Doing Field Projects

4 Research Design

Good research design lies at the heart of all good field research, and you should, in close consultation with your instructor, give careful consideration to how exactly you are going to carry out each project before you get too deeply into it. Each of the projects in this book has some introductory material on how to approach it, and there are many different strategies depending on the nature of the project. Choosing someone to interview in order to record a life history is a completely different matter from finding a space to map, and the methods used to carry out these projects are fundamentally different also. There is no one-size-fits-all model for research design in qualitative fieldwork. Nevertheless, there are certain guidelines that apply to most situations. To begin, field research must be driven by a research question. How to arrive at a research question is often a complicated matter, as is the nature of research questions themselves, but going into a fieldwork project, large or small, without some kind of research question, even a vague one, is potentially a recipe for disaster.

No matter how simple or rough your research design is, you should start a field project with a reason that is more than “I’d like to know something about this.” Certainly, that kind of loose pondering can be your initial jumping off point, but you have to make your purpose for inquiry much more explicit before you commence your actual fieldwork on a specific project.