can hope for is that
those who do learn, or think they have learned, of the true identity of locations,
institutions or individuals represented in accounts of fieldwork also respect the
attempts made by the researcher to preserve their identity. Again, this reveals
that anonymity cannot be guaranteed and therefore this should be made clear
in any university ethics committee applications. In that light, fieldworkers must
think very carefully about any promises made to participants who disclose pri-
vate information during the course of the fieldwork. In Hillyard’s research on
the fair access agenda, the research team all work inside the university that they
are researching. Therefore, the focus of interviews cannot help but be informed
and framed by their front stage roles as university employees. The ‘hidden
curriculum’ remains behind the scenes and best-discussed off-tap (Bowles and
Gintis 1976).
However, there are examples from classic studies where individuals central to
the research have wished to reveal their own identity after publication of the study.
98 Doing Fieldwork

Perhaps the two most well-known instances of this are the characters given the
pseudonyms ‘Doc’ by Whyte (1993) [1943] in his celebrated study Street Corner
Society and ‘Stanley’ by Shaw (2013) [1930] in his Chicago School study The
Jack-roller. Both Doc and Stanley were absolutely central to these important early
studies. For Shaw’s life history, Stanley was the entire focus of his work. Shaw
worked closely with him to produce the volume which was important not
merely in offering an understanding of delinquency in the early twentieth-
century USA, but was also central to establishing life history as a useful and
legitimate research method. The book became, and remains, well known, selling
many thousands of copies worldwide. Whilst Shaw does not reveal the identity
of Stanley, at least to our knowledge, in any formal publication, it is Stanley who
reveals his own identity, as Jon Snodgrass, in his own book published as he
reached the age of 70 (Snodgrass 1983). As well as providing reflections on
Shaw’s original 1930 publication, Snodgrass updates his own story, thus revealing
his identity and providing details of many aspects of his life. Meanwhile, Doc,
who had been Whyte’s gatekeeper and had facilitated so much of the fieldwork
for Street Corner Society, enjoyed a modicum of celebrity after the publication of
the book, appearing on talk shows and being featured in newspaper articles
about the research. However, as Boelen (1992) shows, in her rather destructive
appraisal and revisiting of Cornerville, Doc also attributed some of the difficulties
he encountered in the area, long after Whyte had left, to his close association
with the study. In both of these cases, despite the researchers’ best efforts to
preserve their anonymity, the principal contributors to the fieldwork chose to
reveal their identities. Whilst we might argue that they had the right to choose
to do this and the researchers were of course powerless to stop them, it is also
worth noting that in revealing their own identities they were also likely to reveal
those of others involved in the respective studies, along with the actual location
of the fieldwork, not just in terms of its geography but also the particular institutions
and organizations in which it was based.
Whilst these examples reveal the difficulties of promising anonymity and
confidentiality, they should not be seen as attempts to deny the importance of
protecting research participants, those with whom they associate and the institu-
tions, both formal and informal, of which they are members. We are aware of
researchers who have gone to considerable lengths, including the use of coun-
terintuitive pseudonyms, to protect the identities of their research [Link] the
examples do not reveal, are the consequences of exposing the identity of par-
ticipants and places. The reason they do not do this is because these are not, for
the most part, known. This takes us to a central issue relating to the protection
not only of those upon whom the research might focus, but also of the
researcher(s) themselves. Put very simply, this relates to the fact that we as
researchers have no way of knowing, for certain, what the consequences of the
research are likely to be for those on whom it focuses and those who conduct
it. We cannot identify the unforeseen impact of how the research might be used
 Fieldwork: Values and Ethics 99

and who may gain access to it. Because of this uncertainty it is essential that the
researcher takes comprehensive measures to protect those who are the focus of
the research. Such measures may include not only the use of pseudonyms for
people and places but also ensuring secure storage of information collected in
and about the field. This would also include limiting access to such information
to members of the research team. In both of these instances it would also be
necessary to ensure compliance with the Data Protection Act, which amongst
many other things, requires information which relates to individuals to be kept
only if there is good reason to do so. It would also include talking with research
participants about anonymity and confidentiality and seeking their cooperation
in trying to preserve this. In some instances where researchers have felt their
research to be particularly sensitive, a considerable period of time has been
allowed to elapse between the end of fieldwork and any publications to arise
from it. Here, the assumption being that any adverse effects of the research
would be mitigated by the passage of time. Deem (2014), for example, reflected
upon how pervasive her various projects inside the academy had been, including
work that had been conducted over ten years [Link] the immediate focus
of some of those projects – upon senior academics – had meant some partici-
pants had subsequently retired, others had also moved to occupy more senior
positions. Indeed, as had Deem herself. In the different setting of fieldwork in
rural villages, families can remain embedded in their communities for genera-
tions, there is hence a need to be conscious of situated ethics not only during
the fieldwork (Edwards and Hillyard 2012) but also after its conclusion. Hillyard,
in seeking to protect the identity of three rural village research sites, has had to
deflect persistent questions about the precise location of case villages during
dissemination activities. This includes being clear with those working on the
project, such as offering transcription services, that the identity of the village is
confidential. In relation to her most recent work in Norfolk and following the
advice of the ESRC’s qualitative data archive team at Essex University, very lit-
tle of the material could be successfully archived for fear of revealing the village’s
identification. This was unanticipated at the outset of the research, but became
ethically necessary later. These examples demonstrate the need to be attuned to
the temporal and ethical implications of the fieldwork site and the dataset that
it [Link] we acknowledge the legitimacy of Delamont’s (2009: 60) argu-
ment that there is an obligation to publish fieldwork findings, the timetable by
which this might be ethically appropriate requires judgement and discretion. As
Bell (1977) discovered, not all personal retrospectives of research are well
received, nor permissible under the UK’s libel laws.
Beyond these measures we have outlined above, it is difficult to identify strat-
egies which will protect participants yet still allow the publication and
dissemination of research findings. We should also note here that in addition to
protecting the research participant, where research is very closely intertwined
with the personal life of the fieldworker, it can prove necessary to disguise the
100 Doing Fieldwork

very identity of the author (Congressi 2006, European 1920). What is crucial to
this consideration of ethics is that fieldworkers need to be aware, as far as pos-
sible, of the potential ramifications of exposing their research participants and
take whatever measures they can to avoid this. Seeking to protect their partici-
pants should be seen as an element of the respect that researchers must show to
those who facilitate their work. In doing so, fieldworkers would do well to keep
in mind that they have no absolute right, either legal, moral or of any other kind,
to conduct a particular study. They are, however, usually allowed to do so at the
discretion of those they wish to research and as such, they have a responsibility
towards their wellbeing in respect of its conduct and any outcomes from [Link]
research participants to feel that these responsibilities were not being met they
could, of course, withdraw their cooperation and bring a halt to the study. Were
this to happen, the consequences would only be felt by the researcher.
Other considerations to keep in mind here relate to the identification of the
researcher. In particular, where covert fieldwork is being conducted, there may
be sound reasons not to reveal the identity of the researcher. For example, field-
work for Hobbs et al.’s (2003) fascinating study of bouncers and the night-time
economy relied on one researcher working for a prolonged period of time as a
bouncer. Not only was the researcher routinely exposed to violence in the
nightclubs and on the street, but he also became privy to sensitive information.
This related to gang culture and a range of illegal activities in which those with
whom they worked and were employed by, participated. Therefore, to expose
himself as a researcher who intended to publish material based on his under-
cover participation would have been to risk serious personal injury. In the more
genteel field of rural village research, Hillyard heard cases of perceived fraud,
suspicions of embezzlement and overheard racist opinions in the pub. When
encountering ‘subversive talk in the tap house’ or inadvertently discovering per-
sonal information that a participant does not wish to become widely known,
where this falls beyond the remit of the research, the fieldworker can remove
themself from that situation to protect both themselves and the participants
(Newby 1985: 162).There also can be instances where the fieldworker’s presence
may be an unnecessary intrusion and the best course of action may also be to
leave, albeit for different reasons (Edwards and Hillyard 2012). In such situations,
maintaining the anonymity of those being researched and of the locations and
situations in which the fieldwork was conducted will be of great importance to
those conducting the research.

EXCEPTIONS?
The discussion so far may be seen, in Becker’s (1967) terms, to have been on the
side of those being researched. The discussion has assumed that there is always a
need to protect their identity and to afford them freedom and privacy to conduct
 Fieldwork: Values and Ethics 101

their lives unhindered, as far as possible by the conduct of the research. Whilst
in the great majority of cases this would seem entirely acceptable and an exam-
ple of good research practice, there may, however, be occasions when the
researcher feels a duty to expose the identity and activities of particular indi-
viduals or groups of people to relevant authorities. Such instances may be rare,
relating to extreme circumstances and are not well documented in the research
literature. However, a fictitious though not unrealistic example may serve to
illustrate the point here. The example relates to research with children, who, in
the context of social research, are often seen as relatively powerless individuals.
When researching aspects of children’s lives, such as those central to Pole’s own
work on children as consumers (Pole 2007) or children and work (Pole et al.
1999), the researcher is likely to learn a great deal about the children’s lives, most
of which relates directly to the topic at the focus of the research, but also much
that does not. The researcher seeks to establish a rapport with the child in order
that he/she will feel comfortable and confident and willing to talk openly about
a range of issues. Moreover, discussions may take place in relatively private or even
intimate settings (Pole 2007) adding further to the sense of trust between
researcher and the child. In such circumstances it would not be unthinkable for
the child to reveal things that he/she had never revealed before. If, for example,
the child revealed that he/she had been abused in some way, sexually, physically
or a combination of the two, by a relative, a family friend or a teacher, yet begs
the researcher not to report this to any authorities, what should the researcher
do? There is a clear ethical, legal and personal dilemma for the researcher he/she
may feel there is a responsibility not to expose and betray the trust of the child,
fearing not least that to do so might be to bring greater harm to the child. At the
same time, the researcher will also be aware of a legal responsibility to report the
abuse to the police or children’s services. Personally, there may be a dilemma
about the likely impact of reporting the abuse on the study, as to do so may pre-
clude any further research. Our guess is that as we consider this example and
consider the circumstances, we come to a decision about the action we would
take. Whilst we may seek to resolve the dilemma by looking to act according to
the law, thus protecting the child, it is not entirely clear that this will be in the
best interests of the child. Alternatively, we may decide to respect the confiden-
tially of the child and do nothing, thus choosing to ignore the abuse and protect
the abuser. This would also mean that we had chosen to continue our research,
when the more ethical stance may have been to abandon it.
Whilst this is a fictitious example, it is not one without foundation and indeed
is a scenario Pole and his team discussed at the start of their research into children
and work (Mizen et al. 1999) which involved working closely with children aged
12–16. The conclusion they came to, should such a serious situation arise, was
reached quite quickly. This was that they would report any case of abuse to the
appropriate authorities, thus breaking the confidentiality of the child and
exposing the abuser. Whilst some might see this as compromising their neutrality
102 Doing Fieldwork

as researchers by intervening in the lives of those they were researching, to do so

would be to assume that they would be able to place their decisions, experiences
and consciences in a box marked ‘Fieldwork’ and assume they would and should
stay there. To do this would, in their view, be to ignore the humanity of research.
A less serious example, but again drawn from our own fieldwork experiences,
was encountered by Hillyard during the fieldwork for her doctoral research in
a comprehensive school in the Midlands. It involved spending time with the
form group she was shadowing during out-of-lesson times in more informal
locations on the school site, such as the cafeteria, the playground and on the
playing-fields. Many of the boys in the form were keen footballers and there was
an intense rivalry between the form group she was shadowing and another in
the school. The two forms often played football against each other at lunchtimes
(this was a relatively large secondary school, with over one thousand pupils).
One lunchtime on the playing field, the game spilled into a conflict between
two boys from each form group. Of course, lunchtime games were not ‘refereed’
by adults as lesson-time or after-school games would have been and this meant
Hillyard was the only adult in the immediate vicinity. As a fieldworker, she faced
an unexpected but immediate decision as to whether to intervene to protect the
boys from harm. Intervening would appeal to her authority as an adult-in-
school (Epstein 1998), which she had sought to downplay during the fieldwork
in order to generate a closer rapport and empathy with the group. Fortunately,
the situation diffused by itself and the boys did not come to blows,4 but Hillyard
was clear that not to have stepped in would have been ethically unacceptable. In
hindsight, this was on both a personal level and also the obligations a fieldworker
has towards their university and their discipline.
As with so many of the issues relating to the ethics of fieldwork, it is difficult
and probably unwise to attempt to give definitive guidelines on what to do and
how to do it. Every situation that the fieldworker enters is unique and it is this
uniqueness that may be part of the motivation for the study. It is also what chal-
lenges the authority of generalized, prescriptive advice. In our view, the best advice
is that which recognizes the uniqueness of fieldwork and alerts the researcher to
the possible consequences of his/her work. Moreover, we should also remember
that as fieldworkers, we inevitably, become part of the situations that we research
and as a consequence cannot abdicate responsibility for our actions or their con-
sequences under the rubric of [Link] can seek some degree of protection and
defence for our work, however, by ensuring that we subject the way in which we
conduct our research to the scrutiny of others, be they our academic peers, the
users of our research and the wider public. We do so by publishing, not just the
results of our work but also accounts of our methods and methodologies. These
accounts are no longer buried in the appendices, but are as important as the find-
ings presented. This is because by making details of the process and outcomes of
our work public, we invite comment and criticism. This will help us not only in
achieving the reflexivity which, as we have seen earlier in this volume, is central
 Fieldwork: Values and Ethics 103

to the conduct of successful research, but also aid in avoiding practices that have
not been carefully thought through. The fact that we know our work will be
subject to scrutiny is in itself a useful check on conducting fieldwork and other
aspects of the research process in ways that are less than honest and that cannot be
supported by a convincing and appropriate rationale.

ETHICAL GUIDES AND CODES

In addition to what might be described as a sort of self-policing of fieldwork,
there are of course, many codes and guides to the conduct of ethical research.
These are produced by most learned societies5 with the intention of supporting
researchers through some of the difficult decisions they may need to take.
Guides such as these have a difficult task in that they seek to alert researchers
to the potential problems that they might encounter in their work and to pro-
vide guidance on how to avoid or get round them whilst at the same time
lacking any real authority. If we take the British Sociological Association’s
Statement of Ethical Practice (2002) as an example, we can see that although it
offers laudable advice on professional integrity, responsibilities to research par-
ticipants, covert research and anonymity, privacy and confidentiality, it does so
without any real authority. The British Sociological Association (BSA) is an
organization established to represent the intellectual and sociological interests
of its members and amongst other things, for the promotion and use of sociol-
ogy and sociological research. However, there is no compulsion for those who
regard themselves as sociologists or who conduct sociological research to
become members of the association. Moreover, those who do choose to join
the BSA cannot be subject to any meaningful sanctions by the association for
the conduct of unethical or inappropriate research. The BSA is not their
employer and does not issue a practising certificate or register of conduct.
Indeed, it is the BSA that runs the risk of negative exposure to its own reputa-
tion as an organization, if a researcher’s work showcased at BSA events comes
under attack (Brewer 2012). In fact, the only sanctions that may be brought
against a researcher for improper conduct are those which fall within the ambit
of the law. In this sense, social researchers are treated no differently from mem-
bers of the public. This may lead some to interpret the guidance issued by
learned societies on the conduct of research in the social sciences as of no
significance and therefore, to be ignored. To do so, however, would be to disre-
gard the important role that this guidance undoubtedly plays in encouraging
debate and sensitizing researchers to the range of ethical challenges they may
face in the course of their work. Moreover, to expect these or any other
organizations to provide definitive regulations on the conduct of ethical
research would be to misunderstand the nature of social research by looking for
certainty where there is none.
104 Doing Fieldwork

CONCLUSIONS
Perhaps the most honest conclusion to draw from the foregoing discussion is
that there are no absolute [Link] uncertainty that surrounds the values
and ethics of fieldwork makes definitive positions erroneous. What can be con-
cluded is that the only thing for certain is that, from start to finish and beyond,
fieldwork will present the researcher with often difficult challenges and decisions.
Taking the right decision will depend as much on the values of the fieldworker
as it will on the particular circumstances of the research. This is not, however, to
be taken as an opportunity for researchers to reject any sense of responsibility
for their work, assuming that no right answers mean that anything goes. On the
contrary, it is to emphasize the importance of judging each decision that needs
to be made and every difficult situation that has to be faced on its own merits
and within its specific circumstances. It will demand discretion and sensitivity
on the part of the researcher. The lack of certainty may, therefore, foster a closer
attention to detail and hence a more ethically sensitive and informed approach
to fieldwork.

