The methods reviewed so far in this text offer various ways to learn about social behaviour. Whether quantitative or qualitative in nature, the method we choose is meant to assist us in collecting data that can answer our research questions and achieve our chosen research purpose(s). With observation as the agreed-upon cornerstone of scientific inquiry, and often a key element of Indigenous ways of knowing, it is no wonder that going out and seeing what is happening in the real world is an ideal method for learning about true behaviours. It is particularly useful when studying topics that are hidden away from the public eye, as many criminological topics tend to be, and where access depends on earning people’s trust and maintaining proper relations with the people we work with.

This chapter examines the qualitative method that has observation at its core: field research. The importance of gatekeepers and consultation, the various roles a field researcher can adopt, the art of taking fieldnotes, and the risks and costs associated with field research are discussed. The chapter also covers how to undertake community-based research through a method known as participatory action research, an approach that Indigenous scholars have identified as particularly amenable to working with Indigenous communities (Smith, 1999).

What is Field Research?

Field research is a qualitative method of data collection aimed at understanding, observing, and interacting with people in their natural settings. Field researchers immerse themselves in the settings they wish to study. While the extent to which researchers immerse themselves in a particular setting varies, all field researchers have in common their participation in “the field.”

When social scientists talk about being “in the field,” they are talking about being in contact with the everyday lives of the people they are studying. Field researchers gain firsthand experience and knowledge about the people, events, and processes they study, and no other method offers quite the same kind of close-up lens on everyday life. This means that field researchers can obtain very detailed data about people and processes, perhaps more so than any other research method. You might think of field research as an umbrella term that includes all the activities that field researchers engage in when they collect data: they participate, they observe, they usually interview some of the people, and they also analyze documents, audio files, and other artifacts created by the people they observe.

In this chapter, we will use different terms to refer to field research including participant observation and ethnography. Participant observation is a particular fieldwork tradition  that developed within the discipline of sociology; we will discuss the different ways and degrees to which researchers can participate and observe below. Ethnography, on the other hand, originally developed within the field of anthropology and involves a long period of immersion within a field setting to understand the social context in all its nuanced complexity. While originating in anthropology, as seen in the work of scholars such as Margaret Mead shown in the image above, ethnography has been adopted by criminologists since the 1970s to describe in-depth field research (Anderson, 2003) and today is used in a wide range of disciplines, including education (Fitzpatrick & May, 2022), nursing (De Chesnay, 2014), and criminal justice studies (Van Cleve, 2016).

Field Research in Criminology

For those who study criminology, the tradition of going out into “the field” to learn about the lives of people on the margins of urban society can be traced back to the University of Chicago. It was there, during the first half of the 20th century, that professors such as Ernest Burgess and Robert E. Park encouraged their students to get out of the library and do firsthand research around the city. Many students took up this challenge, producing seminal studies on youth gangs (Thrasher, 2013), race and class relations (Frazier, 1939/1997), and the cultural life of homeless men (Anderson, 1923).

What made these studies different from those that came before was that researchers went out to collect primary data based on their own observations. This often took place via a long ongoing conversation with research participants, one that lasted weeks, months, or even years. This approach was similar to the one being taken up by anthropologists at the time, where figures such as Bronislaw Malinowski (1979) spent years studying the culture of people living in remote places (remote, that is, from where the researchers themselves lived). Anthropologists found that this extended immersion in a cultural setting was the best way to get a nuanced, complex understanding of social behaviour. This approach is known as ethnography, which literally means “writing culture.”

Ethnographers immerse themselves in a setting so they can observe the lived experience of their research subjects. While the tradition of ethnography began with studies of non-Western societies (Malinowski himself lived for years in the Trobriand Islands of the South Pacific), contemporary ethnographers are just as likely to conduct their work in urban North American settings. Examples of contemporary ethnographies include Philippe Bourgois’ (2003) study of crack cocaine dealers in New York City and Alice Goffman’s (2014) study of Black community life under intense state surveillance in Philadelphia.

W.E.B. Du Bois (1903/2007), a founding figure in sociology, also conducted fieldwork in the Black community, but his focus was on the American South during the early years of the 20th century. Being Black himself helped him gain access to a population that had good reason not to trust white people with sensitive information. Elijah Anderson (1978/2003) likewise found entry into the field facilitated by his racial identity. Anderson was interested in studying urban Black life in Chicago and chose as his research site a neighourhood liquor store where men and women hung out. He found that being Black himself was helpful in terms of gaining access, but he also reminds us that we carry many different identities with us  into the field; while his racial identity may have helped him gain access, Anderson notes that his education and class background marked him off as different from the rest of the folks hanging out at the store, leading him to adopt a fictive kin role as a family member of the store owner in order to be accepted.

