![]() Your observations are a sample of all the interactions that occur in your field site. So just pick three.Īnd don’t worry too much about which instances you choose. More than that, and the description gets too thin to be useful. Now, you might ask – why just three key incidents? Because that’s as many instances as most people can handle writing in good, contextualized detail. Write up each of those three events as a short story, with clear context, characters, action, motivation, and resolution.And definitely circle any incidents that don’t fit your hypotheses or the larger patterns you’ve seen. Circle the three events or interactions most relevant to your research question.After you leave the field, write a brief, running log of everything you saw.Rather, the point of ethnographic fieldwork is to gather the data you need to answer your research question. Because the point of ethnographic fieldwork isn’t to describe in detail everything you saw. So, why not write a detailed, contextualized description of everything that happened? Because there aren’t enough hours in a day.Īnd that means you’ll have to make choices about what to include in your fieldnotes and what not to include. And the stuff I wrote in those first few weeks of data collection ended up being almost completely unusable. How do I know this? Because when I first started my dissertation, I wrote my fieldnotes as a running log of everything I saw. Or, worse, because they weren’t detailed enough for the author to make sense of when they went back and looked at them six months later. Because they weren’t detailed enough for a reader to make sense of them. ![]() My hunch is that, in most of those cases, the fieldnotes just weren’t useful. The fieldnote data are nowhere to be found. But then only the interview data appear in the text. But that running log approach is problematic, at least on its own.Īs a reviewer, I’ve read countless studies where the methods section describes how the author conducted both interviews and observations. It’s easy to assume that fieldnotes are just a running log of everything that happened during your visit to the field. But where should you start? And what should you write? And how should you write it? And you know you’re supposed to write fieldnotes based on what you saw. And you just spent an hour – or three – in the field. Let’s say you’re working on an ethnographic project.
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