NOTES

1 See Cooper et al. (2012: 5) for a useful overview of the evolving ‘paradigm wars’
between qualitative and quantitative approaches and amongst its own advocates.
Clearly, there is a politics to method (Savage 2010).
2 It is also worth noting that both projects had methodological ambitions – to raise
the profile of participatory research methods.
3 However, even if this were the case, questions would still need to be posed about
the capacity of the researcher to remove him/herself from the decisions that
structure all forms of fieldwork. To suggest that this could be the case would be
to suggest that the researcher should adopt a role similar to that of a tape recorder
or video camera which is able to merely record and play back. Clearly, this would
not be possible.
4 Nor did she see fit to report the incident to staff.
5 For example, the British Sociological Association publishes several guides to the
conduct of research. These relate to ethics, professional conduct and the use of
language. The British Educational Research Association produces similar guides
as does the Social Research Society. Equivalent bodies in the USA (American
Sociological Association, American Educational Research Association) and in
other countries throughout the world, produce similar codes and guides for
researchers. These are available through the websites of the associations concerned
and are an important resource.
 Fieldwork: Values and Ethics 105

FURTHER READING

Sanders C (2010) Ethnography as dangerous, sad, and dirty work. In: Hillyard S
(ed.) New Frontiers in Ethnography (Studies in Qualitative Methodology, Volume 11).
Bingley: Emerald, pp. 101–24.
Deem R (2002) Talking to manager-academics: Methodological dilemmas and
feminist research strategies. Sociology, 36(4): 835–55.
Newby H (1977) In the field: Reflections on the study of Suffolk farm workers. In:
Bell C and Newby H (eds) Doing Sociological Research. London: Free Press, pp. 108–29.
 6
WHEN IT’S TIME
TO GO

Chapter overview
• Managing the end of fieldwork has similarities to managing its
beginning – both require careful thought.
• Opportunities to conduct open-ended fieldwork, free from internal
and external restrictions, are rare.
• Attuning to the internal rhythm of the research site can provide
saturation markers.
• Leaving the field can take place in stages, such as primary and then
secondary involvement.
• Storage, security and access to data remain issues long after the end
of fieldwork.
• Whilst fieldwork is only as good as the data its account is based upon,
more does not necessarily mean better.

LEAVING THE FIELD

Whilst many books and papers give attention to processes and procedures associated
with gaining access to and entering the field, far fewer give attention to leaving
it. But as Wolcott (2005: 118) argues, by striking a comparison with sexual liaisons,
getting out of bed with someone often requires more grace than getting into bed
with them. Therefore, we see this lack of attention to leaving the field as some-
what curious, as managing the leaving process and issues about the impact of
research on research participants and research sites once the fieldwork is over
108 Doing Fieldwork

are of just as much importance, and in some cases perhaps more, as those relating
to the beginning of fieldwork.
This comparative absence in the literature may be for a number of reasons.
Firstly because it is not always clear what is meant by leaving the field. Secondly,
deciding precisely when is the best time to call a halt to fieldwork may not be
clear. Thirdly, there may be important ethical issues that surround not only the
immediate end to fieldwork but also its impact on and future implications for
those who have participated in it. Indeed, the relative failure of researchers and
those who write about research methods to attribute sufficient attention to the
end of fieldwork may be seen as an ethical issue in itself. Moreover, there are
many issues associated with the end of fieldwork which relate to its impact on
research participants, the analysis of data, writing and publication of material
based on the fieldwork and the possibility of contact with participants after its
designated end, that are imbued with ethical and political significance. The
decisions taken about what constitutes the end, when and how to achieve it,
may also reflect the approach taken to fieldwork and the significance that has
been attributed in the research process more generally. In this chapter we shall
consider these issues and in so doing seek to establish that the end of fieldwork
can be as significant to its success as the beginning.

IS THERE AN END?
There are a number of ways in which to define the end of fieldwork but none
may be entirely satisfactory. Delamont (2002) for example uses the metaphor of
a journey of discovery in her account of educational fieldwork which by implica-
tion has a sense of reaching a desired, final destination. But similarly, the ‘for lust
of knowing’ or curiosity that comes with Delamont’s selection of a metaphor
derived from a poem hints at a much longer [Link] could, for example, say that
fieldwork ends when the researcher stops making visits to the field or in the case
of prolonged participant observation, when he/she moves away from the field,
back to his/her life lived before embarking on the study. Bell, for example,
reflected that it was the physical and habitual impact of years of immersed field-
work and only when he relocated to Sussex and was sitting on a beach with his
family, he felt he had left (Bell 1977). Lacey had also moved into his research
field – living opposite the school he was studying (Lacey 1970), as did Newby
who lived with a farmworker and their family during his doctoral fieldwork
(Newby 1977). These examples refer to the physical presence of the researcher in
the field and in this sense is clearly indicated by the absence of the researcher from
the setting in which the study has been located. However, absence of physical pres-
ence does not necessarily mean the end of all contact with research participants – if,
for example, after physically leaving the field or making a final visit a researcher
may maintain contact with participants via some other means such as telephone,
 When it’s Time to Go 109

Skype, email or by written correspondence, say in the form of a diary or text

messaging. In such cases, data collection may continue, albeit in a different form
from that collected in the field, but does this mean that fieldwork continues? The
question goes to the heart of the definition of fieldwork. As we have seen earlier
in this volume, some definitions are limited to the presence of the researcher in
the research setting or field. For others this may be too narrow a definition as it
would include only data collected at first hand by the researcher whilst in that
field. If it is adopted, however, it makes the end of fieldwork easier to identify. If
it isn’t, on the grounds that it does not necessarily signify the end of data col-
lection, then an alternative would be that fieldwork ceases and hence the
researcher leaves the field when data collection finishes. However, this assumes
a definition of fieldwork that is only concerned with the collection of data.
Whilst this may seem a reasonable assumption to hold, as the capacity to collect
data is, of course, the principal and perhaps only, rationale for entering a particu-
lar field, Shaffir and Stebbins (1991) draws a distinction between primary and
secondary involvement in the field. Whilst primary involvement entails the
direct interface with research participants within the designated setting of the
field, for the purposes of collecting data, secondary involvement encompasses
analysis and writing. Although secondary involvement is usually characterized
by the physical removal of the researcher from the research setting, by continu-
ing to work directly and in detail with material collected from the field, Stebbins
believes the researcher remains in contact with the field and therefore does not
leave it until after the analysis and writing is complete. Taken to an extreme it
could be argued that researchers never or rarely leave the field, in that even
though data are no longer being collected, analysis is complete and publications
have been produced, the experience of the field remains part of the repository of
experience upon which the researcher may draw throughout his/her career. Allan
(2012) and Dovemark (2012) are fieldwork-based papers which have slightly dif-
ferent theoretical orientations to the ones that underpinned the original
fieldwork conducted by both of these researchers and were published later. Crow
and Takeda’s (2011) summary of sociologist Ray Pahl’s career, argues continuities
in theory and method are sustained across a highly productive career spanning
five decades, including single-site studies conducted over five year periods or
more. Similarly, Atkinson (2005) at the very outset of his monograph discusses his
enduring passion for opera, stemming from his teenage years. It is therefore
highly unlikely that this interest or his engagement with his local opera house
would conclude when he stopped collecting field data (indeed that engagement
made good his access). Therefore, after spending a prolonged period of time in
the field during which effective rapport, friendships and a feel for the setting
may have developed, it seems unlikely that a researcher would ever cease to take
an interest in that particular field and those who constitute it. For example,
throughout this text we have drawn both explicitly and implicitly, on fieldwork
experiences from the 1990s onwards, where both of us have spent prolonged
110 Doing Fieldwork

periods of time in a variety of educational institutions, research settings and

locales. These fieldwork experiences not only provide illustrative material for
examples in this and other methods texts to which we have contributed, but
have also informed our approach to more recent fieldwork and contributed to
the maintenance of our interests in qualitative research methods over many
years. As to some of the sites themselves, however, direct engagement with them
is no longer possible as one school was demolished some ten years ago to make
way for a housing development and another has been relocated to a new build
on the outskirts of the village. The pupils of both schools, upon whom so much
of the fieldwork focused, will now be out of education and making their way in
different walks of life. Despite this, quite literal, physical end to the field, they
remain a reality not merely in our stock of experience but also in the published
work from it. If we accept this argument then one conclusion would be that the
researcher never entirely leaves the field and another one would be that the field
never entirely leaves the researcher.

HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?

Whilst acknowledging Shaffir and Stebbins’ (1991) distinction between primary
and secondary involvement in the field, a decision still has to be taken about
the end of primary and the consequent beginning of secondary involvement.
Although it might be argued that analysis and writing should be a feature of
the entire research process (Pole and Lampard 2002) it is, nevertheless, usual
for summative analysis and writing to take place only after the cessation of
fieldwork. The question to be posed is, therefore, are there any distinct criteria
that can be used to confidently determine when fieldwork should be drawn
to an end?
The literature on this topic does offer, if not a consensus, then at least some
common ground here. It does not provide any objective measures to be applied
mechanistically but, as one might anticipate, it does offer a range of broadly
similar qualitative guides to help the researcher judge whether or not it is appro-
priate to leave the field. For example, Delamont (2002: 161) states that fieldwork
should be ‘long enough to appreciate the depth of the material’ and ‘the his-
torical rhythm of the location or institution’ and furthermore avoid detaching
them from ‘their temporal unfolding’. Atkinson (2006: 33) for example in his
study of a national opera house took its immediate focus to be the construction
of those performances and ‘the work of the opera’, but also stressed the time it
takes to come to an informed understanding of that fieldwork setting:

I do not think that it is possible to make sense of such a cultural setting without
making the significant effort to become tolerably well informed about it […]
There is no advantage in rank ethnographic ignorance (Atkinson 2006: 191).
 When it’s Time to Go 111

For Atkinson (2006) the internal rhythm of the opera season would have offered
its own sense of conclusion, as does fieldwork conducted in institutions such as
schools or universities. Glaser and Strauss (1967) in their classic text proposing a
grounded theory approach to fieldwork, discuss the ‘saturation’ of categories and,
in effect, the point at which nothing new is being learnt. In a similar vein,
Hillyard in conducting fieldwork in a north Norfolk village had to evaluate
whether additional information and insights gained through further fieldwork
would justify the time taken to complete (Edwards and Hillyard 2012).
So far, this discussion of the end probably relates to some kind of pure or
Weberian ideal type of fieldwork, where there are few restrictions placed on its
conduct and decisions as to how long it should last and when it should end are
those of the researcher alone. However, the reality of modern social research is
such that a range of external constraints usually acts to restrict the duration of
fieldwork and to a large extent limit the amount of time available for it. For
example, for many researchers, the time to leave the field is determined by the
level of funding for their work, which will support a specific and tightly-costed
period of time in the field. Where this is the case, fieldwork has to be planned
and conducted in accordance with budgetary as well as research considerations.
The physical location of the fieldwork site will also be important, as a research
site must be readily accessed from where the researcher is based or a period of
residential fieldwork may need to be planned. Delamont discusses her own field-
work sites and her capacity to travel to-and-from with relative ease (Atkinson
et al. 2008). In joint projects, where two members of a research team are con-
ducting their own case studies, research timetables require careful planning
(Bagley and Hillyard 2011). So for Bagley, conducting research in a village in
North East England close to his institutional base created different circumstances
to Hillyard’s case study site in the East of England. Even the weather may play
a part, as you cannot, for instance, observe the School Sports Day if it has been
cancelled due to inclement weather. Where fieldwork is carried out for research
as part of a degree programme, there will be clear time limits for completion
imposed by the university or other awarding body. These again will limit the
time that can be spent in the field. Alternatively, in the case of policy-focused
research, fieldwork may be limited by a timescale imposed by a sponsor, requir-
ing a report from the researcher to assist with the decision as part of a
tightly-specified policy framework. In addition, restrictions internal to the
research site itself may also limit the time that can be spent in the field. For
example, where fieldwork is located within an institution, as is often the case in
many areas of social science, it is unlikely that an open-ended invitation for
participation in that institution will be extended to the researcher. What is more
likely is that a particular period of time will be offered during which it will be
possible to accommodate a researcher. Whilst in some instances the timing of
fieldwork may not be significant, with any particular timeframe likely to be as
useful as any other, in others it will be absolutely crucial. For example, in the
112 Doing Fieldwork

field of educational research, secondary school head teachers are often reluctant
to grant access to their schools during the summer term fearing this might dis-
rupt preparation for and the sitting of public examinations. Similarly so,
institutions may find themselves undergoing internal or external audits, such as
an Ofsted inspection, the impact of which upon a school’s routine was traced by
Jeffrey and Woods (1998). Here, Jeffrey was already an embedded fieldworker in
the run up to the inspections and hence did not encounter barriers to access
that a new researcher may have encountered at that time. In the case of a study
designed to observe the full school year or more specifically the place of public
examinations in the experience of schooling, timing would pose a significant
problem. Clearly, it would be easy to identify likely ‘hot spots’ in a wide range
of institutions where accommodation of fieldwork would not be possible.
Ironically, it may be these very times that are of particular attraction for the social
researcher. Whilst it may sometimes be possible for the researcher who has
developed a very good rapport with relevant gatekeepers to persuade them to
agree to access at such times, it may often be that the fieldworker is denied access
to critical incidents in the rhythms of a particular institution and in the lives of
its participants for myriad reasons, including space and time.
From the foregoing discussion we may conclude that opportunities to con-
duct open-ended fieldwork, free from internal and external restrictions, are rare.
As a consequence, the time to be spent in the field will usually be specified in
advance, as part of the research design. Rather than being driven by concerns
for the quality and the quantity of the collected data and therefore a decision
integral to the ongoing progress of the fieldwork, the decision of when to leave
the field is likely to be contingent on external technical factors. This is not to
argue that the decision is always predetermined and the researcher has no capac-
ity for flexibility here, it is to emphasize the financial and political context
within which much fieldwork is conducted. The fieldworker may therefore have
a strong sense of what needs to be included within that timeframe (Jeffrey and
Troman 2004). Whilst it may be possible for the researcher to leave the field
early, that is before the time specified in the research design, it is rare for field-
work to extend beyond the original time specified. In this respect, decisions
about the ending of fieldwork may be more usefully considered not in terms of
when, but in terms of how the nature of departure should be managed.

TAKING YOUR LEAVE

As with all aspects of the research process, the end of fieldwork requires careful
thought and planning. As a courtesy, research participants need to be at least
informed and if possible consulted about when fieldwork will end, as this will
impact on them as well as on the researcher. Although a specific period of field-
work is likely to have been agreed with at least some of the participants in
 When it’s Time to Go 113

advance of the study, not all of those who become involved in the fieldwork will
have been informed of the arrangements. Others may have forgotten or, in cases
of covert participation, the researchers’ decision to leave the field may be totally
unexpected and in some cases difficult to explain. Our discussion in an earlier
chapter was also clear that not all people in the field can be informed or neces-
sarily consent formally to the research. Managing the end of fieldwork may,
therefore, prove similar to managing its beginning in respect of the expectations
of members of the field. As we have seen above, the period for fieldwork may
be circumscribed by technical factors. In some ways this may make planning for
the end easier, as the researcher knows when data collection must be completed,
or at least by what time he/she has to have gathered enough data to work with
and with which he/she can be confident to represent the activities of the field.
Knowing in advance will enable the researcher to make appropriate plans for
targeting particular locations, people, activities, documents, etc., which are
regarded as essential, before the end. For example, in the case of school-based
research, this may mean ensuring that observations of lessons in particular sub-
jects or those taught by a particular teacher have been completed. For fieldwork
sites spread geographically across a village, it may include spending time in the
different organizations or clubs within that space, meeting with residents across
the village and also tracing how different areas are used and for what purpose
by the people there. It may mean that the end is planned around a specific or
infrequent event, such as a sports day, parish council meetings, parents’ evening
or the annual village charity cricket match, which is regarded as significant to
the study. Whilst it may be possible for the researcher to return for such events,
so long as relations with research participants have been amicable, the context
of such a return may make a qualitative difference to the experience. The lead-
up to the event as well as its aftermath will not be accessible and the return of
the researcher may, in itself, add to the ‘special’ nature of the event. Clearly, these
possibilities would need to be judged within the specific context before a decision
to return was taken.
Deciding on or knowing the specific date of the end of fieldwork, or of the
final visit to the field will help to facilitate the many simple and more routine
tasks that often punctuate fieldwork. These may include ensuring that relevant
documents have been collected which may be especially important where par-
ticular sequences of information are required, or where a complete set of
information is important. It may be that information or books borrowed from
respondents need to be returned, with thanks. It may also be an opportunity to
ensure that you have reliable contact details of those you may wish to keep in
touch with after the end of fieldwork. Or, quite simply, the final stages of field-
work may produce the motivation to collect the data that, for some reason, have
eluded you so far. One last attempt to talk to the one person who has so far
avoided you and appeared rude on previous attempts, to catch a word with a
very busy working mum or to observe the school football team at training as it
114 Doing Fieldwork