As shown in these examples, fieldwork in criminology and other disciplines depends a great deal on relationships. It is perhaps the relational nature of fieldwork that led to so many early practitioners of ethnography being other than the usual cast of white, male academics.

Take the work of Annie Marion MacLean, for example. She was a Canadian woman associated with the Chicago School and has been called the “mother of contemporary ethnography” (Hallett & Jeffers, 2008). MacLean conducted fieldwork within department stores (1899), sweatshops (1903), and coal fields (1908), showing just how widely ethnography can be applied.

Gaining Access

The examples above highlight the important role of gatekeepers in field research. Gatekeepers are people who can grant or deny access to a particular location, social setting, or organization. This role can be performed formally, as is the case when someone performs this function as part of their official duties, or informally, such as when a person is well positioned to grant access to a community even if they are not formally recognized as fulfilling this role on a daily basis.

In Anderson’s (1923) fieldwork at a corner liquor store in Chicago, the proprietor (Jelly) served as a gatekeeper to the community he was interested in working with. Jelly’s role was informal but significant as he was able to provide the researcher with access to the store and its patrons. Other gatekeepers are more formal in the gatekeeping role they occupy in that their official position gives them the authority to admit or deny researchers. Prison wardens would be an example of a formal gatekeeper (Jefferson, 2015), as would the principal of a school where a researcher might hope to conduct fieldwork with high school students (Pascoe, 2007).

When working with Indigenous communities, it is important to consult early on and build trust with community members in a meaningful way prior to conducting any research. For Indigenous groups with formal governance structures (such as band councils), researchers should secure agreement from the leadership but should not neglect other Indigenous knowledge holders who should also be consulted. For Indigenous communities without formal governance structures, researchers should seek approval from and involvement with alternative organizations, such as a local Métis association or urban Indigenous and women’s organizations (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, & Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2018).

Participating and Observing

Now that we have defined field research, addressed how to gain access, and discussed the importance of gatekeepers and consultation, let us now turn our attention to the various roles that field researchers can take.

Taking on new roles while in the field is not uncommon as researchers often look for ways to both observe and participate in the social life of their research subjects. Goffman (2014), for example, tutored children in the community where she ended up conducting fieldwork on Black community life under intense state surveillance. This is known as participant observation. In participant observation, a researcher observes interactions and participates in events in the field. While this might sound straightforward, researchers conducting participant observation vary in the extent to which they participate and observe.

You can think about degrees of participation and observation as existing on a continuum, with complete observation at one end and complete participation at the other (Lune & Berg, 2017). When engaging as a complete observer, a researcher watches people while attempting to remain separate from what and whom they are observing. A researcher studying people through the use of CCTV cameras would constitute a complete observer. A complete participant, on the other hand, is a researcher who fully immerses themselves in the social group they are studying. Laud Humphreys (1970) could be considered to have conducted this kind of observation in his ethically questionable research on male sexual encounters in public bathrooms, wherein he acted as a lookout or “watchqueen” for the men engaging in sex who did not know he was conducting research. Rather than simply observing, complete participants take part in the social life of the field and, like Humphreys, sometimes do not reveal that they are conducting research, though today this is widely seen as unethical.

To understand the strengths and weaknesses of both poles of the observer-participant continuum, imagine you want to understand how children learn to obey rules during unstructured play. You might choose to conduct participant observation at a local playground over a few different days and times. As a complete observer, you might choose to sit on a bench at the edges of the playground or on a blanket on the grass outside the playground area. You would then watch and take notes on how the children played with their peers and interacted with their parents. From this outside perspective, you may be able to see a wide variety of interactions across different children and families. But you would miss what happened before or after and would likely not be able to discern the precise relationships at play (who are best friends, siblings, parents, babysitters, etc.).

Complete participation, on the other hand, would allow for a deeper understanding of life in the group. In your study of how children learn to obey rules, you might decide to become a childcare worker yourself. You could then take children to the playground, play with them, watch how they pick up on rules, and learn more about how and when they decide which rules to follow and which to break. While complete participation offers the advantage of a more in-depth understanding of context, it also may complicate the researcher’s role and position in the field. Completely participating in a setting makes it difficult to take comprehensive notes in the field as you have other responsibilities (in this example, keeping the children safe). In practice, complete participation is not a common position for researchers to adopt (Lune & Berg, 2017).

