FIELD RESEARCH AND FOCUS GROUP RESEARCHobservation, informal interviews, and reading doc-
uments or official records. In 1916, Robert E. Park
(1864–1944) drew up a research program for the
social investigation of the city of Chicago. Influ-
enced by his background as a newspaper reporter,
he urged researchers to leave the libraries and “get
their hands dirty” by making direct observations and
listening to conversations on street corners, in bar-
rooms, and in luxury hotel lobbies. Early studies
such as The Hobo(Anderson, 1923),The Jack
Roller(Shaw, 1930), and The Gang(Thrasher, 1927)
established early Chicago School sociology as the
descriptive study of street life with little analysis.
Early field research blended journalistic and
anthropological techniques. Journalistic techniques
require getting behind surface appearances and
behavior, using informants, noticing conflicts, and
exposing what is “really happening.” Anthropo-
logical techniques tell us to remain with a small
group for an extended time, conduct detailed obser-
vations, and then produce a report on how group
members interact and see the world.
In the Chicago School’s second phase, from the
1940s to the 1960s, scholars developed participant
observation as a distinct technique by expanding
anthropological technique to study a researcher’s
own society. Three principles emerged: (1) Study
people in their natural settings, or in situ;(2) study
people by directly interacting with them repeatedly
over time; and (3) develop broad theoretical insights
based on an in-depth understanding of members’
perspectives of the social world.
After World War II, field research faced in-
creased competition from survey and quantitative
research. Field research declined as a proportion
of all social research until the 1970–1980s. Field
researchers began to borrow and adapt ideas and tech-
niques from cognitive psychology, cultural anthro-
pology, folklore, and linguistics. Field researchers
also reexamined the epistemological roots and
philosophical assumptions of social science to elab-
orate on the qualitative methods. In addition, these
researchers became more self-conscious about
research techniques and were more systematic
about elaborating on field research as a distinct sci-
entific approach for the study of social life.
Today field researchers directly observe and
interact with members in natural settings to acquire
an “inside” perspective. Many of these researchers
embrace an activist or social constructionist per-
spective on social life. Instead of viewing people
as a neutral medium through which social forces
operate or social life as something “out there” to
measure, they hold that people continuously create
and define social life through their daily inter-
actions. Field researchers assume that people filter
human experiences through an ongoing, fluid, sub-
jective sense of reality that shapes how we see and
act on events. Such assumptions about social life
suggest that we must focus on the everyday, face-
to-face social processes of negotiation, discussion,
and bargaining by which people construct and
modify social meanings. To do field research is
simultaneously to describe the social world and
to be an actor within it. When the researcher is a
part of a social setting, conducting field research is
more than a passive or neutral data-gathering activ-
ity. It becomes a self-aware lived social experience
in itself.Ethnography and Ethnomethodology
Two extensions of field research, ethnography and
ethnomethodology, build on the social construc-
tionist perspective. Ethnographycomes from cul-
tural anthropology.^4 Ethnomeans people or folk,
and graphyrefers to writing about or describ-
ing something. Ethnography is a description of a
people and/or their culture. We constantly make
inferences—that is, go beyond what is explicitly
said or obvious to see—and move toward what is
really meant or implied indirectly. People display
their culture (i.e., what they think, ponder, or
believe) through external behaviors (e.g., speech
and actions) in specific social contexts, yet we
cannot capture full social meaning from explicit,
externally displayed behavior alone. Thus, by usingEthnography Field research that emphasizes pro-
viding a very detailed description of a different culture
from the viewpoint of an insider in the culture to facil-
itate understanding of it.