had been pouring with rain on previous occasions and you hadn’t fancied get-
ting wet! The final days are, therefore, an opportunity to address those things that
you had put off for one reason or another at earlier stages in the field. They
reflect very clearly the fact the fieldwork is about human relationships and that
you, the researcher, are not a machine able to be turned on or off at will. They
come into sharper focus as you approach the end of fieldwork and prepare to
distance yourself from the opportunities to continue collecting more and more
data. As Delamont (2002) says, the temptation may be to go on and on collect-
ing data in surroundings that by then will be familiar and perhaps (too)
comfortable, as the alternative of prolonged analysis and writing seems far less
attractive. Alternatively, as Parker (1996) found, relationships with key gatekeep-
ers can prove antagonistic and their conclusion relieve the fieldworker from the
tension involved in managing such relations.
In addition to tying up the loose ends of data collection, the end of fieldwork
also means the end of relationships that will have been formed over its duration.
These are likely to have varied according to the extent and nature of the contact,
the formal and/or institutional status of individuals, the extent to which people
have been helpful or obstructive as well as the usual conventions of social inter-
course which shape whether or not individuals are able to establish a rapport.
Within these particular sets of circumstances it is feasible that friendships
between researcher and researched will have developed. Hillyard, coming to the
end of her fieldwork in Norfolk, was invited to various informal social gather-
ings by staff and exchanged email addresses with some of the teachers she had
worked with. Where this is the case then expectations of contact beyond the
fieldwork may be anticipated and encouraged. If so, participants may also expect
to continue their involvement in the research through the more informal con-
tact with the researcher that may ensue. Whilst there may be no problem with
this and such relationships may be regarded as a positive outcome of the field-
work, it may be useful for the researcher to make clear the extent to which it
will be possible to discuss the research within the context of the friendship.
Clearly, the researcher has a duty of confidentiality to all of those who have
participated in the study, not just those with whom longer lasting relationships
have been maintained. It is not difficult to see where such relationships may
present challenges to the researcher, which may have a significant bearing on the
nature of the friendship. In such circumstances, it might be argued that although
the fieldwork and indeed the study as a whole has come to an end, the researcher
does not stop being a researcher in the sense that he/she may have had access to
information that is not necessarily in the public domain and that is highly sensi-
tive and personal. Moreover, in the course of data analysis, the researcher will
also have made judgements about those with whom she/he may have come to
regard as friends and may have referred to them in published work. As we have
seen, even where pseudonyms are used it is often possible for research partici-
pants to identify themselves and others from the field in published work and
 When it’s Time to Go 115

where this happens, the researcher will need to acknowledge the possible impact
of this on any future friendship. In addition, even where there is no identifiable
friendship, it may also be the case that participants seek to maintain intermittent
contact with the researcher. Understandably, they may wish to gain access to
publications or other output relating to the study, in which they may have been
key participants. Alternatively, the researcher may decide to notify participants of
output and send them copies of papers, thus maintaining the relationship, albeit
at a restricted and professional level. This can often be the case if the fieldwork
has involved academic participants.
However, the decision of whether or not to maintain contact after the formal
cessation of fieldwork may not be entirely that of the researcher. Research
participants may be only too pleased that the fieldwork is coming to an end, thus
allowing them to return to the way things were before the researcher arrived in
the field. Alternatively, some kind of contact, perhaps in the form of reports or
presentations on the findings of the study, may have been negotiated as a pre-
condition of granting access to the field in the first instance. Where this is the
case the researcher clearly has an obligation to prolong contact regardless of
personal preference and may also feel under some pressure to present findings in
such a way as to avoid creating tensions between those upon whom the findings
are based and who remain in the field. The art of the post-fieldwork presentations
that, whilst being true to the data also has minimal impact on the site, may be
something which researchers would do well to cultivate. In addition, it is often
difficult to judge what will interest the people attending, particularly if it is a
public event. One further possibility may also be where participants offer to
continue to feed data to the researcher after the point of departure. This may be
tempting and useful as a means of adding to the stock of data. However, there
comes a time in all research where it is necessary to draw a halt to data collection
and where the study has to stand or fall by what there is. It is also worth keeping
in mind that more does not necessarily mean better and the outcome of the
research must rest on what has been collected.

AFTER THE END

RESEARCHERS
Ending the time in the field can represent a watershed in the research process.
For some, fieldwork is the most enjoyable aspect of the entire project and its end
may signal a return to, or the start of the more routine activities of analysis and
writing. It may also signal that time towards completion of the doctorate is
approaching, that funding is running out or that a sponsor will be expecting an
end-of-award report. For others, the end of fieldwork may mean the beginning
of serious summative analysis and writing (Pole and Lampard 2002) or where a
116 Doing Fieldwork

comparative project can really come to fruition when fieldworkers return from
their different sites and contrast their findings. This is the period of the research
project when the hours spent in the field start to pay dividends in terms of tan-
gible output. It may, therefore, herald the most productive phase of the research
process in which there is a new or different sense of urgency, requiring a new
timetable, targets or work schedules. Whichever way the end of fieldwork is
interpreted, it seems likely that a period of adjustment will be required as new
work rhythms are adopted at the same time as others are left behind.
For some researchers, leaving the field behind can be an emotional time.
Losing contact with people, locations and situations that have been important
and absorbing for what may have been a long period of time may be difficult
and a time of some sadness which may even engender a sense of loss. It may
also represent a ‘low’ spot in the research process where the researcher feels it
necessary to re-charge the intellectual and physical batteries. For example,
Wacquant’s (2003) fitness regime in his study of boxing was highly intensive
and he describes the change in his physique during that time. Towards the end
of his fieldwork, his training will have diminished from the level needed for his
preparations for his first amateur fight. Quite literally, his body and soul would
have needed a period of recuperation after the fieldwork. On a more trivial
note, the fieldworker may have been away from family and friends for a pro-
longed period of time. However, for many fieldworkers a period of adjustment
may not be possible, as fieldwork has been conducted alongside other duties
such as teaching and administration. Moreover, a period of adjustment may not
be regarded as necessary. In the case of Scott (2009: 125), a self-proclaimed
‘chlorine junkie’, swimming regularly was already part of her schedule and
hence the end of formal data collection no disruption to her routine. For many
academics, for example, fieldwork has become part of the rhythm of working
life and in this sense, it is not exceptional either in its conduct or its ending.
The intention of this discussion is not to engender feelings of guilt amongst
researchers, probably a majority of whom do not feel a sense of loss or exhaus-
tion or relief, or even anything at all at the end of fieldwork. It is merely to
acknowledge those possibilities and to give due attention to them as an aspect
of the research process.

RESEARCH PARTICIPANTS
Whilst for the researcher the end of primary fieldwork may signal the start of
new and different activities directed towards the completion of the research, for
the research participants the situation might be very different. For some, the
departure of the researcher may be welcome, signalling a return to normality,
whilst for others it may result in a sense of loss and unlike the situation faced
by the researcher, there may be little to compensate for it. For example, par-
ticipants may have enjoyed the attention and perhaps a degree of status which
 When it’s Time to Go 117

participation in the research had afforded them. Some participants may have
enjoyed the fact that they or their particular role within an organization was
deemed to be of interest to an outsider and they welcomed the chance to par-
ticipate in the study. In some instances, removal of this interest and associated
status may have returned those concerned to their previous unexceptional role
and hence a sense of loss may be experienced.
In exceptional circumstances, participation in fieldwork may have a long-­
lasting impact on the participant. For example, we discussed earlier in this text
the classic example of Doc who was central to the fieldwork conducted by
Whyte for the celebrated study ‘Street Corner Society’. Without Doc, Whyte
would have been unable to gain access to the street corner gangs of ‘Cornerville’
and therefore, to the activities that, for many, constituted everyday life in the
town. As a result of the attention the book received over many years Doc, whose
real identity was eventually revealed, enjoyed a minor celebrity, appearing in
newspapers and on US talk shows. However, other gang members took excep-
tion to Doc’s new-found status and ostracized him, suggesting that he had
betrayed them and their way of life. Doc eventually suffered some kind of break-
down which Boelen (1992) argues was the result of the difficulties he encountered
with former friends. For Doc, the consequences of such close involvement with
Whyte’s fieldwork were felt long after it ended and Whyte had left the field. For
Whyte, ‘Street Corner Society’ provided the foundation for a highly successful
academic career and therefore, represented the beginning of things. For Doc it
was the end of an episode of his life and although his participation also led to
other things, not all of these were by any means positive. A final, more recent
example can be drawn from Deem and her team’s research on new managerial-
ism in UK universities (Deem et al. 2007). The team was interdisciplinary and
included four professors and two researchers. In negotiating access that required
research across all levels of the organization the team, on occasion, drew upon
their own personal and research networks to make initial approaches. This alone
was not problematic for, as we have discussed earlier, rapport is an inter-personal
process cultivated across the data collection process. Nevertheless, clear instances
emerged where the research uncovered instances of conflict or criticisms directly
relating to or addressing those who had acted as initial gatekeepers. This required
tact and diplomacy, both in the dissemination of the project to case study sites
and also in subsequent publications where the individual characteristics of institu-
tions can render them – and their employees – identifiable.
Whilst such situations are rare they do, nevertheless, serve to demonstrate not
only the potential for lasting impact of fieldwork but also the uncertainty that
surrounds it. The case of Doc raises a broader ethical issue relating to the extent
to which responsibility for Doc’s unfortunate situation could be attributed to
the demands made upon him by Whyte, in the conduct of the fieldwork. Whilst
it would be possible to argue that Doc took it upon himself to engage with the
media after the publication and success of the book, a question remains about
118 Doing Fieldwork

the responsibility of Whyte to alert Doc to the possible consequences of doing

so. This would assume, however, that Whyte himself was aware of the possibility
of such consequences, which may not have been the case. In the case of the new
managerialism project, Hillyard was the interviewer in one interview with a
respondent who had also been an initial gatekeeper. In this case, the respondent
was reflexively aware that they were an ‘uncomfortable presence’ inside their
own organization and curious as to the future of the project and its findings. In
a context of profound and enduring change across the Higher Education (HE)
sector, they would not have been able to foresee the longer-term consequences
for their institution nor their own career. Such examples serve to emphasize the
uncertainty surrounding life after fieldwork and its wider impact. It could be
argued that the sixty years since Whyte’s study have resulted in a far greater
awareness, amongst researchers, of the role of the media in their work and of its
potential for interest beyond the academic world in which it is [Link] may
be the case and there are certainly attempts, for example, by the research coun-
cils and other funding bodies, to encourage researchers to give due attention to
the likely impact of their work (although this may be measured differently).
However, increasing the awareness of and attempting to manage the wider
ramifications of research outcomes does not necessarily mean that it is possible
to control for all of its likely consequences. Moreover, there may be many dif-
ferent kinds of consequences, some of which will be easier to manage than
others. For example, whilst researchers may be able to alert and thus prepare
participants to the likely consequences of speaking to the media about the
research, they would not be able to offer protection against more personalized
consequences of participating in the research. The example of Heley’s research
in his home village in Bedfordshire, England had been discussed already as Heley
(2011) himself did not see his familiarity with the town as necessarily problematic,
even though members of his family still lived there and during the course of the
fieldwork he had been invited into the homes and to social activities (for exam-
ple, golfing) of this group. Whilst originally presented anonymously in journal
articles, the village’s real identity was exposed by the media. This led to a sense
of betrayal amongst his respondents, the new incoming and wealthy village
residents. In contrast, during another project exploring the social and cultural
impact of the 2001 UK foot-and-mouth disease epidemic, Hillyard, as a member
of the research team, was involved in fieldwork trips and conducted several
interviews with key policy and governmental figures. In such cases, a great deal
of what was reported was discussed ‘off the record’ and/or could not be included
in subsequent publications for it would have revealed the identity of the source.
However, as should be clear from the discussion throughout this volume so far,
it is never possible to give categorical assurances of anonymity, confidentiality or
the impact that a study might have. Whilst all reasonable precautions can be
taken there will always remain the possibility of things going awry. In addition,
taking the view that what participants never know will not hurt them, does not
 When it’s Time to Go 119

address the more fundamental question of whether those involved in studies

based on fieldwork should have the right to know precisely that.

THE DATA
Although it is rarely discussed explicitly in methods texts or accounts of research
more generally, perhaps the most important responsibility the researcher has
after fieldwork has been completed is to the data. As we have seen, there may be
a substantial amount of primary data, in various formats, that have been col-
lected and generated during the fieldwork. In addition, there will also be
documentation produced to support the fieldwork in the form of access and
permission correspondence, research tools and in many instances the primary
data will have been supported by secondary data in the form of documents col-
lected as the fieldwork has [Link] researcher’s responsibility to all of this
falls into three related categories of storage, security and access. In short, the
researcher will need to ensure that data are stored securely and that only those
with an agreed and legitimate need will have access to the data. Expressed in this
way these responsibilities appear quite straightforward. However, in practice they
present a number of challenges for the researcher.
Whilst the capacity to digitize all kinds of data has largely dispensed with the
need for physical storage of hard copies of data, it has not removed issues of security
and who should have access to the data. For example, whilst it may be reasonable
to assume that the principal investigator(s) would have long-term access to the data,
would the same access be extended to all members of the research team and if so
for how long? Would conditions also need to be applied to the access? For example,
that any member of the research team be obliged to at least inform his/her col-
leagues of output produced on the basis of access to the data, or perhaps to
collaborate with them in such output? What capacity should there be for discussion
prior to publication, if the analysis presented by one member of the research team
is not shared by the others? Moreover, storage of electronic data presents questions
not just about access but also about security. For example, in how many locations
should files be stored? If hardcopy of some documents exists, who should be
allowed to take copies and how should their safe handling be ensured? If electronic
copies, of papers, pictures or recordings exist, what arrangements need to be made
for shared access to files which ensure that only those authorized to do so gain
access? Should these be on a university central computer network, in The Cloud
or even via an international software package, such as Nvivo, that may require
regular software updates? What responsibilities for security will be in place if indi-
viduals then download material to individual hard-drives, USB devices or smart
phones? Even the disposal of physical hardware on which files may have been
stored needs to be addressed in order to be as sure as possible that those without
good and approved reason to do so, do not access material. Shredding paper, for
example, is more straightforward than irretrievably erasing a hard-drive.
120 Doing Fieldwork

Issues of storage, security and access need to be addressed not just in relation to
those conducting the research and those from whom data have been conducted
but also to a number of third parties. Most readily identified in this category are
the sponsors or funders of the research. With some, for example, the research
councils in the UK, there is often a contractual requirement that the collected data
be offered to a relevant and specified data archive for use by other researchers for
secondary analysis in the future. When the archive wishes to accept the data there
are certain conditions. For example, they may embargo any use of the data for a
specific length of time and in some instances it is possible to specify the kinds of
organizations to whom access should and should not be given. For example, whilst
other bona fide academic researchers may be granted access, organizations seeking
to use the data only for financial gain may perhaps be denied [Link] are also
a number of difficult issues here relating to access by various official and quasi-
official organizations and bodies such as, for example, the police and social services.
Such organizations may seek access to data for perfectly legitimate and laudable
means. For the researcher, however, even though the data will have been com-
pletely anonymized before placing it with the archive, there remain issues about
providing information about particular lifestyles or events that may be used against
certain groups of people in ways not intended at the start of the study.
Access to data is, however, carefully regulated in statute by the Data Protection
(1998) and the Freedom of Information (2000) Acts. Collectively, this legislation
specifies the conditions under which personal data may be stored and the purposes
for which it may be used. Additionally, it makes clear an individual’s right to access
any information held about them. Whilst it is not appropriate to enter into the
detail of this legislation here, it is, nevertheless, important to emphasize that all
researchers need to be familiar with the regulations on data protection and access
to information, in order to ensure that their work is conducted within the law.
Storage, security and access to data remains an issue long after the end of
fieldwork and indeed, long after the particular piece of research to which it
pertains may be deemed to have been completed. For example, we are sure that
the great majority of social researchers hold on to data long after they have
finished working on a particular project. Moreover, we are equally sure that
there are data in both formal and informal archives which have been all but
forgotten by researchers who may have moved on from the particular institution
which still holds the data or in some cases the researcher(s) responsible for
depositing the data may be dead. Such situations present interesting test cases for
the legislators and for the institutions that continue to hold the [Link] there
may be good reason to dispose of such data there are examples of very old data
being rediscovered and put to good and legitimate social scientific [Link] work
of Goodwin and O’Connor (2005) and O’Connor and Goodwin (2004) is a
case in point. After discovering a collection of some 400 unanalysed question-
naires completed during the early 1960s, Goodwin and O’Connor set about
contacting those who had completed the questionnaires as part of the Young
 When it’s Time to Go 121

Workers project (Ashton and Field 1976) conducted by, amongst others, Norbert
Elias (1961) some forty years earlier. The completed questionnaires had, at some
point, been stored in a loft in a property belonging to the University of Leicester
and forgotten about. Ironically, one of the final questions on the original survey
asked respondents whether they would agree to a follow-up interview and many
had done so. However, it is doubtful whether they expected to wait more than
forty years for that interview! Goodwin and O’Connor traced people via
addresses on the original questionnaire but also via snowballing techniques and
the website Friends Reunited. Finding the questionnaires provided a fantastic
opportunity for longitudinal study, underpinned by a romantic methodological
account of access and analysis. However, such examples are rare and are not
without their ethical challenges. Re-visiting data and people forty years on
posed a range of ethical issues which the twenty-first century researchers had to
confront. Ultimately, after careful consideration, they felt the risks of harm could
be minimized and there was much to be gained from contacting the original
participants again. We should also note the complexity of revisiting data or con-
ducting re-studies (Charles and Crow 2012, James 2012). Savage (2010), for
example, sought to contextualize the fieldwork underpinning several landmark
sociological studies. Moreover, he sought to see the implications of fieldwork for
the public academic or intellectual emerging during that research era – to
unravel the politics of the method. However, he failed in the eyes of some key
figures embedded in those contexts to capture the nuances of those intellectual
traditions (Pahl 2011). There is a real danger that retrospective work can lack a
contextual appreciation of how and when the data were collected (Hammersley
2012b, Pahl 2011, Phillipson and Thompson 2008). This, and the issue of famil-
iarity with your dataset, is something we discuss in relation to analysis [Link]
the requirements of present-day data protection legislation governing the stor-
age of information, it is also doubtful whether ‘finds’ such as Goodwin and
O’Connor’s will be possible forty years from now. It is also intriguing as to
whether projects employing software packages will lay as clear an analytic path-
way as the index card system used by Chicago sociologist W.I. Thomas in the
early part of the twentieth century (Janowitz 1966). Perhaps only if the software
manufacturers ensure full compatibility across versions.