Most researchers take a position that lies somewhere near the middle of the observer-participant continuum. We can think of these middle positions as observer-as-participant and participant-as-observer. An observer-as-participant position means that one’s presence is felt in some way, and therefore the researcher has an impact on the setting, but one is not immersed in the events. This often involves short stints of observation, such as one-time trips and brief interviews (Lune & Berg, 2017). Wright et al.’s (1992) field research with active burglars fits this role. While the burglars knew they were being studied, the contacts were typically brief and the researchers were not immersed in the research sites (i.e., they never went into people’s homes with the burglars).

A participant-as-observer, on the other hand, spends a lot of time in the field getting to know the social actors and generally participating in some activities while maintaining some distance from the action. The participant-as-observer role is the one typical of ethnography. For example, while studying the culture of crack-cocaine dealing in New York, Bourgois (2003) spent many months hanging out with men who sold drugs at their place of business, as well as drinking beers and chatting with them late into the night, but he was not involved in selling drugs himself. He participated in the daily life and observed behaviour, and while his presence influenced those in the field, he was careful not to get involved in the business and status struggles that defined the groups’ social organization. He was a participant-as-observer.

In summary, field researchers typically participate at least somewhat in their field sites while also spending some time just observing. The above distinction between complete observer, observer-as-participant, participant-as-observer, and complete participant is meant to help in thinking through the relative advantages and disadvantages of your own position in the field (Lune & Berg, 2017). Sometimes, we have more control over the roles we play than at other times, and our research question will often dictate what sort of position we should take. It is important to note that while complete observation (where a researcher hides their identity) is sometimes permissible, research that involves deception is generally not allowed by today’s research ethics boards, which value informed consent as a prime directive for all research (see chapter 1 for more on ethics).

Taking Notes

Fieldwork is sometimes described as “hanging out,” and indeed being present is an important part of gaining insight into people’s lives. This is not the same as passively observing, like the kind of people watching you would engage in while sitting in the park on a sunny day. Ethnography “involves looking in a planned and strategic way with a purpose” (Palys & Atchison, 2014, p. 189). Unlike casual observation, ethnography requires a researcher to write fieldnotes. These are notes on what you are seeing, hearing, feeling, and even smelling and tasting. This can sometimes be done while you are in the field, though most researchers must wait until they are back at their desk to write up their notes.

Field researchers often carry pocket-sized notebooks in which they can jot down brief reminders of important observations and events to write more about later. When conducting fieldwork outdoors in wet climates, researchers can use a write-in-the rain booklet for observations.  Today, a smart phone with a notebook function can work just as well and has the advantage of being less noticeable, as one is less likely to draw attention to oneself when typing on a phone rather than writing in a notebook in this day of constant phone usage.

Regardless of how and when a researcher writes their fieldnotes, they must take great care to jot down as much as they possibly can while in the field and all they can remember after leaving the field. You never know what might become important later, and things that seem entirely insignificant at the time may later reveal themselves to have a great deal of relevance when you begin to conduct your analysis (see chapter 13 on qualitative data analysis).

When thinking about how to produce fieldnotes, it is useful to distinguish between the quick notes you take in the field and the detailed fieldnotes you produce when you are back at your desk. The former can be thought of as jottings; they are short, on-the-fly notes you produce in the moment (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2011). These jottings are what go into your small notebook, phone app, or a spare piece of paper that might be lying around, like a grocery store receipt or napkin (not that researchers are ever caught without their tools).

Your fieldnotes, on the other hand, are what you produce when you have the time to sit down and write out the details in all their richness. This should be done as soon as possible, ideally before you’ve had the chance to talk with colleagues or family members about your experience. Write up your fieldnotes when you are fresh, the very same day or first thing the next morning. Waiting a couple days will result in subpar fieldnotes as your memory fades and your mind starts framing things differently. These fieldnotes represent your data, so you want to make sure your data are of good quality.

When writing your fieldnotes, pay particular attention to the words people use as these can often be important for developing concepts later. When looking at a scene, describe the action happening, not just the static frame, and pay attention to other sensory data, like smells and noises. Keep inferences to a minimum and avoid generalizations as they are likely to produce weak descriptions with possibly erroneous conclusions. Consider the following example descriptions of the same scene (adapted from Fontes & Piercy, 2000):

Description #1: A student got on the bus. She looked like she was late for class.

