Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches

FIGURE 1 Examples of Field Research Sites/Topics

FIELD RESEARCH AND FOCUS GROUP RESEARCH

SMALL-SCALE SETTINGS
Passengers in an airplane
Bars or taverns
Battered women’s shelters
Camera clubs
Laundromats
Social movement organizations
Social welfare offices
Television stations
Waiting rooms

COMMUNITY SETTINGS
Retirement communities
Small towns
Urban ethnic communities
Working-class neighborhoods

CHILDREN’S ACTIVITIES
Playgrounds
Little League baseball
Youth in schools
Junior high girl groups
Summer camps

OCCUPATIONS
Airline attendants
Artists
Cocktail waitresses
Dog catchers

Door-to-door salespersons

Factory workers

Gamblers

Medical students

Female strippers

Police officers

Restaurant chefs

Social workers

Taxi drivers

DEVIANCE AND CRIMINAL ACTIVITY

Body/genital piercing and branding

Cults

Drug dealers and addicts

Hippies

Nude beaches

Occult groups

Prostitutes

Street gangs, motorcycle gangs

Street people, homeless shelters

MEDICAL SETTINGS AND MEDICAL-

RELATED EVENTS

Death

Emergency rooms

Intensive care units

Pregnancy and abortion

Support groups for Alzheimer’s caregivers

British social anthropologist Bronislaw Mali-
noski (1844–1942) was the first researcher to live
with a group of people for a long period of time
and write about collecting data. In the 1920s,
he presented intensive fieldwork as a new method
and argued for separating direct observation and
native statements from the observer’s inferences.
He held that the best way to develop an in-depth
understanding of a community or culture was for a
researcher to directly interact with and live among
the native peoples, learning their customs, beliefs,
and social processes.
Soon researchers were applying field research
techniques to study their own societies. In the 1890s,
Charles Booth and Beatrice Webb used both sur-
vey research and field research to study poor people

in London. They directly observed people in natu-

ral settings and used an inductive data-gathering

approach. The field research technique of partici-

pant observation may have originated in Germany

in 1890. Paul Gohre worked and lived as a factory

apprentice for three months and took detailed notes

each night at home to study factory life. His pub-

lished work influenced university scholars includ-

ing the sociologist Max Weber.

We can trace field research in the United States

to the University of Chicago Department of Soci-

ology in what is known as the Chicago School

of sociology.Its influence on field research had

two phases. In the first, from the 1910s to 1930s,

researchers used a variety of methods based on the

case study or life history approach including direct