CONCLUSION
The intention in this chapter has been to raise awareness of the need to think
carefully and systematically about leaving the field and to avoid the temptation to
assume that there is no need to attempt to manage the end. Above all, it is essential
to recognize that the end is not simply the end for the fieldworker, but also for
those at the centre of the fieldwork and from whom the data have been collected
and generated. Moreover, the definition of the end of fieldwork has also been
122 Doing Fieldwork

considered in the sense that the end seems not only difficult to determine, but also
unlikely to be pre-determined as a particular date and time. There may be many
ends to fieldwork that, in turn, lead to new beginnings in the form of other aspects
of the overall research process. Without wishing to be over-romantic or clichéd, it
does, however, seem reasonable to assert that research rarely comes to an absolute
and final [Link] may reach the end of data collection but continue to work with
the data for many years and by doing so, continue to interact with the field.
Furthermore, as we have seen through the work of O’Connor and Goodwin, data
may lay dormant for several decades before being taken up again and further
engagement with the field ensues. For every project that faces immediate and
unforeseen difficulties even before the research takes place,1 fieldwork still presents
new opportunities. These are inevitably varied, drawn variously from personal
affinities (Atkinson 2005, Sanders 2008, Scott 2009), the challenge to immerse in
unfamiliar fields and explore new techniques (O’Neill 2012, Wacquant 2003) or
to capture insider nuances (Stephens and Delamont 2006). As Geertz (1988)
argued, fieldworkers will always have the suspicion that they haven’t got quite
right ‘that’ element of the field. In that sense, there is always more ‘for lust of
knowing’ fieldwork to be done (Delamont 2002: 1).

NOTE

1 For example Cox et al.’s (1996) ESRC-funded project, where most of the
research team had moved institution before the data collection process began or
where, in the case of Deem’s new managerialism ESRC project, members of the
team had taken on unanticipated senior management roles themselves before the
fieldwork commenced. As Deem (2002) later noted, those who conducted the
interviews influenced the focus and content of the material collected.

FURTHER READING

Delamont S (2002, 2nd edition). Fieldwork in Educational Settings: Methods, Pitfalls

and Perspectives. London: Routledge. (Opening and concluding chapters.)
Jeffrey B and Troman G (2004) Time for ethnography. British Educational Research
Journal, 30(4): 535–48.
 7
ANALYSIS

Chapter overview
• Analysis is not a distinct stage of the research, but takes place across
the entire research process – not just at the end.
• A comprehensive familiarity with your dataset is vital.
• Analysis involves transforming and interpreting qualitative data in
order to capture the complexities of the social world we seek to
understand – making sense of the processes we have experienced and/
or witnessed.
• The analytic process, guided by the research focus/problem, involves
moving from tentative to more confident understandings of social worlds.

To this point, we have discussed a range of research methods and techniques

and also key principles involved in their application. Along the way, we have
also alluded to a much wider orientation which we feel fieldwork involves.
Namely, it is an alignment with the interactionist tradition, interpretivism and
also social constructivism. We have also stressed the importance of reflexivity
throughout the research process, for example, in Chapter 5 we highlighted
that fieldwork is produced by the judgements of researchers, not something
occurring neutrally. In this chapter, all of these come together in the analytic
process.
Our approach has probably already revealed that we do not consider analysis
to be a separate research phase, rather it is something that involves careful reflec-
tion right at the outset of any research (as we discussed in Chapter 2 on ‘Finding
the field’). As Hammersley and Atkinson (2007: 158) argue, ‘the analysis of data
is not a distinct stage of the research’ and by that they mean that analysis and
writing take place across the entire research process – not just at the end.
124 Doing Fieldwork

Therefore analysis is absolutely intrinsic to research – it is what makes research

count and makes it more than just the meaningless collection of ‘facts’. Data
analysis was perhaps once seen as the territory of more quantitatively-orientated
social researchers and qualitative researchers neglected the idea of analysis until
relatively recently. For example, Atkinson et al. (2008: 52) remind us the ‘root
metaphor of triangulation’ was originally to prevent the risk of one method
introducing [Link] use of multiple methods would reduce measurement flaws.
This reveals how some concerns have been inherited from quantitative research
terminology, rather than reflecting our own distinct, contemporary concern
with multi-strategy research. In the mid-1990s, an important flurry of publica-
tions redressed this absence within qualitative research (cf. Bryman and Burgess
2002, Coffey and Atkinson 1996, Denzin 1997, Miles and Huberman 1994,
Wolcott 1994). These took the work of Glaser and Strauss’ (1967) Discovery of
Grounded Theory (itself a significant landmark) a step further. This body of work
served to place analysis more prominently in discussions about fieldwork, in the
same way that Thomas and Znaniecki’s (1918–20) ‘methodological note’ at the
beginning of the Polish Peasant in Europe and America study was instrumental in
raising the importance of talking about the research process in general (to the
extent that it was read more widely than the original study!). There is now a
substantial research literature available, but it is useful to remember that this was
not always the case and it has only relatively recently received special attention –
opening up what had arguably hitherto been the ‘black box’ of analysis. Simply
because it now receives more discussion and is almost a standardized aspect of
the research literature, does not mean it should be taken for granted or that we
should become complacent.
In this chapter, we support the argument established by the analysis literature
that emerged in the mid-1990s and stress that the analysis of fieldwork demands
careful thought. We focus upon the analysis of fieldwork per se, but later reflect
upon the data that come from fieldwork in the concluding chapter. An opening
question to address here is – what do we mean by analysis? What are the key
issues researchers face when managing their fieldwork dataset? What are the dif-
ferent elements fieldworkers highlight in seeking to unlock their fieldwork sites?
There are a number of approaches or techniques available and we outline these
as well as stating our own position.
Silverman (2013) offers a cautionary tale:

Sequence is consequential for what we say and do […] qualitative research is not
[…] just a set of techniques but an analytic project, different from journalism
(Silverman 2013: 54, original emphasis).

For us data analysis involves transforming and interpreting data in order to

capture the complexities of the social world we seek to understand. For Hillyard
 Analysis 125

and Bagley (2013: 413) it was ‘looking beyond the school gates’ that enabled
them to unlock the circumstances informing long-term lack of a head teacher
in one village’s primary school:

This school (and its absent head) therefore acted as a lens through which to see
broader changes through the lived reality of one, rural village environment ‘in
the round’ and also place a value upon the perspectives of those embedded in
that locale and milieu—both its ‘peasants’ and its (new or otherwise) ‘squirearchy’
(both respondents’ terms) (Hillyard and Bagley 2013: 413).

This immediately offers two distinctions. One holds that the analytic task of
fieldwork is to make sense of the social world we are studying (to ask ‘What is
going on here?’ Silverman 2013: 50). The second is that it is also about seeing
into the working behinds the scenes. Our stance is that the task of analysis is
both: to understand and see what is ordered out of what may at first appear
messy and chaotic. We have already acknowledged that research is a messy, com-
plex process, which (no matter how carefully planned in advance) rarely runs
smoothly or in a straightforward way. We also know that we are fighting famili-
arity (Delamont et al. 2010) in seeking to de-familiarize the very social world
of which we are a part. The main aim remains to make sense of your data. But
we need to unlock, or find a key to, the way in.
Now is also the time to be clear that there are assumptions underpinning our
own stance. Foremost is the supposition that fieldwork is capable of delivering
insight into the social world (Hammersley 2012b, 2013). This holds fast to ‘the
possibility of discovering what people’s attitudes actually are and what is really
going on’ (Hammersley 2012b: 159, original emphasis). Therefore, it is – at its
most basic level – an applied social science (Byrne 2011) because it evokes this
language of subtle realism (Brewer 2000). It is therefore timely now to clearly
state our own principles and then to outline alternative stances (such as
grounded theorizing) and what they seek to achieve.

PRINCIPLES
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE RESEARCHER
We highlighted earlier that the researcher is the research instrument par excellence
in our chapter on fieldwork tools. So across the entire research process, social
research techniques remain nothing on their own, but rather are what the
researcher makes of them. As Hammersley and Atkinson (2007: 151) observed,
‘there is a constant interplay between the personal and emotional on the one
hand, and the intellectual on the other.’ For example, Crossley’s (2008) study
126 Doing Fieldwork

of his own gym and the exercising of social capital by some of its member-
ship involved a personal closeness (literally being in the gym, pool and sauna
with participants), but also the recognition that ‘the details of wider roles
were screened out and agents enjoyed a degree of autonomy in “self-­presentation”’,
to borrow Goffman’s (1959) term, because they were the only source of infor-
mation about their “outside life” (Crossley 2008: 486). Here, Crossley (2008)
used Goffman’s theoretical ideas as a means to maintain an analytic distance – to
keep a critical purchase – despite his personal and physical closeness to his
research group. Here there is a close dialectic between theory and method in
analysis:

Ideas are emergent from one-experience in the field, and from one’s preliminary
analytic reflections on the data. As this should make clear, emergence is a function
of the analytic work one puts in: it does not ‘just happen’ (Hammersley and
Atkinson 2007: 159).

So here, the sociologist’s role is explanation and interpretation via analysis, but
does not dictate the form that analysis takes. Rather, as we reviewed in our
chapter on finding the field, there is a process of identifying a conceptual
framework to ‘guide’ the direction of the fieldwork. It is this conceptual framework
that aids our interpretation of the data and moves it beyond the research sub-
jects’ own understandings of their actions. This is thinking in a hierarchical
sense, of levels of concepts and orders of knowledge. On the first, ‘lowest’ level
in this order is the data. What qualitative data analysis delivers is the next level
up: second-order knowledge that conceptualizes the social world (echoing
Robert K. Merton’s notion of middle range theory). This is not radical or
unduly daunting for, as Craib (1992) points out, we are all involved in thinking
theoretically in our everyday lives when we make sense of what is going on all
around us.

GENERATING LANDMARKS
A very early stage in this conceptualizing process – thinking theoretically – is
when we start finding or generating concepts that help us understand what is
happening in the area we are studying. Silverman (2013: 50, emphasis added)
captures the move between these levels of thinking: ‘What is going on here? In the
analytic process this then becomes how can I make sense of what is happening here?’
So here you are unlocking or making sense of what is occurring and this is a
fundamental aspect of doing analysis.
The methodological literature uses a wide variety of terms for how we
identify these kinds of first and second order concepts: coding, classifying,
creating typologies, memo writing, diagrams, themes, categories and nodes.
These develop via the continuous interaction between data and thinking by
the researcher. Plenty of analogies are available. Hammersley and Atkinson
 Analysis 127

(2007: 160) use the metaphor of a funnel in their discussion of ethnography.

This captures the refinement of the initial research problem across the course
of the research and also that analysis involves making what is, or can be, very
unstructured datasets into ‘the development of a set of analytic categories
that capture relevant aspects of these data, and the assignment of particular
items of data to those categories’ (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007: 161).
The capture of that analysis is a cyclical process that requires thinking about
interrelationships across your dataset. Blumer (1954) summarizes the process
as moving from the tentative ‘sensitizing concepts’ to more confident
‘definitive concepts’.
It is sometimes difficult to see how to start this process, for example, what to
code in the first place. Delamont (2002) suggests code anything that interests
you. Atkinson et al. (2008: 46) also appeal to Blumer’s recommendation ‘that
research should be “faithful” to the phenomena under investigation’ so here you
might pursue what is of concern to those in the research field. For example,
Payne (1996) makes the very well-observed point that fieldwork almost cannot
avoid picking up on the issues that are important to the people being researched.
Silverman (2013: 49) seeks ‘to reveal what is extraordinary about the ordinary
features of everyday life’. The analytic process needs to note the intriguing and
regular or irregular features of the dataset.
All of these could be almost anything, but will of course be dependent upon
your research focus and the research problem you are investigating: in sum,
looking for landmarks and creating your own landmarks as well as capturing the
capacity of fieldwork to surprise. These are all potential landmarks to explore.

AN INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE OF YOUR DATASET

What is vital across all of these issues is a comprehensive familiarity with your
dataset (Atkinson 2015, Delamont 2002, Hammersley and Atkinson 2007):

It is not good enough to skim a transcript or set of field notes and to have a
broad sense of ‘what it’s all about’, cherry-picking bits of data for quotation. Thin
descriptions and unconvincing analyses derive from cursory reading and inade-
quate acquaintance with the data (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007: 162).

The sheer volume of a dataset, given that a single interview can yield a
document of twenty or more pages per respondent, can make this a daunting
prospect. Yet amongst the research teams within which we have worked, we
have seen it is possible to have an intimate command of a dataset even when
others have collected some of that material. Fortunately, in categorizing and
classifying data, there are also now far more computer-based methods of data
storage to help than was the case even ten years ago. Some are Cloud-based
(such as the sharing capacity of Dropbox) that allow a team password-protected
access; some simple category analysis software packages (cf. Filemaker or even Word)
128 Doing Fieldwork

and Nvivo is a more sophisticated package, but rendered problematic due to

frequent upgrade requirements. Like Tummons (2014) and Wolcott (2010),
we consider these great aids and agree that they do not perform the thinking
for you.
In discussing computing, we must acknowledge that our lives are now
permeated by ubiquitous technologies and in our view this has led to some
confused thinking about the role of data. Hand’s (2014) overview of the ‘big
data’ literature is very clear here. There is a considerable difference between
seeing the parallels between Simmel’s cosmopolitan and the online
gamer/‘flâneur electronique’ and setting up such ‘big’ datasets as a means to
predict our behaviour (Atkinson and Willis 2007: 818). Atkinson and Willis’
(2007) analysis shows how we experience space is also mediated by our
encounters with technology – they come together to inform our lived realities
(even if this reality takes place online). Hand (2014) powerfully argues, we want
to study this, rather than think that ‘big data’ will deliver the answers for us.
Living in a ‘big data bonanza’ means that fieldwork must acknowledge the role
such technological systems (or knowing capitalism) holds for our everyday
lives, but it should not detract from being clear about the analytic status of
electronic datasets that ‘big data’ proffer us. Lyon and Back (2012), whilst talking
about the working practices of a London street vendor – and the very move-
ments of their hands – still carefully situate their fieldwork within changing
global consumption. The analyses of bin usage datasets in a sentient city or
what city traders are buying for lunch in expenses-restricted times will only
tell us so much. We can reach into electronic and social transactional datasets,
but we should not fetishize nor suggest they will yield privileged insight – or
answers.
There is a history of over-promising in relation to new techniques of social
research. Travers (2009) argues that technological developments often result in
innovation claims, but that does not equate to developing methods to better
understand the social world (see also Wiles et al. 2011). For example, the strong
case made by Strangleman (2004) regarding the illuminating insight visual
methods can yield for the sociology of work has yet to waken the sub-­discipline
to non-traditional techniques of data collection (Roderick 2014). We would
suggest, as Atkinson (2013) noted of his own practice of making his notes only
after leaving the field, that capturing information ‘in the moment’ will always
be selective whatever the medium (and he uses digital video-recording) and
hence is not essential for good practice. What is key is the analytic thinking that
goes on around that information. So when Delamont (2006) began her field-
work exploring capoeira, it was both careful observation of that activity and
analytic thinking that enabled her to write about the authority of the different
teachers – working out which t-shirts demonstrate displays of loyalty, that is,
the meaning of the data.
 Analysis 129

THE IMPORTANCE OF A REFLEXIVE OUTLOOK

This reaches across all principles. It is vital to maintain throughout the process
of analysis (and the entire research project) a reflective stance (cf. Atkinson 1990,
Hammersley and Atkinson 2007). This involves the constant questioning and
reflection upon what you are doing in the field, through the analysis and too in
the writing-up. This involves asking questions such as:

1 What was your basis for selection? (What you are omitting?)
2 Access (Who granted access and does this skew your own analysis in any way?)
3 What counts as data? (Both informal and formal situations?) Following that,
what status do you give to each and what are the implications of that thereon?
4 Have you collected enough data? (A qualitative dataset need not be vast.
Glaser and Strauss (1967) argue that this process of data analysis finishes when
the data are conceptually exhausted. Delamont (2002) is perhaps more accu-
rate when she suggests it finishes when the researcher is exhausted!)