Description #2: A young (mid-20s?), white woman with dark brown hair, wearing blue framed glasses, a white shirt, blue jeans, and white sneakers got onto the bus. She sat down at the front and placed her brown leather backpack onto her lap and repeatedly looked at her phone, apparently checking the time. At University Bus Station, she rang the bell to request a stop and, pushing her way past the crowd of people waiting to board, hurried towards the campus.

Note how description #1 relies heavily on inferences. How do we know this is a student? Maybe she is late for a job interview as a department assistant? Instead, your fieldnotes should paint vivid descriptions based on what you observe and contain details you can draw upon later when you analyze your data and start writing up your final report, paper, or book. Photos and drawings can also be helpful, as can video, though one is often limited regarding how much one can record for practical and ethical reasons. If you are someone who sketches or doodles, you might enjoy Causey’s (2017) book Drawn to See, which is about how drawing can be used effectively in ethnographic research.

Much like the qualitative method of interviewing examined in chapter 8, ethnography is an iterative process, so don’t wait until you are finished gathering data to start thinking about your analysis. Write down any analytical/theoretical insights and interpretation as you go (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2011). It can be useful to separate these analytical/theoretical notes from your descriptive fieldnotes using different section headings in the fieldnotes. It is also important to keep track of your own reactions and emotions while engaged in the project. This might take the form of a separate journal for personal reflections, or these personal observations can be folded into your general fieldnotes (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2011). The value of keeping a separate journal, or creating separate sections in your fieldnotes, is that when it comes time to code your fieldnotes, you won’t have a lot of dead-end analytical notes and tangential personal matters to sift through, though these can be coded as such when conducting your analysis and can provide valuable insights into the process itself. For Indigenous researchers, intuitions and dreams may form an important part of the methodology and ought to be recorded and preserved as one progresses (Kovach, 2021).

Risks and Costs of Field Research

Doing fieldwork does present some risks to the researcher, especially in a field like criminology. If you are an undergraduate student, you should be aware that any research that might put you or anyone else in harm’s way will not be approved by your teachers or your institution. Some risk, however, simply comes with being in the field. Risk that comes from working in a dangerous setting, like being mistaken for a rival gang member while researching gang culture (as was the case with Venkatesh (2008)), is known as situational risk and should be minimized or avoided altogether in your research planning. Ambient risk, on the other hand, is risk that may affect everyone in the setting equally, like falling ill while in the field. This type of risk is one you should consider but is unlikely to raise the same ethical problems as situational risk (Lune & Berg, 2017).

A related concern is the emotional labour involved in successfully conducting a field research project. Field researchers often develop close relationships with the people they study. These relationships can be very rewarding and yield rich, detailed data. However, the emotional closeness that comes from participating in day-to-day life with one’s research subjects can result in some ethically problematic situations, such as when Goffman (2014) served as the driver for a group of armed young men searching for the killer of their friend. It can also be emotionally difficult, as the people you work with may suffer tragic misfortune and even death.

While the time spent in the field and the ability of field researchers to collect detailed data are strengths of field research, these benefits come at a cost. Field researchers sometimes spend years in the field, and they must take care to write detailed notes to document their observations. For example, Williams (1989) spent four years observing teenage cocaine dealers before he wrote his ethnographic study. Vysotsky (2015) spent seven years studying militant-antifascist organizations, albeit over the course of two periods of time. Most field researchers don’t spend that long conducting research, but it is not uncommon for graduate students to devote over a year or two to working in the same setting, especially if they are conducting ethnographic research. This allows researchers to gather in-depth information on elements and interactions in the field, but the focus is by necessity narrower compared to survey research. In short, field researchers generally sacrifice breadth of knowledge in exchange for depth of understanding.

Participatory Action Research

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, all fieldwork involves relationships. Many of these relations are asymmetrical and primarily reflect a professional association. This is reflected in the language itself, where the researcher “studies” a given group who become “research subjects.” Many researchers, particularly those working with Indigenous and other marginalized populations, are concerned with the colonial, top-down way in which research is conducted (Smith, 1999). In such research, a researcher chooses the topic, conducts a literature review, formulates a research question, carries out the research, and writes up the results without much input from the people “being studied” other than as a source of data. This can be the case even when a researcher wishes to challenge social inequalities. As a purely extractive way of carrying out research, the research process itself is likely to reproduce the dynamics of exclusion and disempowerment (Quinless, 2022).

