ResearchMethods/Qual/Field research

= Field Research: Researching the natural setting = <!-- stuff from POWERMUTT to be integrated = Focus Groups = Focus groups and surveys have some similarities, and are often used by the same researchers. They are, however, quite different and it is important not to confuse them.

Specific differences between a survey and a focus group include the following:


 * A survey will typically include 1,000 or more respondents. A focus group will typically include 8-10 participants.
 * Respondents to a survey are, insofar as possible, selected at random so as to constitute a representative sample of the population from which they are drawn. Members of a focus group are chosen because the members have something relevant in common.  For example, they may be first time voters.  To obtain a range of perspectives, a study may include a number of different focus groups, each with different common characteristics.  Even taken together, however, participants in focus groups cannot be considered a representative sample of the population.
 * A survey will consist of a carefully structured questionnaire in order to obtain comparable responses from all people surveyed. A focus group will be much freer flowing in order to probe more deeply into people's opinions and feelings.
 * A survey is most useful for testing hypotheses. A focus group is most useful for generating hypotheses.
 * Information gathered from surveys lends itself to quantitative analysis. Information gathered from focus groups lends itself to qualitative analysis.

Surveys and focus groups are complementary rather than competing methods and are often used in combination. For example, before a survey questionnaire is put together, researchers may conduct a series of focus groups. In these groups, an attempt will be made to get a better sense of what issues are of greatest concern to participants, how they react to certain words or concepts, or how they perceive different candidates and parties. Researchers may then be better able to know which questions to include in a survey, and how best to word them. Avoid the temptation to treat focus groups as a less expensive alternative to surveys.

=Field Observation= This approach was originally developed by anthropologists such as Margaret Mead. These scholars sought to understand cultures (in Mead’s case, those of tribal societies in the South Pacific) by immersing themselves in those cultures as fully as possible over extended periods of time. An example of participant observation in recent political science is the work of Richard Fenno, who studied members of congress by following them around on their visits to their states and districts, “soaking and poking” (in Fenno’s words), and trying to blend in with the members’ environments. Such research is, by its nature, largely qualitative, and better suited to generating than to testing hypotheses.

Further reading: Focus Groups


 * Center for Institutional Research, Evaluation, and Planning, University of Texas at El Paso, "The Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How (many) of Focus Groups." http://irp.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=57975.
 * Luntz, Frank I., “Focus Groups in American Politics,” PollingReport.com. http://www.pollingreport.com/focus.htm.

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Why Field Research?
If we wanted to know who conducts more of the housework in households, how could we find the answer? One way might be to interview people and simply ask them. That is exactly what Arlie Hochschild did in her study of the second shift, her term for the work that goes on in the home after the day’s work for pay is completed. Hochschild (1989)Hochschild, A. (1989). The second shift: Working parents and the revolution at home (1st ed.). New York, NY: Viking. interviewed 50 heterosexual, married couples with children to learn about how they did, or did not, share the work of the second shift. Many of these couples reported to her that they shared the load of the second shift equally, sometimes dividing the house into areas that were “her responsibility” and those that were “his.” But Hochschild wasn’t satisfied with just people’s personal accounts of second-shift work. She chose to observe 12 of these couples in their homes as well, to see for herself just how the second shift was shared.

What Hochschild discovered was that even those couples who claimed to share the second shift did not have as equitable a division of duties as they’d professed. For example, one couple who told Hochschild during their interview that they shared the household work equally had explained that the wife was responsible for the upstairs portion of the house and the husband took responsibility for the downstairs portion. Upon conducting observations in this couple’s home, however, Hochschild discovered that the upstairs portion of the house contained all the bedrooms and bathrooms, the kitchen, the dining room, and the living room, while the downstairs included a storage space and the garage. This division of labor meant that the woman actually carried the weight of responsibility for the second shift. Without a field research component to her study, Hochschild might never have uncovered these and other truths about couples’ behaviors and sharing (or not sharing) of household duties.

Learning Objectives

 * 1) Define field research.
 * 2) Define participant observation and describe the continuum of participant observation.
 * 3) Discuss at least two examples of field research.

Field Research: What Is It and When to Use It?
There’s a New Yorker cartoon that pretty accurately portrays life for a field researcher (Cotham, 2003).Cotham, F. (2003, September 1). Two barbarians and a professor of barbarian studies. The New Yorker. Retrieved from http://www.cartoonbank.com/2003/two-barbarians-and-a-professor-of-barbarian-studies/invt/126562 It depicts “Two Barbarians and a Professor of Barbarian Studies.” As field researchers, just as in the cartoon, we immerse ourselves in the settings that we study. While the extent to which we immerse ourselves varies (note in the cartoon the professor is riding a horse but has chosen to retain his professorial jacket and pipe), what all field researchers have in common is their participation in “the field.”

Field research is a qualitative method of data collection aimed at understanding, observing, and interacting with people in their natural settings. Thus when social scientists talk about being in “the field,” they’re talking about being out in the real world and involved in the everyday lives of the people they are studying. Sometimes researchers use the terms ethnography or participant observation to refer to this method of data collection; the former is most commonly used in anthropology, while the latter is used commonly in sociology. In this text, we’ll use two main terms: field research and participant observation. You might think of field research as an umbrella term that includes the myriad activities that field researchers engage in when they collect data: they participate, they observe, they usually interview some of the people they observe, and they typically analyze documents or artifacts created by the people they observe.