Being reflexive is vital because all decisions impact upon the fieldwork product
as a whole. For example, the roles you occupied during your fieldwork will lead
to different vantage points – and these will then impact upon your analysis and
the representation of the field that you ultimately offer.
So, in summary, opening principles of analysis involve:

• Becoming completely familiar with your data (whilst acknowledging the

wide range of data this may encompass).
• Re-engaging (by watching/listening/experiencing again) with the data you
have collected (using your initial research problem or ‘foreshadowed problems’
to guide you).
• Looking beyond the obvious.
• Looking closely in order to be surprised.
• Exploring anything of interest or regularity.
• Categorizing and classifying the data (what patterns emerge? What surprises
or puzzles you?).
• Are there any inconsistencies or contradictions?
• What similarities and differences are there?
• Noting the context in which the data were collected (as meaning is inter-bound
with context).
• Maintaining a reflexive outlook.

We now move to situate these opening principles with three approaches often
utilized by qualitative researchers: grounded theorizing (GT); analytic induction
(AI) and; critical ethnography.
130 Doing Fieldwork

THREE APPROACHES TO QUALITATIVE DATA

ANALYSIS
I. GROUNDED THEORIZING
Grounded theorizing (GT) is the most cited and arguably most famous approach
to the analysis of qualitative data. It is inductive, in that the data provide the steer
through which the theory is built. In that sense, it cannot be wrong because it
was iteratively generated by/through the [Link] analysis is therefore extremely
important – effectively what the whole project is about.
Glaser and Strauss (1967) first outlined the grounded theory approach in their
seminal text The Discovery of Grounded Theory and this is the original reference
point. However, this immediately leads to some problems for those choosing this
style of analysis. Namely, it has evolved in different ways since. As Atkinson
(2012) noted of the time when Strauss taught him in the States, there is a dif-
ference between the way the approach is communicated first hand and the
textbook account. To further complicate matters, Glaser and Strauss themselves
subsequently took up different approaches to grounded theorizing (cf. Charmaz
and Mitchell 2001).The danger emerging might be that there are as many versions
of grounded theorizing as there are grounded theorists!
Space does not permit us to go into a detailed account of all the nuances
between Glaser, Strauss and their followers’ versions of GT, but these debates lead
us to feel that grounded theory is best described as an ideal type of inductive
analysis. It places an importance upon the definition of the situation of the research
participants themselves and attempts to build an analysis from there. Yet, as the
preceding chapters on reflexivity and the process of defining the field have shown,
fieldwork is not a simple process of allowing the data to ‘speak’ for themselves. So
one way to see how the approach has worked is to look beyond the classic text by
Glaser and Strauss to see a more recent form used by one scholar. This version of
GT operationalized by a former student of Strauss’ is well represented in the methods
literature by Charmaz (Bryant and Charmaz 2007, Charmaz 2006, 2014, Charmaz
and Mitchell 2001).
The core principles of contemporary grounded theorizing are straightforward
and we are resistant to attempts to over-complicate or mythologize them.
Key – indeed absolutely vital – is flexibility for reasons that we will explain. The
approach emerged from the symbolic interactionist tradition (see Rock 1979)
and this informs two features of GT. Firstly, its interest in theorizing and, second,
the type of theorizing that is interested in how action and meaning are con-
structed. Charmaz, too, acknowledges that multiple interpretations are possible.
So, taking a step back, we can see that grounded theorizing has an ambition to:
make sense of the data; to interpret them and; to use them as a basis for explana-
tion of the processes they have captured. It is therefore ambitious – it wants to do
 Analysis 131

more than simply understand or describe (although these are important steps on
the way), it wants to produce grounded theory.
This metaphor or moniker of ‘grounded’ emphasizes flexibility and too reveals
the importance of being open-minded. That translates as a curiosity about issues
that arise and develop during fieldwork whilst ‘suspending your disbelief ’ (to
employ the phrase used in literary studies). Here you want to see the weltan-
schauung or worldview of the people studied and this might well involve
challenging your own. Charmaz is certainly resistant to any prescriptiveness in
the process of use of research tools and celebrates that grounded theorizing is
only one approach amongst many, so whilst she clearly is a champion of GT, she
is no methodology zealot.
What is particularly distinctive about this approach compared to others, or
Charmaz, is that grounded theorizing is aligned to ethnography more so than
fieldwork. She perceives here that fieldwork is often targeted at a particular issue
or question (i.e. forms of assessment in schools or the role of the school in a
village community). Ethnography tends to look at an environment or setting in
its entirety (i.e. a whole school or a whole village). Such social worlds do not
need to be geographically large, but they involve more than the participant
observation of face-to-face behaviour and co-presence.
Whilst we might take issue with this representation of fieldwork that is issue-
based or has a pre-defined research question at its core, the point Charmaz is
making is that GT’s focus upon a ‘whole’ social world is a strategic one to do with
what GT seeks to achieve. It seeks to see the interconnections. Right from the
outset, the challenge is to see what categories and concepts emerge when trying
to make sense out of what is happening in that relatively-contained social world.
GT then uses the technique of comparison and contrast to see what relations and
relationships operate across these categories and concepts. It then asks whether
these original categories and concepts hold, or need modification in the light of
new data? The strategy necessitates having a grasp of the whole in order to see its
interconnections.
Charmaz and Mitchell (2001) outline some useful procedural steps for
grounded theorizing in greater detail than we can offer here, but identify the
following five strategies as core to the approach:

1 simultaneous data collection and analysis;

2 pursuit of emergent themes through early data analysis;
3 discovery of basic social processes within the data;
4 inductive construction of abstract categories that explain and synthesize these
processes;
5 integration of categories into a theoretical framework that specifies causes,
conditions and consequences of the process(es) (Charmaz and Mitchell
2001: 160).
132 Doing Fieldwork

The grounded theory analyst is therefore constantly asking questions in two

senses: in the field and of the emerging dataset. It involves the kind of ‘think-
ing theoretically’ we mentioned earlier that Craib (1992) talks about. Here,
thinking theoretically whilst doing GT helps the fieldworker consolidate
their ideas through a cyclical engagement and re-engagement with their
dataset. What initially starts with making descriptions moves to the generation
of abstract concepts that then are reinforced to become theoretical explanations.
This happens as the initially abstract concepts are compared to the data and
found to ‘hold’ across a variety of insights the fieldwork has generated.
They become more confirmed or solidify into theoretical explanations that
hold across the different social scenes studied. The data therefore do not
speak for themselves, but this analytic engagement with them is absolutely
intrinsic to the account that emerges. It is cyclical and only becomes solidified
once the abstract concept holds across the dataset that is being worked with.
The claim is not towards generalization, but rather that if you are looking
across three teaching groups in a school, it would successfully capture what
happens in all three.
One of these steps marks out a clear distinction between GT and the approach
of analytic induction we now introduce. For Charmaz’ grounded theorizing, the
review (of the data) comes after concepts and categories have been modelled into
a theoretical framework. For analytic induction, as advocated by key proponents
such as Hammersley, the review comes much earlier and (like GT’s interest in
flexibility) for strategic reasons.

II. ANALYTIC INDUCTION

Hammersley has been a central figure in the description and advocacy of
analytic induction within qualitative research (cf. Hammersley 1992, 2010b,
2012a, 2012b). We agree with his argument that a reflexive position should
include metaphorically laying your cards on the table (i.e. being very clear
about where you stand) when it comes to making causal claims based on
qualitative research (Hammersley 2012b). His point is an important one. With
the recognition that, (a) multiple representations are possible from one research
site, and (b) that when we are constructing an account as much as presenting
any ‘reality’ comes the danger that we might lose sight of what qualitative
research can and should produce. In response, some researchers have rejected
the grounds for making causal claims, whereas Hammersley (2012b) points out
in practice they often do. For Hammersley (2012b), a lot of qualitative
researchers are in denial.
It is in this argument that Hammersley’s calls for clarity in the analytic process
(cf. Hammersley 1992, Hammersley and Cooper 2012). For example, he reminds
us that AI actually pre-dates GT and offers a very accessible introduction to
what AI is by contrasting it with GT (Hammersley 2012b). First, both approaches
 Analysis 133

favour the use of case study datasets (echoing Charmaz’ point about ethnography
working best with GT). Secondly, they share an inductive flavour, that is, use the
data to help explore and unravel what is significant and important about the
given social phenomena. Finally, neither sample with an aim to be representative
or towards generating probabilistic generalizations, but rather for AI the aim is
about working out deterministic laws and for GT sampling strategy is all about
finding cases that help further crystalize the emerging theory. This last point or
feature of AI – its concern with deterministic laws – seems quite strong at face
value, but what it means is that the challenge is to look at samples that can help
really improve or narrow down the issue or phenomenon explored: that make
it manageable in research [Link] sample to help you to look at examples that
will help refine your working theory. So, it is only when the point of
‘theoretical saturation’ is reached (and no further sampling or cases would pro-
vide valuable information because your data have already captured that issue or
aspect of the field), that your work is done.
So if AI and GT share many characteristics, what merits the distinction
between the two? It lies right at the starting-point, or initial source of inspiration
for the research, what we termed finding the field (Chapter 2). For AI, there is
already a burning issue or interest, whereas for GT the concern is more about
what is taking place in a more generic setting or [Link] difference at the start
is reflected in their subsequent conclusions. AI is narrower and very specific in
the conclusion or knowledge that it offers (i.e. it would be about a form of
behaviour in particular circumstances or an exact situation), whereas GT would
seek to explain a set of behaviours in the context of a setting or system. This is a
key distinction for Hammersley (2012b) for it affects the precision of language
deployed. AI favours binaries (i.e. xyz does or does not occur), whereas GT tends
towards degrees (i.e. a change of behaviour occurs, but varying). Here we can see
that the ambitions of both approaches (what they seek to achieve) impacts upon
what each approach initially wants to explore. So for AI, questions could be: does
it hold in this new setting (yes or no) and, if not, what causal factors account for
why? For GT, there is more scope to refine the theory, to explore perhaps why
things do not seem to fit or further explaining why they do.
This nicely summarizes a key distinction: GT is developmental; AI is about
testing (that can then help theory development, too). GT holds fast to the logic
that, if the approach is used correctly and the theory inductively developed
throughout, it is valid in its own right and therefore does not need further test-
ing. Put simply, because it has inductively arisen from the data it cannot be
wrong.1 For AI, because it ‘thinks’ in binaries, it needs to fit or be well-aligned,
or otherwise be re-worked to explain the discrepancy.
We can see now that there are two, quite different approaches. These very
different styles stretch across the whole research process and echo what we
stressed earlier about analysis – it begins even before the fieldworker enters the
field. To ignore thinking about what analytic approach you are going to use
134 Doing Fieldwork

simply will not wait until the fieldwork is underway – you must have thought
long and hard about it beforehand. Of course, and as Hammersley (2012b)
reminds us, there is still the act of interpretation by the researcher taking place.
If you are in the business of causation, which GT or AI are, then it is essential
to remain reflexive towards how you are shaping your data as much as your data
are shaping your account.
The orientation of AI towards causation, in our view, is one of the particular
strengths of AI. It maximizes the synergy between fieldwork and the development,
testing and cumulation of theory. A reflexive analysis would not become refined
or isolated to the degree that it does not speak to broader, more abstract social
forms or sociological theory. Hammersley (2012b) is very critical of such insular
work and perceives it as a form of naïve realism, naïve because GT does not need
to look hard at confounding or outlying data. Whilst a critical point, this does
ensure that fieldwork does not become divorced from the issues that preoccupy
its parent discipline of [Link] feel fieldwork has the capacity to help inform
and even shape the latest debates in sociology and it would be a waste to miss this
by solely using GT. There are parallels with Gane’s (2012) use of Weber’s work to
analyse contemporary capitalism. Weber’s output is that of an early twentieth-
century scholar writing during the industrial revolution, not one who is inside
contemporary ‘knowing’ capitalism (Thrift 2005).Yet Gane uses (even transgresses)
Weber’s ideas to lever insight into contemporary social and cultural dynamics.
Fieldwork can be used in a similar vein, but not if it only looks to itself.
In summary, AI involves the following stages:

1 An initial description of the type of outcome to be explained is formulated.

2 One or a few cases where this outcome occurs are investigated.
3 Data from these are analysed in order to identify common elements, and to
generate an explanatory hypothesis […].
4 Data from further cases are collected and/or analysed in order to test this
hypothesis […].
5 If the hypothesis is not confirmed, there are two options […] the hypothesis
can be revised […] [or] revised in such a way as to exclude discrepant cases […].
6 This process of modification […] continues until the explanatory hypothesis
fits all the data from new cases as well as that from previous cases (adapted
from Hammersley 2012b, in Cooper et al. 2012).

The capacity of fieldwork to be relevant links to the goal embedded in the next
analytical approach we discuss – ‘critical ethnography.’ Critical ethnography is
all about speaking to the contemporary issues, be they theory, power, inequali-
ties or even [Link] result is a very different set of orientations
and predispositions and of course analytic principles. We now outline the
approach and then evaluate how it sits alongside the broader fieldwork canon –
for better or for worse.
 Analysis 135

III. CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY

An early point to clarify is that in discussing critical ethnography (CE), no
suggestion is made that GT or AI are uncritical, but rather they have different
ambitions. CE takes Marx’s maxim – that sociology’s task is not just to under-
stand society, the point is also to change it – and this applies to fieldwork too.
So rather than the interactionist research tradition that informs our own
approach to fieldwork, CE injects postmodern literatures and ideas (the work of
Foucault, Derrida and Butler) alongside its Marxist concern with praxis (to not
only understand the world, but to change it too). If we return to our earlier
description of verstehen and the importance we placed upon it, the value of ver-
stehen is not sufficient for CE. The theoretical territories of CE align it with
global post-colonial research and towards a public sociology. These theoretical
ideas avoid the perceived ‘shallow romanticism’ of early anthropological work
(Madison 2011: 144). CE’s engagement with postmodern literatures therefore
leads it to be critical of past, early forms of anthropological fieldwork. What CE
takes from its reading of new theoretical ideas is a strong synergistic relationship
between theory and method and a more proactive, interventionist stance.
CE blends theory and method and concludes with the argument that social
justice, critical analysis and the ethics of fieldwork are intrinsically intertwined.
So whereas GT draws inspiration from interactionism’s social construction of
reality by actors to narrow its focus, CE wants to use that knowledge to make a
difference. To use the metaphor Goffman (1974: 14) uses to describe the task of
his sociology – ‘to sneak in and watch the way people snore’ rather than to wake
them from their ideological slumber – CE is setting the alarm clock! So rather
than an inductive model, CE argues that the very opening research question of
what is happening in a setting is a ‘critical and moral question’ of representation
(Madison 2011: xi). Madison’s own professional field is that of performance
studies and anthropology and draws upon the work of Stuart Hall. Hence
representations matter and there is a ‘responsibility to address’ societal inequali-
ties alongside fieldwork’s concern to understand, study and comment (Madison
2011: 5). The task is to move from merely laying bare the processes of what is,
to see what could be.
This stance determines every aspect of fieldwork conduct. CE is highly
attuned to the ‘positionality’ of the researcher and highlights the need for them
to ‘resist domestication’ (Madison 2011: 8). This is more complex than it first
appears. CE is against objectivity and subjectivity because of its political charge
or desire to make a difference. Whilst we discussed in Chapter 1 that there is
often something that attracts the fieldworker to the research site, for CE
through dialogue and representation the task is to make a difference to that
fieldwork site. This is CE modifying its Marxist antecedents for the contempo-
rary fieldworker and the metaphor of dialogue becomes key here for achieving
its aims (dialogue representing the relationship between researcher and researched).
136 Doing Fieldwork

This is presented as the key means by which the othering of the researched of
early forms of anthropology can be corrected (and hence is very different to
the lineage and analytic principles of GT and AI outlined above). We can also
see parallels here with action research, with its twin objectives to work with
the researched and also have an (positive) impact upon their lives as a direct
consequence of the research.
The different theoretical lineage of CE distinguishes it from both GT and AI
and also shapes its analysis. With CE, its opening theoretical ideas position the
researcher beforehand – CE is in effect the fieldwork application of critical theory.
Critical theory then defines what constitutes the ‘just purposes’ to which CE
should be applied to make a difference (Madison 2011: 15).
What constitutes such responsible research purposes and what would be a just
outcome is, we would argue, relative. The combination of theoretical orientations
(some nine heritages are discussed by Madison) make for a heady mix and we
would question to what degree these would or could possess the same sense of just
purpose. There are many procedural strategic similarities between CE and analytic
induction, both for instance emphasizing a circular ontology. Madison’s (2011)
stylistic choice to introduce three hypothetical researchers – to discuss how they
each grapple with issues of theorizing and analysis – is less illuminating than the
examples grounded in practice used by both Charmaz (reviewing her own work)
and Hammersley (applying Znaniecki, Cressey and Lindesmith). The chapters by
Madison (2011) outlining the practice of fieldwork are also thinner than her high-
lighting of CE’s opening or core theoretical position. Neither does fieldwork enjoy
the same status GT accords it. We are with Hammersley when he argues that
whichever strategic technique is used – it should be used well. In summary:

• ‘research should operate within a framework of political assumptions, and

should be geared to serving political goals’ (Hammersley 2013: 34).
• ‘it means that a comprehensive theory of society is required […] [and] it
implies that the researcher is not located outside of the socio-historical process
but is necessarily part of, and shaped by it. As a result, he or she cannot but
operate within some perspective that has been generated by the process of
social development, and this carries with it the dangers of bias, and therefore
error, but also the only potential for true understanding that is available’ (Hammersley
2013: 32, original emphasis).
• [it is therefore about] ‘achieving particular kinds of political goal: reducing or
eliminating exploitation and oppression, and bringing about emancipation’
(Hammersley 2013: 30).

