Fieldwork assignment: Exercise in Group Fieldwork
(Last ‘exercise’ in the large sense)
Planning and carrying out the field research
Working groups should send 1-2 paragraph draft description via email
Discuss amongst yourselves:
-- a name for your group
-- your topic/research problem -- your interest areas, themes
-- research questions (3-4, can be more)
-- research plans: who, what, where, how (methods)
-- methods -- you should aim to make use of 3 methods (interviews; observations (practices, meetings or other discussions, activities); video documentation for analysis or video scenarios; analysis of documents, forms, reports;
-- analysis of information systems
-- analysis of websites, project or institutional documents (semiotic analysis)
-- research agreement letter and 'consent' forms for research participation and privacy/confidentiality of participants
Think about relations to your Masters thesis
For coordination, learning from each other
For analysis and writing analytic memoes:
Review all the data sources together

--What do you have?
Discuss & organize the research materials as a group

--Who will be responsible for analyzing this or that interview?
Strategy for writing and presenting

--common introduction of the group & what you did

--presentations and analytic memo by individuals, clustered in working groups
Objectives of the assignement
To gain experience with methods and fieldwork
Learning, experimentation –
 with at least 3 qualitative methods
Principle of triangulation of methods
 preferably basis from 3 methods for ‘triangulation’ – sources of data for analysis, to support your interpretation and argument
Writing analytically
Evidence to support analysis
Developing an interpretation
Going from qualitative research to making sense to scientific writing

Developing an argument with support from evidence

--how do you know something?

--what are the limits to what you know?
Preliminary analysis
‘Analytic memo’ is a technique for in-progress analysis
Making sense of data while doing the research
Generating questions

--what can you know by the methods?

--what do you need to do to know more?

--how can you confirm or validate?
Elaborating methods – how would you improve on use of the methods? would you use different methods? how would you combine methods to learn about your topic and about the phenomena you are studying?
Benefits of analytic memoes to communicate from field research
 to colleagues
 to advisors
 to people in the research setting
 to responsibles
To gain experience & learn from being
Multidisciplinary research team
Differing perspectives on a common topic
Analytic memoes – why write individually?
– individuals have different interests in the same topic
– you create more than the sum of the parts
Integrative mechanisms

Information flow

Photos

Tables, charts

Metaphors
Reflective
Reflections on varying methods
 on combining methods
Reflections towards your Master research
--Relevance for your topic
--Relevance of methods for your research approach
About the technique of analytic memos

Strauss, Anselm, 1987. Memos and memo writing . Qualitative Analysis for Social
Scientists . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 119-129.
Strauss, Anselm, 1987. Integrative mechanisms: diagrams, memo sequences, writing .
Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
184-214.