FIELD RESEARCH AND FOCUS GROUP RESEARCHWith this chapter, we shift from the quantitative to
the qualitative research and discuss field research
and focus group research. Field researchencom-
passes many specific techniques but usually the
researcher directly observes and participates in
small-scale social settings, most often in his or her
home culture. As the study of bridal showers in this
chapter’s opening box illustrates, field research is
not just about the urban poor.
Many people enjoy field research because it
involves “hanging out” with people. It has no cold
mathematics or complicated statistics and no
abstract deductive hypotheses. Instead, in involves
direct, face-to-face social interaction with “real
people” in a natural social setting. Field research
appeals to those who like people watching. Field
research reports can be fascinating, revealing
accounts of unfamiliar social worlds: nude beaches,
people who are homeless or professional gamblers,
street gangs, police squads, emergency rooms, artists’
colonies, and so on. Some field studies are as engag-
ing to read as a work of fiction with the excitement
of a thriller or mystery novel.
Field research requires directly talking with
and observing the people being studied. Through
personal interactions over months or years, you
learn about these people and their life histories,
hobbies, habits, hopes, fears, and dreams. Meeting
new people and discovering new social worlds can
be fun. Field research is also difficult, intense, time
consuming, emotionally draining, and sometimes
physically dangerous.UNDERSTANDING FIELD RESEARCH
Field research is appropriate when we want to learn
about, understand, or describe a group of interacting
people. It helps us answer research questions such
as: How do people do Yin the social world? or What
is the social world of Xlike? We can use field
research to identify aspects of the world that are inac-
cessible using other methods (e.g., survey, experi-
ments) as in studying street gangs or bridal showers.
Most field research studies focus on a particu-
lar location or setting. These range from a small
group (twenty or thirty people) to entire communi-
ties. Beginning field researchers should start with a
relatively small group who interact with each other
on a regular basis in a fixed setting (e.g., a street cor-
ner, church, barroom, beauty salon, baseball field).
Some researchers used amorphous social experi-
ences that are not fixed in place but where intensive
interviewing and observation are the only way we
can gain access to the experience, for example, the
feelings of a person who has been mugged or who
is the widow of someone who committed suicide.^1
To use consistent terminology, I will call the
people studied in a field setting members.They are
insiders or natives in the field and belong to a
group, subculture, or social setting that the outside
field researcher wants to learn about.
Field researchers have explored a wide variety
of social settings, subcultures, and aspects of social
life^2 (see Figure 1). Places where my students have
conducted successful short-term, small-scale field
research studies include a beauty salon, day care
center, bakery, bingo parlor, bowling alley, church,
coffee shop, laundromat, police dispatch office,
nursing home, strip club, tattoo parlor, and weight
room.A Short History of Field Research
We can trace field research to the reports of travel-
ers to distant lands.^3 Since the thirteenth century,
European explorers and missionaries have written
descriptions of the strange cultures and peoples they
have encountered. Others read these descriptions to
learn about foreign cultures. By the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries with European expansion,
the travelers had become more literate. The number
and quality of such reports of strange lands and
peoples grew.
Academic field research began in the late
nineteenth century with anthropology. The first
anthropologists only read the reports of explorers,
government officials, or missionaries. They lacked
direct contact with the people they studied. Many
travel reports focused on the exotic and were racist
and ethnocentric. Travelers rarely spoke the local
language and relied on interpreters. Not until the
1890s did European anthropologists begin to travel
to faraway lands to learn about other cultures.