In times of increasing complexity and speciality amongst forms of analysis, the

addition of CE as a choice of qualitative research analysis for contemporary
fieldworkers we would argue, is a useful one. Yet, like others, it has advantages
and disadvantages.
 Analysis 137

IV. CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

Finally, we wish to overview the contribution of the tradition of analysis known
as conversation analysis (CA). It enjoys less of a profile than the others, but could
be argued to be enjoying something of a renaissance given the attention ‘big
data’ analysis has attracted (for example, twitter feeds). CA has been thinking
on these matters for many decades and hence it would be an omission not to
consider what this stance upon analysis has evolved into and why.
CA stems from an ethnomethodological theoretical standpoint (Garfinkel
1967); it researches people’s methods of making sense of the world around
them. CA therefore has a different flavour or orientation to theory – it is far
more micro. It looks inside conversational exchanges to seek how people are
making sense of their social world – during the very doing of conversation.
That moment of conversation exchange or interaction is the primary focus.
They make no assumption that it will be successful, but rather see any out-
come as a product of the moment or exchange itself. Sequences and pauses – even
conversational stumbles – are therefore key here.
Earlier in the chapter, we argued that Charmaz was no methodological
zealot. When we contrast her version of GT with CA, we see there is a pur-
ist character to CA stemming from its association with ethnomethodology.
By looking to the moment of interaction (or conversation) as where mean-
ing is achieved (its advocates do not recognize structure in the same way CE
would) this then influences the methods they choose. Their unit of focus is
inevitably the conversational exchange. Therefore, the depth of an analysis
of that very unit is much richer – every utterance is noted, including non-
verbal clues (nods, winks, for instance) as well as over-lapping talk. The CA
transcript (and key) is therefore far richer than you would find quoted in
most methods textbooks.
CA has come under attack for being too micro-focused and that this had
detracted from its ability to acknowledge other important aspects of how inter-
action is ordered. However, Silverman (2013) carefully notes that, for him, such
an interest in this kind of sequential analysis does not put CA at odds with other
approaches to qualitative research. He importantly stresses that interviews need
to be contextualized, not just taken as fixed lumps of data for analysis. Mair
et al. (2012) is a strong case-in-point. They used a CA-informed approach to
analyse an instance of ‘friendly fire’ in 2007 during the Gulf War. They do so by
looking at the ground-to-air communication and the air-to-air communication
and exchanges:

we see the chaining and amplification of problems stemming from the locational
confusion we focus on in Excerpt II.9 Once POPOV36 [pilot] received confir-
mation from POPOV35 [pilot] (via MANILA HOTEL) [ground control] that
there were no allied troops in ‘the area’ (with both the ground controller and
the pilots laboring under different understandings as to where ‘here’ was), he
138 Doing Fieldwork

erroneously concluded, by a process of elimination, that the ‘orange panels’ he

had observed on the British vehicles could not be markings signalling an allied
force (as they standardly are). Instead, they had to be something else, orange
‘rocket launchers’ attached to Iraqi vehicles. In this way, the ‘four ship’ came to
embody not merely a potential enemy force but a potentially threatening enemy
force (Mair et al. 2012: 91).

Mair et al. (2012) were here looking into a conversational exchange that was
also situated in a wider context of shared (or mis-shared) knowledge (where
‘here’ was). They looked at the conversational exchange to note when this
breach or disjunction in the accuracy of knowledge occurred – in flight, via
a conversational exchange. Therefore, their application of CA was successful
in capturing and detailing that particular, critical moment. In this case, CA
as an analytic technique was perfectly matched to the subject matter and task
at hand.

SUMMARY
This discussion of alternative approaches has revealed that our own stance
distances us from a postmodern discourse that, some have argued, severs the
arteries of field research (Pole and Morrison 2003). We would therefore sum-
marize our own stance towards analysis with a few broader comments and
observations.
Firstly, we resist the tendency towards something alchemic in the analytic
process. Rather, foreshadowed problems inform the analytic process (Delamont
et al. 2010). In the current climate in which fieldwork now often incorporates
a wide array of tools and new digital technologies, there is a risk that something
magical or mysterious has become associated with analysis. Delamont et al. (2010)
argue that actually working hypotheses (said foreshadowed problems) are key to
fighting familiarity. Careful questions and demystification needs to be asked of
all the resources that fieldwork appeals to – whether traditional tools or the ever
ubiquitous technologies, such as photographs and other visual media. Beer
(2012) for instance notes how algorithms predefine Big Data outputs. We there-
fore cannot take these techniques, nor the knowledge that they yield for granted
or think they have any more privileged access to social reality than the more
traditional techniques associated with fieldwork.2 As Hand’s (2012: 24) discus-
sion of the permeation of photography across our everyday world recognizes,
‘Photography now has many lives, each of which may be related, but all are part
of different trends and may have rather different trajectories in the future.’ For
fieldwork, you will need to think about the very ‘life’ or trajectory of the
medium you are looking to include and why. Rich as new resources may be,
they provide no analytic shortcut. Unlike CA, it is rare that analysis consists
entirely of a text-based dataset. Therefore analysis will always be done on a
 Analysis 139

portfolio of material, some you have generated, and others you have adapted to
your own needs or even stumbled upon. Increasingly, this will include open
data – that is, data which are already there – the kind of data shadow we all
possess in the digital age. For the purposes of analysis, a more fruitful way to
respond is to invite fieldworkers to explore how such new technological devel-
opments can better aid our understanding of the social world (Travers 2009).
The fieldworker here proactively uses New Social Media (NSM) for their own
ends, rather than simply scraping or mining from what is already there (after
netnography). Our preference would be to see the social science community
work in synergy with new and established methods to see the presentation of self
both online and in co-­presence, but there is a danger we may miss the boat. To
paraphrase Kelly and Burrows (2011: 140), ‘it’s play or get played’.
Our second point overviews the evolving ‘life’ or status of fieldwork within
the social sciences. Qualitative analysis has now become a broad church, con-
taining a variety of approaches each with advantages and disadvantages (Atkinson
et al. 2008). For instance, Atkinson (2009, 2013) was instrumental in revealing
the rhetorical devices underpinning ethnographic representations, yet has
remained cautious about some forms of narrative analysis (such as autoethnog-
raphy). Nevertheless, such new forms (cf. Smith 2013, Sparkes 2007, 2009) or
those that privilege the interview (Forsey 2010) are well [Link] broader
cultural context in which fieldworkers are trained and work has had its own
impact. Atkinson and Silverman (1997) and Silverman (2013) argue we live in
an ‘Interview Society’ akin to a sound-byte society in which the interview is
reified as the best or only way to access the complexity of an individual’s world.
Fieldworkers risk becoming complicit with this, for example, Atkinson (2013) is
particularly cautious about how we have come to neglect the situation within
which the individual is located (instead focusing more upon their biography –
or further even auto-ethnography).
A discussion of these debates in full is beyond our task here, beyond noting
the tendency to over-claim methodological innovation (Travers 2009, Wiles
et al. 2011). We prefer Goffman’s (1983) modest wish for a few conceptual distinc-
tions (and a cold beer) that will help ‘unlock’, explain and illuminate our
fieldwork sites alongside Delamont’s (2002) metaphor of fieldwork as a jour-
ney. These both capture the excitement – and challenge – of fieldwork as a
social science research approach is evolving as well as offering the fieldworker
a sharp learning curve. Delamont et al. (2010) use classic examples from the
literature to dispel the mysticism or ‘magic’ (Geer’s original metaphor) of get-
ting an analytic grip on a fieldwork setting. In a similar manner, we now
conclude with a few celebrated (and varied) examples of the analytic insight
yielded by distinctive fieldwork. In the spirit of Atkinson (2015) and Atkinson
and Housley (2003), classics may appear dated, but we feel should not be forgotten
for danger of reinventing the wheel.
140 Doing Fieldwork

EXAMPLES OF CONCEPT USE IN RESEARCH

MONOGRAPHS
There are many examples in the literature where analytic concepts have been
drawn from the terminology of the research participants. Wieder (1974) is a
seminal case and more, using the inmates’ own notion of ‘telling the code’ in
his study of an American prison. However, importantly, he moves beyond the
way the inmates employed it to use it as a tool of both description and expla-
nation. Where an inmate refused to provide a prison guard with information
about a fellow inmate, they explain their actions with reference to the prison
code. Here it becomes more than an informal code to become something that
is directly appealed to as a means to (legitimately) explain behaviour (even if
it places them at odds with the prison rules). To fast-forward to a more con-
temporary piece of fieldwork, O’Neill (2012) used ‘walking ethnographies’
with workers and residents of Vancouver’s downtown east side. Here,
alongside physical maps drawn by participants and their verbal accounts dur-
ing the walks, O’Neill pieced together local knowledge of the place, both the
no-go areas and safe spaces. This was richer than a physical map or even tran-
sitional zones of a city in terms of capturing the ‘experiences and presentations
of communities of interest, well-being and connection’ (O’Neill 2012: 165).
O’Neill’s account was dependent upon the analytic interconnections possible
across her dataset, from interviews, walking tours and observation techniques
in order to make sense of ‘the workings of “community”’ (O’Neill 2012: 166).
This multi-strategy approach relied upon the most marginalized informants’
deep familiarity of their locale.
Pryce (1979) is a second example of a seminal fieldwork monograph that
used participants’ terminology and adapted them into a more formal socio-
logical language. Pryce (1979) created six categories, or typologies, which
described the differences between people in the Afro-Caribbean community in
the St. Paul’s area of Bristol and captured their orientations towards criminal
activity vis-à-vis respectability – from the piously religious to the teeneybop-
pers. To again fast-forward to a more contemporary scene, Lyon and Back
(2012) were similarly interested in the multicultural city environment.
Employing an array of ethnographic techniques, including visual and aural
recordings, they sought to capture urban multiculturalism in a street in South
East London. Here they focused upon the craft of the occupational group –
fishmongers – but the contemporary context demanded they opened up their
analysis to understand the particular circumstances of two retailers in both the
setting (a high street) and the social history of that section of London (the
embedded third generation local vis-à-vis a migrant from Kashmir – where
there is no sea!). Lyon and Back (2012) looked beyond craft (fishmongering)
towards its becoming a skill of embodied local knowledge that was embedded
in the new landscape of a global, multicultural city. ‘Knowing your fish’
 Analysis 141

becomes diversified to shaping the product to fit the consumers’ world (using
ideas drawn from actor network theory) (Lyon and Back 2012). The situation
of the working lives of the two case study individuals could, their analysis
found, only be understood as part of a global landscape situated alongside the
sensuous activity of their labour. This is a theoretically-informed example of
global ethnography.
Metaphors are an alternative technique for extrapolating data. A famous
example is Goffman’s (1959) use of a dramaturgical model. In this Goffman
conceptualized social interaction as analogous to a drama on a stage, with social
actors taking the role of performers. Goffman then applied this drama meta-
phor to understand their actions and behaviour, informed by fieldwork
conducted in the Shetland Islands. Here he was able to represent how people,
in a very small and remote community, adopted ‘masks’ of sociability upon
entering public spaces (such as the pub). The metaphor works on a number of
levels. One, to invite the audience to see how we represent ourselves in a more
critical light (we are all performers) and, secondly, to see the influence of the
audience upon us (whether we get good reviews or not). To again introduce a
more contemporary study, Keenan (2012) found various readings and mis-
readings of his own sexuality during his largely interview-based research upon
self-defined homosexual clergy. Rather his ‘interesting perspective for a straight
researcher to have their gayness presumed when professionally reflecting on the
effects of the presumption of heterosexuality on gay lives’ forced him to think
reflexively about his own disclosure and presentation of self during the research
process (Keenan 2012: 92). Here, Keenan’s backstage persona could not avoid
being intertwined with his facework and front-stage demeanour, during the
informal conversations and communication with his respondents before, during
and after his research that fieldwork visits included. His front-stage habitus as a
young, white man from Northern Ireland overlapped with his more personal,
backstage persona as a ‘clergy kid’ and heterosexual man. Sexual identity, he
concludes, is ‘a rather complex whole’ (Keenan 2012: 93). Roles and masks
therefore infiltrate both the way we think, make sense of our fieldwork and also
how we conduct it.
Finally, researchers can also use what does not happen or absences in the field
as an analytic strategy to understand a research site. Atkinson and Delamont
(1977), in a classic classroom observational study of science lessons, argued that
in order to produce ‘successful’ learning outcomes, certain experiments were
effectively staged. The model of allowing pupils to follow instructions to con-
duct a science experiment could not guarantee the results that would sufficiently
demonstrate the ‘right’ outcome. Hence ‘mock-ups’ were better learning exper-
iments than the ‘cock-ups’ of when pupils were left to conduct experiments
autonomously. The right outcome needed to be staged, rather than risk not
getting the right results. In a more contemporary school study, Hillyard and
Bagley (2013) found during their fieldwork in a Norfolk primary school that it
142 Doing Fieldwork

lacked a permanent head teacher and began to question and analyse why. It
could not be explained by issues inside the school gates, but linked into the
recent political-economic change and expansion of the village itself. The absent
head teacher was therefore symptomatic of a much broader social phenomenon.
The above examples use concepts derived from fieldwork and observation,
but move beyond the data via their analyses. It is this that makes their work
sociologically distinctive. We would argue that without such an analysis, it
would not be sociology. There is a risk of making mistakes along the way,
Alex Allan (2012), for example, talks frankly about her inclusive ambitions for
her fieldwork. Yet during the research, not only did her judgements about
what would be possible change, but also her standing in the eyes of her own
respondents:

Seeing as though Hetty had never used the camera or the tripod before, I
attempted to leave her with some basic instructions about their use. As I did
this the camera and tripod accidentally fell to the floor. This was met with a
disdained look and a dry remark from Hetty: ‘Come on Alex … you don’t really
know how to use this equipment do you! It’s probably best if you leave it to us
experts!’ (Allan 2012: 4.5).

Here, Allan’s (2012) reflexive orientation made her only too conscious of this
changing balance of power across the research.

CONCLUSION
We can see that qualitative data analysis is not an easy or straightforward task.
Data analysis is messy, complicated and often uncertain. Unlike Glaser and
Strauss’ (1967) metaphor of discovery implies, theory and concepts will not
‘magically arise’ out of the data for you. It involves (to borrow C. Wright Mill’s
term) exercising your ‘sociological imagination’. The process acknowledges
the human element of research, namely, that we are intrinsically a part of the
social world we study and hence cannot be separated from it. As Hammersley
and Atkinson (2007) remind us, this is not a part of a methodological commitment:
it is an existential fact and is fundamental to the notion of reflexivity. However,
this is not to suggest theory is the only aim or outcome of research. Your aim
may be to make a difference, to speak to a specific goal or task or to explain
a particular social phenomenon – all of which are valuable qualitative research
enterprises.
 Analysis 143

NOTES

1 Even contemporary thinkers, influenced by postmodern thinking, would not

entirely disagree – they would just argue that it holds only for that moment in
time (Thrift 2008).
2 Simply ‘so that we understand the software and its automated sorting processes,
and so that we might use such a dialogue in order to morph versions of this
software to suit our own critical and comparative interests’ (Beer 2012: 5.3).