How, then, does one include community members in the research project in a more authentic way? One answer is participatory action research (PAR).  PAR is a community-based research method that has grown out of several traditions, including psychological action research (Lewin, 1948), feminism (Reinharz, 1992), and educational studies (Freire, 1982). In recent years, PAR has been used to evaluate college educational programing inside a women’s prison (Fine & Torre, 2006) and as a means for running focus groups with women in Japan who experienced intimate partner violence (Yoshihama, 2002), a project that resulted in the first community-based support group for domestic abuse survivors in Japan.

PAR can help ensure that community members maintain control over how the knowledge will be produced and how it will be used. This form of research is not value-neutral, nor does it generate knowledge simply for the sake of testing academic theories (Torre & Ayala, 2009). It is explicitly oriented towards producing social change and empowering the people themselves who are participating in the project. As Dupont (2008) explains, “researchers engaged in participatory research are encouraged to take a stand and to be invested in outcomes and policy implementation. They are allied with marginalized individuals and communities with the purpose of improving their well-being and social conditions to the degree possible” (p. 202).

Participatory action research is a collaborative approach that empowers people to take action to resolve specific problems. Unlike traditional research, it is the participants themselves who define the problem at hand and do so with the aim of improving their own condition. Since the action may take any form, PAR can facilitate a move away from reliance on the criminal justice system for addressing crime, as the community takes the lead on developing solutions and remedies (Dupont, 2008; Pepinsky & Quinney, 1991).

Indigenous scholars advocate for PAR as a way for researchers to engage in decolonial research when working with Indigenous communities and to counter deficit theorizing (Smith, 1999). A great deal of research conducted in Indigenous communities focuses on the preconceptions of outsiders, and while often well-intentioned, this research frequently ends up reproducing negative stereotypes by portraying Indigenous communities as deficient in various ways. This form of deficit theorizing blames community problems on individual choices rather than structural conditions and ignores the impact the state has had on creating the conditions that exist in Indigenous communities today (Irlbacher-Fox, 2009; Kovach, 2021).

PAR, by contrast, is well suited to a strengths-based approach because it allows the community to focus on what is working well rather than simply identifying problems (Quinless, 2022). Mohatt et al. (2004), for example, used a participatory action approach to research sobriety in an Indigenous community in Alaska. At first, the researchers thought they would focus on alcoholism, but through working with the community to develop their research problem, “Very quickly everyone agreed that our research should focus on sobriety, rather than on alcohol abuse, and strengths not deficits” (Mohatt et al., 2004, p. 265). This culturally anchored approach, created in collaboration with members of the community, allowed the researchers to use the concept of ellam-iinga, or “eye of awareness” (Mohatt et al., 2004, p. 267). By using this concept, the research was redirected away from a pathology framework toward one based on resiliency, and from a focus on Western conceptualizations of illness to an Indigenous understanding of wellness.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we considered how to conduct fieldwork in an authentic and ethically grounded way. Because much of the history of ethnographic fieldwork is one of extracting data from the community, without giving much back in return, we also considered PAR as a way researchers can centre community needs and voices and ensure that communities maintain control over the research. PAR is not in-itself an Indigenous methodology, but it is well suited to working with Indigenous communities as it depends on relational accountability throughout the entire research process.

Fieldwork yields rich and nuanced data, which makes it an excellent choice for studying social processes and for understanding the role of social context in shaping people’s lives and experiences. Because methods like ethnography typically occur over an extended period, it permits greater opportunities for understanding the intricacies of daily life. The combination of observations, interviews, and the analysis of content in field research creates opportunities for understanding the social and historical context for people’s words and actions. You often know you have really found something when you can tell the people you are working with something about themselves they did not already know. PAR might add something they can use to improve their lives and challenge the unjust power structures that keep them in a marginalized position.

Further Reading

• The role of public interior spaces in the socialization of active elderly individuals
• “We keep each other safe”: San Francisco Bay Area community-based organizations respond to enduring crises in the COVID-19 era
• Keepin’ It Real: Authenticity, Commercialization, and the Media in Korean Hip Hop
• ‘Do not go through the system passively’: Integrating environmental studies and ethnic studies through a social justice outdoor education program for high school learners
• Routines and daily dynamics of young people with borderline intelligence: An ethnomethodological study
• Inappropriate driving behavior exhibited by drivers with the tendency of developmental disabilities

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