ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA 115115PART II
ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA
Question:
All the cocks in Kasombe Village are white.
Lute Mirla saw a cock in Kasombe Village.
What colour was the cock she saw?Answers:
Lute Mirla went to the market yesterday to sell two chickens.
Lute Mirla has a sister she goes to see in Kasombe Village.
Ask Lute Mirla when she gets back.
—Andreas Fuglesang (1982, 15)“Access,” in the context of traditional field research methods treatises, is typically used in refer-
ence to gaining entrée to a research site or person—a community, overseas or domestic; an orga-
nization; an archive; a government official. Although we begin this section overview with some
discussion of that understanding of access, we are primarily using the term in a different sense. In
standard methods textbooks and discussions, the more commonly found phrase is “gathering” or
“collecting” data. Yet, as the chapters in this section demonstrate, interpretive data are understood
less as being accessed by the researcher, as if they had some ontologically prior, independent
existence, like some exotic fruit just waiting for the researcher to come and discover and “pluck”
it, than as being “generated”—at the very least by the researcher in conceptual, mental interaction
with her documentary materials and observed events. In addition, when research data are gener-
ated through interviews or in the physical and nonverbal exchanges between respondents and
researcher during participatory interactions, one might speak of the “co-generation” of data. And
so we speak here of accessing sources that might enable the generation of data.
ACCESS AS ENTRÉE TO POTENTIAL SOURCES
OF POTENTIAL EVIDENCE
Methods texts treating field research typically discuss “entry” into the field setting. The notion
that entry is a problem is curious, as is the use of that language. As Feldman, Bell, and Berger
(2003, ix) point out, the language suggests the imagery of a door, and only a single door at that,
which needs somehow to be made to open. Although common now across qualitative methods
texts, this concept seems to have emerged out of traditional anthropological research and its