FURTHER READING

Weider DL (1974) Telling the code. In: Turner R (ed.) Ethnomethodology: Selected
Readings. Harmondsworth: Penguin Education, pp. 144–72.
Smith RJ (2011) Goffman’s interaction order at the margins: Stigma, role, and
normalization in the outreach encounter. Symbolic Interaction, 34(3): 357–76.
 8
CONCLUSIONS

Chapter overview
• Fieldwork involves paying very close, serious attention to the lived
experience of people’s lives in all their different manifestations.
• It involves craft, verve, curiosity and an entrepreneurial spirit.
• Reflexivity is a hallmark of good fieldwork – laying your work open to
inspection, evaluation and critique.
• Fieldwork both has its eye on the minutiae of our everyday lives and
the broader social-historical circumstances that inform that situation.
• Fieldwork is more than a stand-alone, individual product or output, but
involves a dialogue between theory and evidence.

Throughout this book, we have tried to capture what we consider to be the

essences of doing fieldwork – its excitement and its challenges:

Fieldwork is not only a way of doing research; it represents a wider commitment

to engaging with people in their everyday lives, and in their work settings, in
order to pay very close and serious attention to their doings (Atkinson 2005: xi).

We now return to highlight a few themes we have discussed across the book,
and comment on some of the challenges of the present research climate before
finally drawing together some core characteristics we perceive to be at the heart
of doing fieldwork.
From the outset, we outlined an approach that applies research tools
(methods) strategically. The aim is to generate an insight into ‘social life’ in
rich detail. We stressed that it is not a neutral research medium. Chapters 5
and 7 particularly demonstrate that fieldwork is more than the simple collection
146 Doing Fieldwork

of data. Through the process of doing fieldwork and constantly thinking

analytically, we come to offer explanations/make decisions about data and
what they say. Therefore, research is also about ethics and politics. The social
world is descriptively inexhaustible and fieldwork selectively represents one
account or interpretation of the social [Link] in the very act of doing field-
work we make an assumption aligned to a Simmelian sociology in which
‘aspects of culture and the mundane organization of social life have their intrin-
sic formal properties, and that the analysis of social life should respect and explore
these forms’ (Atkinson et al. 2008: 35, original emphasis).
The task, as we have communicated in our discussions, then becomes the
ambition to do good, rigorous and thoughtful fieldwork capable of exploring
these social forms or everyday patterns and rituals of social life. Pole and
Morrison (2003), for instance, talk about the ‘nerve’ to do a thorough analysis,
Atkinson (2013) mentions the fear or desperation (‘the silent cry “How on earth
do I make something out of this?”’) and to this we would add a metaphor of
fieldwork apprenticeship – what Atkinson calls the craft of fieldwork (Atkinson
2013: 57, original emphasis). This asserts that, through application, you will
become more familiar with the fieldwork toolbox of techniques and also be
aware of what kind of knowledge your use of them can yield. As Alasuutari
(2004) notes, each user leaves their marks on the tools that they use.
In our opening remarks, we talked about how embedded fieldwork is in our
everyday lives – we are all consumers of fieldwork. This is not to be confused
with claiming that fieldwork has any automatic claim or privilege towards gen-
eralizability. Rather that reaching the end of a project invites you to reflect upon
the fieldwork in its entirety – the total experience of your fieldwork. This
is thinking about fieldwork as something you have produced, but also as some-
thing others will consume. A fieldwork project is not fully finished until it is
disseminated and how you communicate your ideas (through writing or other
formats) is just as important as the techniques you used to collate the data upon
which it is based. This process of reflecting upon this experience as a whole
(including how it will be consumed) is what Atkinson (1990) defines (and most
comprehensively in our view) as reflexivity. Here, you need to lay your work
open to inspection, evaluation and critique. Expressed more simply, you need to
defend the decisions that you made before, during and after your fieldwork and how
they speak to the initial goal or objective you had at the outset of the research.
A reoccurring theme across the preceding chapters is flexibility in the field-
work process. We view this is a core strength and Silverman (2013) likewise
discusses how the task is to ‘document properly the choreography and scenic
resources of any milieu, it is usually necessary to look out for new cases and new
sources of data while we are in the field’ (Silverman 2013: 50). (By scenic
resources, Silverman means the frame or setting of that place – like the props,
costumes and staging of a theatre performance.) Flexibility is a generic principle
that bridges all of the differing uses or applications of fieldwork. This is not to
 Conclusions 147

say that the field dictates your actions, but it often leads you to explore new
avenues of investigation or requires you to alter your plans in order to best capture
the complexities of the given research setting.
This is where we see that fieldwork itself contains an orientation – it has a
passion to explore how action gets done. This is not to suggest it has a life of
its own, beyond the good fortune of serendipity, but rather it has a deep-seated
curiosity about interactional encounters. So for example, whilst some scholars
have a commitment towards a plural theoretical stance (such as Giulianotti’s (2005)
use of Simmel to explore the sociability of the Tartan Army) and others have a
coherent intellectual programme of engagement (such as Pahl’s (2008) with space
and class), for us, fieldwork contains an interpretivistic orientation. That is, ‘how
people interpret and make sense of their world and act on their interpretations’
(Hammersley 2013: 27). But we also temper this interpretivism by agreeing with
Hammersley’s (2013) own stance that the aim of ‘social science must be to pro-
duce knowledge about social institutions, policies, and/or processes, their
character, sources or consequences’ (Hammersley 2013: 98). Therefore, whilst
fieldwork has its eye on the minutiae of our everyday lives, it must also remain
attuned to the broader social-historical circumstances that inform that situation.
That is, the intrinsic formal properties of Simmelian sociology also to be found
in the dramaturgy of everyday life (Goffman 1959). This is neither profound nor
radical, rather it celebrates the value of the insight that fieldwork can offer:

We do not need to define the key elements of social life, nor to reinvent a
theory of everyday life in order to demonstrate how close attention to its multiple
forms can inform an ethnography that is densely responsive to the complexity
of social life (Atkinson et al. 2008: 3, original emphasis).

Atkinson’s point here is that fieldwork can offer a richness of insight into every-
day life whilst also keeping an eye upon broad themes or changes taking place in
society. It may be small-scale, but it is capable of speaking to the big themes of our
times in all of their complexity. As such, we feel fieldwork is well placed to accom-
modate innovations within digital sociology and Big Data resources (such as new
social media). Whilst Atkinson et al. (2008) declare themselves unashamedly
modernist, we see less of a disjunction between the traditions from which field-
work has emerged and the contemporary research climate. These do not demand
a reorientation. However, Hammersley (2013) does make an interesting observation.
He is unhappy with ‘qualitative research’ as a category, perceiving it more a matter
of degree in practical terms, rather than any fundamental clash with quantitative
research. In fact, his careful tracing of core elements of both shows an oppositional
dualism is both inaccurate and unhelpful. So, something more subtle and realistic
that captures differences in practical conduct (the doing of fieldwork) would be
more helpful and we would say the same applies to new forms of data now
making themselves available to us. As Christensen et al.’s (2011) study showed,
148 Doing Fieldwork

children write text messages and hence using that medium can be useful in getting
to understand children’s worlds. It is not so radically different from looking at the
notes they write to one another, as Hey’s (1997) ethnography did.
What is clear is that we live in interesting times and fieldwork is an approach
well placed to engage with process and change. Yet Atkinson et al. (2008) and
Hammersley (2013) are right to express some concern in their respective ways.
Whilst fieldwork and ‘qualitative research’ has for many years been on the
ascendency, funding councils in the UK context are currently more attuned to a
more quantitative-orientation and this in turn shapes what empirical research
gets done. It is our belief that the quality of our understanding about the
changing social world around us will not be enhanced if less fieldwork is done
and therefore we know empirically less as a result.
Unsurprisingly, our stance is to resist any essentialist position that categorizes
fieldwork as a single way of doing social research. Research boundaries or labels
can be distractions rather than means of enhancing good fieldwork. For us, field-
work is a practical activity that will, to a certain extent, demand adaptions. For
example, if you are researching children’s social lives and a lot of their time is
spent online, then perhaps the fieldworker needs to follow suit. As Wiles et al.
(2011) note, this would be adaptation rather than methodological innovation. We
would encourage a more entrepreneurial spirit that is mindful of the political
climate in which fieldwork is situated. Fieldwork now, perhaps more than in the
last twenty years, needs to make itself relevant and not retreat into its own silo.
We now end on a series of comments or food-for-thought issues of which
the outward-facing fieldworker should remain mindful. These debates are now
core to the fieldwork enterprise. We look forward to seeing how they unfold via
new fieldwork project designs and conceptualizations; the dissemination of
research findings; and through continued sustained methodological reflection.

I.
Fieldwork is a creative process. Sometimes this may entail thinking tangentially
and eclectically. For example, much is to be said for eclecticism as a means to
unlock your data. Strong (1988) used the deviant case as a means to get a critical
purchase on a substantial dataset of over one thousand observations of paediatric
consultations; Atkinson (2013) inverted Sudnow’s focus upon the hand in piano
playing to look at the feet (in the movement of glass-blowers in their work-
shops); Atkinson and Willis (2007) used the notion of the flaneur, but applied
inside a computer game as well as an urban context to explore contemporary
identities and experiences. Thinking tangentially and using resources eclectically
can yield insight. New combinations can emerge from reading beyond your
immediate sub-discipline or from a broader field. What is key is not to expect
thinking eclectically to magically resolve your query or impasse, but it may give
 Conclusions 149

you additional critical purchase upon the problem at hand. It may serve to get
you over the fear or worry about what your data are actually telling you. We are
not suggesting that the tail should wag the dog, nor attesting to the promise of
the latest technological fashions, but rather that the fieldworker can imagina-
tively use a wide array of analytic strategies. This is Burgess’ multi-strategy
research in a more interdisciplinary and twenty-first century technology-savvy
context. All methods still have advantages and disadvantages and this holds for
all alternative or emerging techniques.

II.
Fieldwork emerged from a particular theoretical ‘moment’ or canon and it is
important to remain aware of that antecedence. As Silverman (2013) notes, the
‘overwhelming number of my students seem unaware of the theoretical basis of
their approach’ (Silverman 2013: 50). The knowledge that fieldwork yields has
not just fallen from the sky, blue or otherwise. It is a way of thinking about the
world that places a value upon particular forms of information and ways of
knowing. Ethnography and fieldwork, we would argue, have become a victim
of their own success. They are no longer subject to the same criticism as expe-
rienced by those first using sustained fieldwork and are even the dominant
paradigm in some sub-disciplines which may have fostered complacency.
Hammersley’s (2013) concise tracing of the various lines of intellectual develop-
ment around qualitative research highlights what some research has come to be
missing. There is also a second element to this, relating to practice and the need
to demonstrate competence in the field. It is worth remembering ‘a coquette is
in a much better position to learn about men than a nun’ (Dingwall 1980: 880,
quoting Wax 1971). Whilst there is an advantage on occasions to play the naïve
card in order to invite a full explanation of an event, for the most part ‘to be too
ignorant of the setting and current affairs, to be a total ingénue, may convince
elites that you are too unconcerned or uninterested to have done your home-
work for them to waste their time with you’ (Hunter 1993: 51–52). With more
candour, Atkinson (2005) argues:

I do not think it is possible to make sense of such a cultural setting without

making the significant effort to become tolerably well informed about it. Part of
the work, therefore, that goes into an ethnography like this one [of the Welsh
national opera] involves not just participant observation in situ, but also a com-
mitment to pay attention to such specialist knowledge. There is no advantage in
rank ethnographic ignorance (Atkinson 2005: 191).

If we accept this argument for competence in the field, then it follows that we
should also know what drew us to be interested in generating that kind of
knowledge about the social world in the first place.
150 Doing Fieldwork

III.
We argued earlier that flexibility (during fieldwork) is one of the strengths of
the approach, both in the sense of freedom to follow new avenues of investiga-
tion and also make the most of opportunities that arise (such as being invited to
a staff leaving-do; the school end-of-year barbeque; or out for a post-work drink
with the teaching staff). These are options: you don’t have to – nor is it always
useful or sensible to accept such offers – but the capacity of fieldwork to enable
the fieldworker to adapt is a core strength and challenge. More strategically, we
would add that fieldwork needs to include not only those who might want to
collaborate, but also those who do not. This is not to advocate coercion, but
more to put your fieldwork into a position where there is a capacity for you to
come across divergent points-of-view. For example, as Neal and Walters (2008)
acknowledge, inviting discussions about rurality amongst groups such as the
Women’s Institute and the Young Farmers’ Club is a Goffmanesque front-stage
performance of the versions of reality (in this instance, rural lifestyles) that actors
are prepared to share with the research team. The backstage also, as best we can
access it, also demands attention; that is, what people do in everyday life, as well
as what they say they do.

IV.
There is a new imperative we want to comment upon that seeks to update and
further develop research that has already been done. Sometimes this is by those
originally involved (James 2012), or alternatively can be a re-study of a ‘classic’
study of a geographic area or locale (cf. Lyon and Crow’s (2012) restudy of
Pahl’s work on Sheppey and Manchester sociologists’ re-engagement with the
Affluent Worker study of the 1960s; cf. Savage et al. 2013). Charles and Crow
(2012) observed that re-studies are uncommon but it seems to us that they
offer an opportunity, not least for analytic contrast. The danger remains that
retrospective studies miss the nuances of the research during data collection,
as Pahl (who was placed within that research moment) considered to be the
case with Savage’s (2010) account of social science research in the past. Whilst
we would not go as far as to agree with the argument put forward by Thrift
(2008) that (fieldwork) accounts hold but just for that one moment, we see
that fieldwork has its roots in a research tradition. That is, it emerged from the
influences of two strands: American interactionist sociology (such as the Thomas
and Znaniecki 1919–20) within the very early Chicago School and also British
anthropology (and Malinowski 1922). Both the tradition and the research setting
are changing and hence any re-engagement must be familiar with how both
have been reconfigured.
Charles and Crow (2012) offer a measured and important reflection upon the
possibilities of re-study research and James (2012) is also supportive. Claims
towards innovation as we have acknowledged earlier can often be over-cooked
 Conclusions 151

(Travers 2009, Wiles et al. 2011) but we also agree with James (2012) that the
potential for re-use is currently neglected. What must be key is the awareness of
that moment or the politics of the method when that account was created. The
impetus for a study is inevitably grounded in a particular moment and context
and something of its original intent/direction will change with time (even if the
same research team is used). Wiles et al. (2011) argue that in practice, most
re-studies adapt rather than simply adopt the same approach as an original study.
The new imperative towards improved archiving offers strong encouragement
and an important resource for all social scientists.

V.
There are now more opportunities to publish and disseminate research in a
variety of formats and styles than has ever been possible before. It would be hard
to imagine a fieldwork project dataset that did not include a wide array of textual,
visual and digital materials. Yet fieldwork is richer than a variety of formats.
Abrams (1980) in a classic paper called for work in which ‘narrative and theory,
evidence and concept really do maintain a close, fluent dialogue with no bullying’
and cited Goffman as ‘manifestly our best stylist’ (Abrams 1980: 15). There are
two elements to this argument. First, we know now (as did Abrams) that form
and style are wedded. So format and style come together in bringing alive the
field to the reader, viewer or consumer and this includes new formats. Stylistically,
Atkinson et al. (2008) advocate retaining ‘something of the texture and the fla-
vour of the original ingredients’ (Atkinson et al. 2008: 54). He inverted
dramaturgy – everyday life was not like a drama, rather drama was like everyday
(working) life. Some scholars have utilized poetry, some plays or narrative scripts.
However, like Hammersley (2010a), we suggest such performances remain the
preserve of the professionals, rather than the social scientist amateur. More spe-
cifically on the communication of an argument, metaphors have often been used
as an analytic device to generate a jolt of surprise or evoke a comparative anal-
ogy, but ultimately the scaffolding must come down (Goffman 1959). (The
metaphor stopped for Atkinson (2005) and he did not see fit to disseminate via
the medium of dance, theatre or song.)
Secondly, whilst format and style are key parts of fieldwork, collectively field-
work is more than a stand-alone, individual product or output as Abrams (1980)
realized in his advocacy of a fluent dialogue between theory and evidence. This
places fieldwork within a much wider picture of its contribution to a body of
knowledge (or theory). Of course, the centrality of theory or conceptual ideas
will vary with the remit of fieldwork studies, but where it sits and contributes
vis-à-vis the theoretical canon to which it feels it belongs is equally important.
Our point here is that there is nothing wrong with highly varied formats and
styles, but sometimes their role and status in the presentation of research conclusions
has become blurred. Like Hammersley (2013) suggests, we should be very clear
152 Doing Fieldwork

about what activity we are involved in – or run the risk of doing nothing well.
Format and style are vital in the communication of fieldwork ideas, but run the
risk of reification – the medium becoming more important than the message.
Novelist David Lodge (1984) makes an interesting and relevant point about the
ambitions of texts, when one of his characters (an academic) suggests that reading
a text is analogous to a striptease. This metaphor holds that accounts are per-
suasive, leading you on, taking you down a certain route with the promise of
ultimate revelation (in the conclusion). Lodge’s (1984) character is a post­
modernist and suggesting that perhaps we should not look so hard for ‘the truth’
or categorical statement of meaning (for as we know, multiple interpretations of
the field are possible) but ‘instead […] we should take pleasure in its teasing’
(Lodge 1984: 27). The argument should only be taken so far, as there remains a
danger in the recognition of diversity and ambiguity that we give up our ambi-
tion for fieldwork’s capacity for knowledge and impact. Acknowledging that how
an argument is presented is as important as the message it seeks to communicate
does not mean rigour should be abandoned. Yet in the light of the observations
we have made about the contemporary zeitgeist permeating qualitative research,
we consider that a loss of rigour has occurred but we are not yet in an empirical
crisis. Furthermore, social science in the past produced fine work whilst under
attack. For example, the ‘new’ sociologies of childhood, education and deviance
and recent turns (object, affect, mobilities) produced many papers and mono-
graphs before they became established as legitimate canons complete with their
own distinct literatures and celebrated papers.
There are analogies with contemporary critiques and we advocate the need
to participate in those debates, rather than to ignore them or allow them to
overrun us – namely, the dilemma of accessing everyday dramaturgical life – be
it online, co-location or [Link] metaphor of the striptease is too com-
placent and now is not the time for complacency. To answer Silverman’s (2013:
55) question – there is nothing wrong with the ability of fieldwork or ethnog-
raphy to access and engage with the manifestations of social worlds and
experiences. We look forward to seeing where the challenge to explore all facets
of social life takes fieldworkers next.

FURTHER READING

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 INDEX
Page numbers in italics denote figures
Abrams, P., 151 Becker, H.S., 48, 88, 89
accents, 44 ‘being there’, 2, 15, 24, 36–7, 64, 92
access to data, 99, 119–21, 127–8 Bell, C., 26, 35, 108
access to field ‘big data’, 128
and ethics, 24–5, 92–5 ‘black box’ of analysis, 124
gaining, 21, 24–8, 42 blending in, 15–16, 25, 29, 44, 67
restricted, 28–31, 68, 111–12 body capital, 44
see also gatekeepers Boelen, W.M., 98
action research, 136 Bolton, S., 73–4
active participation, 65–70 British Sociological Association
actively passive participation, 72–5 (BSA), 103
adaptation see flexibility Burgess, R.G., 7, 48, 62, 96–7
Agar, M., 47 Burrows, R., 13
aims of fieldwork, 59
aims of research, 86–7 case studies, 4
Allan, A., 22, 35, 39, 109, 142 causation, 132, 134
allegiances, 48–9, 51, 88–91 CCTV, 13, 26
analysis see data analysis change, as aim, 86–7, 135, 136
analytic concepts, research examples, 140–2 Charles, N., 150
analytic induction (AI), 132–4 Charmaz, K., 130–1
anonymity, 96–100, 118 Chicago School of Sociology, 6–7
anthropology, 5–7, 10, 19 children, ethics of research with, 101–2
Archer, M.S., 79 Christensen, P., 37, 62, 147–8
Atkinson, P. Clifton, G., 22
on data analysis, 123–4, 126–7, 128, clothing, 44–5
139, 141 co-operation, and access, 27
on field identification, 22 compromise, 25, 29, 32, 90
on fieldwork, 145, 146, 147, 149 see also flexibility
opera fieldwork by, 8, 66, 109, conceptual field, identifying, 21–3
110–11, 149 conceptual framework, and analysis, 126,
on researcher role, 125 140–2
Atkinson, R., 128 confidante, researcher as, 51–3
confidentiality, 96–100, 114–15, 118
Back, L., 128, 140–1 consent, 24–8, 93–5
Bagley, C., 22, 43, 49, 125, 141–2 constructionism, 82–3
Barker, E., 20 conversation analysis (CA), 137–8
Barnes, J.A., 88, 89–90 conversational techniques, 68–70
168 Doing Fieldwork

conversations with a purpose, 70 Delamont, S. cont.

Cooper, B., 83 on demands of fieldwork, 42
Corrigan, P., 44 on end of fieldwork, 108, 110
counsellor, researcher as, 51–3 dialogue, and critical ethnography, 135
Courtney, R., 67 diary methods, 73
covert research, 68, 71, 92–5, 100 digital data, 13, 72, 121, 127–8, 147–8
Cox, G., 43 Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), 28
Craib, I., 33, 126 Doc (Street Corner Society), 98, 117–18
credibility, 42–4, 89 Douglas, J.D., 25
Criminal Records Bureau (CRB), 28 Dovemark, M., 109
critical ethnography, 38, 86, 87, 135–6 dress, 44–5
Crossley, N., 125–6 Dunning, E., 15
Crow, G., 109, 150
curiosity, 10, 20–1, 131, 147 Edwards, M., 43–4
emotional restrictions on access, 30–1
data analysis Epstein, D., 43
approaches to, 130–9 Erikson, K., 24
‘black box’ of, 124 ethical codes and guides, 24–5, 103
concept use in research, 140–2 ethics, 91–2
familiarity with dataset, 127–8 and ‘being there’, 92
flexibility in, 32 confidentiality and anonymity, 96–100
generating landmarks, 126–7 of conversational techniques, 70
literature on qualitative, 124 and end of fieldwork, 117–18
nature and purpose of, 123–5 exposure of participants, 101–2
principles of, 125–9 and gaining access, 92–5
and reflexivity, 129 and responsibilities, 63
and role of researcher, 125–6 and revisiting data, 121
as secondary involvement, 109, 110 see also values
tangential and eclectic thinking, 148–9 ethnography
throughout research, 123–4 critical ethnography, 38, 86, 87, 135–6
and values, 90–1 and grounded theory, 131
data collection Malinowski’s preconditions for, 11–13
ending, 113–14, 115 relationship with fieldwork, 4–5, 11
as primary involvement, 109 theoretical context, 149
see also fieldwork methods; research visual and sensory, 11
methods walking ethnographies, 140
Data Protection Act (1998), 99, 120 ethnomethodology, and conversation
data storage, security and access, 99, analysis, 137
119–21, 127–8 everyday life, 5–6, 9–10, 12, 36, 147
dataset, familiarity with, 127–8 exotic locations, 5–6, 7–8, 19
Davidson, J.O.C., 93–4
Deem, R., 46, 50, 99, 117 facilitators see gatekeepers
Delamont, S. familiarity
capoeira fieldwork by, 12, 20, 66, 128 concept of, 8–10
on data analysis, 138, 139, 141 with field, 6–7, 8–10, 20–1
 Index 169

familiarity cont. fieldwork cont.

and research relations, 37, 47 subjectivity of, 14–15
faraway locations, 5–6, 7–8, 19 tangential and eclectic thinking in,
feasibility, of active participation, 67–8 148–9
feminist standpoints, 85, 87 theoretical origins, 149
Fenge, A., 86, 87 and theory, 16–17, 151
field as total experience, 5–7, 146
access to see access to field fieldwork methods, 10–11, 13, 60
leaving see leaving the field choice of, 58, 60–5, 85
restrictions on participation in, 66 and epistemology, 79–80
field identification, 19, 133 to facilitate active participation, 65–70
conceptual field, 21–3 to facilitate passive participation, 71–5
researching familiar, 20–1 fieldwork tools, 55–6
field relations, 35–6 assessment and selection of, 56–7
and access, 27 and methods, 59–60
‘being there’, 36–7 and theory, 57–9
and end of fieldwork, 114–15 fieldworkers see researchers
getting too close, 45–8 Finch, J., 48
inequality in, 38, 45 first hand experience, 11, 12–13, 20, 60–1
presentation of self, 39–45 flexibility
rapport, 37–9, 42–3, 44, 52 in fieldwork, 13–14, 29, 31–3, 63–4, 94,
researcher as counsellor/confidante, 51–3 146–7, 148, 150
researcher effect, 47–8 and grounded theorizing, 130–1
researcher as tool, 49–51 format, 151–2
taking sides, 48–9, 51, 88–91 Foster, J., 20, 44
fieldwork ‘found’ data, 72
aims and objectives, 59 Freedom of Information Act (2000), 120
analysis of see data analysis funding, 48, 111, 120
approaches to, 147
compared with working in the field, Gane, L., 134
3–4 gatekeepers, 46, 98, 117–18
definition and nature of, 1–3, 146–7 Geertz, C., 2
ending see leaving the field Glaser, B., 111, 124, 130
ethics and values see ethics; values Goffman, E., 26, 30, 135, 139
familiarity with, 78–9 dramaturgical model, 141
and flexibility, 13–14, 29, 31–3, 63–4, presentation of self, 39, 40, 126
94, 146–7, 148, 150 Goodwin, J., 120–1
format and style, 151–2 Gouldner, A., 88
Malinowski’s preconditions, 11–13 grounded theorizing (GT), 130–2
as methodology, 4–5 compared with analytic induction,
micro and macro insight from, 147 133–4
origins of, 5–6, 150
purpose and value of, 77–8, 81–2, 146 Hammers, C., 94
status of, 139 Hammersley, M., 81–2, 123–4, 125,
strangeness and familiarity in, 7–10 126–7, 132–4, 147
170 Doing Fieldwork

Hand, M., 128, 138 Keenan, M., 141

Harper, D., 73 knowledge
Heley, J., 20, 97, 118 and choice of method, 58, 85
Hey, V., 43 and fieldwork, 33, 151
hierarchical organisations, 95 subjectivity of, 82
hierarchy, and credibility, 89 value of research and, 83–4
Hillyard, S.
and access to field, 28 Lacey, C., 108
and data analysis, 125, 141–2 landmarks, generating, 126–7
and ethics, 97, 99, 100, 102, 118 language, 12
and field identification, 22 leaving the field
and field relations, 37, 43, 44, 45, 47, absence of literature on, 107–8
50, 52 data storage, security and access,
and fieldwork timescale, 111, 114 119–21
and flexibility, 32 definition of end, 108–10, 121–2
and methods, 62, 73 identifying end, 48, 110–12
Hobbs, D., 44, 93, 100 impact on participants, 116–19
Hockey, J., 12, 31–2 management of, 113–15
Hogan, S., 86, 87 researcher adjustment following, 115–16
Housely, W., 22 restrictions on duration, 111–12
Hubbard, P., 73 Lee, R.M., 72
Hughes, C., 36, 47–8 legislation, 99, 120, 121
Humphreys, L., 93 legitimation, researcher as tool for, 49–51
Hutchinson, E., 36, 75, 94 life history interviews, 70
listening, 71–2
immersion, 15–17, 67 literature reviews, 22–3
see also blending in locational field, 23
inductive analysis access see access to field
analytic induction, 132–4 Lodge, D., 152
grounded theory, 130 Lyon, D., 128, 140–1
inequality, in field relations, 38, 45
interactional restrictions on research, MacLure, M., 83
29–30, 67–8 Madison, D.S., 135, 136
interactionism, 79, 130–1 Mair, M., 137–8
interpretation, and values, 90–1 Malinowski, B., 6, 11–13
interpretivism, 16, 80, 147 Marxism, 135
interviews, 68–9, 70, 139 media, 118
Merton, R.K., 29–30
Jack-roller,The, 98 metaphors, 141, 151
James, A., 150–1 methodological solipsism, 30, 65
Jeffrey, R., 112 methodology, fieldwork as, 4
Jones, K., 86, 87 methods see fieldwork methods; research
judgements, of fieldworkers, 81 methods
 Index 171

micro-sociology framework, 16 Pole, C. cont.

Mills, C.W., 2 and field relations, 40–2, 44, 46, 50–1,
Mitchell, R.G., 131 52–3
Mizen, P., 73–4 and methods, 73–4
Moore, R., 8 postmodernism, 135
multi-strategy research, 62, 124, 140 presentation of findings
timing of publication, 99
Neal, S., 150 to participants, 115
Newby, H., 26, 108 and values, 90–1
presentation of self, 39–45
objectivity, 14, 88 primary involvement in the field,
observation, 71, 72 109, 110
O’Connell Davidson, J., 93–4 professional stranger, 47
O’Connor, H., 120–1 Pryce, K., 140
O’Neill, M., 73, 140 pseudonyms, 96–100, 114
overt research, 95 public places, access to, 24–6
publication of research, 99
Pahl, R., 109, 150
Palmer, C., 94 qualitative data analysis
Park, R., 1–2 approaches to, 130–9
participants literature on, 124
anonymity and identity of, 96–100, qualitative research
114–15, 117–18 analysis of, 124, 130–9
divergent views of, 150 relationship with fieldwork, 4
impact of leaving on, 116–19 relationship with quantitative, 147
impact of research on, 95, 98–9, 100
intentional exposure of, 101–2 rapport, 37–9, 42–3, 44, 52
involvement in research, 38 reflexivity, 15, 102–3, 129, 146
see also field relations relationships see field relations
participation relativism, 82, 84
methods to facilitate active, 65–70 avoiding, 84–8
methods to facilitate passive, 71–5 research
participatory action research, 38 funding of, 48, 111, 120
participatory research, 38 scrutiny of, 102
passive participation, 71–5 subsequent use of, 49–51
Patrick, J., 44 values in see values
personal information, 51–3 research design, and values, 85
perspectives, 79–80 research findings, presentation of, 90–1,
photographs, 73–4 99, 115
Pink, S., 11 research methodology, fieldwork as, 4–5
Pole, C. research methods
and access to field, 27 defining, 4
and ethics, 96–7 in fieldwork, 10–11, 13
172 Doing Fieldwork

research methods cont. Silverman, D., 124, 137, 139, 146

selection of, 58, 85 Skeggs, B., 85–6
see also fieldwork methods Smith, B., 49
research relationship see field relations Smith, G.J.D., 13, 26
research tools see fieldwork tools social change, as aim, 86–7, 135, 136
researcher effect, 47–8 social hierarchy, and credibility, 89
researchers social structure, 16–17, 79
adjustment following fieldwork, 115–16 social transactional data, 13
allegiances of, 48–9, 51, 88–91 software, 121, 127–8
characteristics of, 29–30, 67–8 space, 74–5
competence in the field, 149 Sparkes, A.C., 32, 49, 75
continuing engagement with field, sponsors, 48, 111, 120
109–10, 114, 122 standpoint, of researcher, 85–7, 88
as counsellors/confidantes, 51–3 status
fieldworker caricature, 6 of fieldwork, 139
identification of, 100 and presentation of self, 42–3
immersion in action, 15–17 and social hierarchy, 89
importance of, 125–6 Stebbins, R.A., 109, 110
objectivity of, 88 Stephens, N., 66
power of, 49–50 storage of data, 99, 119–21, 127–8
reflexivity of, 15, 102–3, 129, 146 strangeness, 7–10, 20
responsibilities of, 63 Strangleman, T., 128
standpoint of, 85–7, 88 Strauss, A., 111, 124, 130
subjectivity of, 15 Street Corner Society, 98, 117–18
as tool for legitimation, 49–51 structural restrictions
values of, 80–4 on access, 28–9
see also field relations on duration, 111–12
responsibilities on participation, 66
of fieldworkers, 63 structure (social), 16–17, 79
see also ethics style, 151–2
retrospective studies, 121, 150–1 subjectivity, 14–15, 80, 81, 82
Roderick, M., 20, 43
Takeda, N., 109
Savage, M., 13 technology see digital data
Scott, S., 39, 45, 66, 94, 116 theory
secondary involvement in the field, 109, 110 and fieldwork, 16–17, 151
security of data, 99, 119–21, 127–8 and fieldwork tools, 57–9
self grounded theorizing, 130–2
conducting fieldwork on, 49 ‘thinking theoretically’, 126, 132
presentation of, 39–45 Thomas, W.I., 124
Shaffir, W., 109, 110 Thompson, K., 94
Shaw, C., 98 timeframe for fieldwork, 111–12
sides, taking, 48–9, 51, 88–91 total experience, fieldwork as, 5–7, 146
 Index 173

Travers, M., 128 verstehen, 16, 135

truth, and values, 82–3, 88 visual techniques, 11, 73–4

understanding Wacquant, L., 20, 66, 116

as aim of research, 86–7 Walford, G., 20, 49
and purpose of fieldwork, 5, 11 walking ethnographies, 140
unobtrusive observation, 72 Walters, S., 150
Urry, J., 75 Warren, L., 86, 87
Weber, M., 87, 88, 134
value freedom, 90 Whyte, W.F., 98, 117–18
value neutrality, 87, 88, 90 Wieder, D.L., 140
value relevance, 87–8, 89 Williams, J., 15, 25
value sensitivity, 91 Willis, P., 128
values Wolcott, H.F., 38–9, 53, 65, 107
in research, 80–4 Woods, P., 112
and research design, 85 working in the field, compared with
and researcher standpoint, 85–7 fieldwork, 3–4
and taking sides, 88–91
see also ethics Znaniecki, F., 124