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Introduction, what is fieldwork, purpose of fieldwork, physical safety, mental wellbeing and affect, ethical considerations, remote fieldwork, concluding thoughts, acknowledgments, funder information.

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Field Research: A Graduate Student's Guide

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Ezgi Irgil, Anne-Kathrin Kreft, Myunghee Lee, Charmaine N Willis, Kelebogile Zvobgo, Field Research: A Graduate Student's Guide, International Studies Review , Volume 23, Issue 4, December 2021, Pages 1495–1517, https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viab023

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What is field research? Is it just for qualitative scholars? Must it be done in a foreign country? How much time in the field is “enough”? A lack of disciplinary consensus on what constitutes “field research” or “fieldwork” has left graduate students in political science underinformed and thus underequipped to leverage site-intensive research to address issues of interest and urgency across the subfields. Uneven training in Ph.D. programs has also left early-career researchers underprepared for the logistics of fieldwork, from developing networks and effective sampling strategies to building respondents’ trust, and related issues of funding, physical safety, mental health, research ethics, and crisis response. Based on the experience of five junior scholars, this paper offers answers to questions that graduate students puzzle over, often without the benefit of others’ “lessons learned.” This practical guide engages theory and praxis, in support of an epistemologically and methodologically pluralistic discipline.

¿Qué es la investigación de campo? ¿Es solo para académicos cualitativos? ¿Debe realizarse en un país extranjero? ¿Cuánto tiempo en el terreno es “suficiente”? La falta de consenso disciplinario con respecto a qué constituye la “investigación de campo” o el “trabajo de campo” ha causado que los estudiantes de posgrado en ciencias políticas estén poco informados y, por lo tanto, capacitados de manera insuficiente para aprovechar la investigación exhaustiva en el sitio con el objetivo de abordar los asuntos urgentes y de interés en los subcampos. La capacitación desigual en los programas de doctorado también ha provocado que los investigadores en las primeras etapas de su carrera estén poco preparados para la logística del trabajo de campo, desde desarrollar redes y estrategias de muestreo efectivas hasta generar la confianza de las personas que facilitan la información, y las cuestiones relacionadas con la financiación, la seguridad física, la salud mental, la ética de la investigación y la respuesta a las situaciones de crisis. Con base en la experiencia de cinco académicos novatos, este artículo ofrece respuestas a las preguntas que desconciertan a los estudiantes de posgrado, a menudo, sin el beneficio de las “lecciones aprendidas” de otras personas. Esta guía práctica incluye teoría y praxis, en apoyo de una disciplina pluralista desde el punto de vista epistemológico y metodológico.

En quoi consiste la recherche de terain ? Est-elle uniquement réservée aux chercheurs qualitatifs ? Doit-elle être effectuée dans un pays étranger ? Combien de temps faut-il passer sur le terrain pour que ce soit « suffisant » ? Le manque de consensus disciplinaire sur ce qui constitue une « recherche de terrain » ou un « travail de terrain » a laissé les étudiants diplômés en sciences politiques sous-informés et donc sous-équipés pour tirer parti des recherches de terrain intensives afin d'aborder les questions d'intérêt et d'urgence dans les sous-domaines. L'inégalité de formation des programmes de doctorat a mené à une préparation insuffisante des chercheurs en début de carrière à la logistique du travail de terrain, qu'il s'agisse du développement de réseaux et de stratégies d’échantillonnage efficaces, de l'acquisition de la confiance des personnes interrogées ou des questions de financement, de sécurité physique, de santé mentale, d’éthique de recherche et de réponse aux crises qui y sont associées. Cet article s'appuie sur l'expérience de cinq jeunes chercheurs pour proposer des réponses aux questions que les étudiants diplômés se posent, souvent sans bénéficier des « enseignements tirés » par les autres. Ce guide pratique engage théorie et pratique en soutien à une discipline épistémologiquement et méthodologiquement pluraliste.

Days before embarking on her first field research trip, a Ph.D. student worries about whether she will be able to collect the qualitative data that she needs for her dissertation. Despite sending dozens of emails, she has received only a handful of responses to her interview requests. She wonders if she will be able to gain more traction in-country. Meanwhile, in the midst of drafting her thesis proposal, an M.A. student speculates about the feasibility of his project, given a modest budget. Thousands of miles away from home, a postdoc is concerned about their safety, as protests erupt outside their window and state security forces descend into the streets.

These anecdotes provide a small glimpse into the concerns of early-career researchers undertaking significant projects with a field research component. Many of these fieldwork-related concerns arise from an unfortunate shortage in curricular offerings for qualitative and mixed-method research in political science graduate programs ( Emmons and Moravcsik 2020 ), 1 as well as the scarcity of instructional materials for qualitative and mixed-method research, relative to those available for quantitative research ( Elman, Kapiszewski, and Kirilova 2015 ; Kapiszewski, MacLean, and Read 2015 ; Mosley 2013 ). A recent survey among the leading United States Political Science programs in Comparative Politics and International Relations found that among graduate students who have carried out international fieldwork, 62 percent had not received any formal fieldwork training and only 20 percent felt very or mostly prepared for their fieldwork ( Schwartz and Cronin-Furman 2020 , 7–8). This shortfall in training and instruction means that many young researchers are underprepared for the logistics of fieldwork, from developing networks and effective sampling strategies to building respondents’ trust. In addition, there is a notable lack of preparation around issues of funding, physical safety, mental health, research ethics, and crisis response. This is troubling, as field research is highly valued and, in some parts of the field, it is all but expected, for instance in comparative politics.

Beyond subfield-specific expectations, research that leverages multiple types of data and methods, including fieldwork, is one of the ways that scholars throughout the discipline can more fully answer questions of interest and urgency. Indeed, multimethod work, a critical means by which scholars can parse and evaluate causal pathways, is on the rise ( Weller and Barnes 2016 ). The growing appearance of multimethod research in leading journals and university presses makes adequate training and preparation all the more significant ( Seawright 2016 ; Nexon 2019 ).

We are five political scientists interested in providing graduate students and other early-career researchers helpful resources for field research that we lacked when we first began our work. Each of us has recently completed or will soon complete a Ph.D. at a United States or Swedish university, though we come from many different national backgrounds. We have conducted field research in our home countries and abroad. From Colombia and Guatemala to the United States, from Europe to Turkey, and throughout East and Southeast Asia, we have spanned the globe to investigate civil society activism and transitional justice in post-violence societies, conflict-related sexual violence, social movements, authoritarianism and contentious politics, and the everyday politics and interactions between refugees and host-country citizens.

While some of us have studied in departments that offer strong training in field research methods, most of us have had to self-teach, learning through trial and error. Some of us have also been fortunate to participate in short courses and workshops hosted by universities such as the Consortium for Qualitative Research Methods and interdisciplinary institutions such as the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Recognizing that these opportunities are not available to or feasible for all, and hoping to ease the concerns of our more junior colleagues, we decided to compile our experiences and recommendations for first-time field researchers.

Our experiences in the field differ in several key respects, from the time we spent in the field to the locations we visited, and how we conducted our research. The diversity of our experiences, we hope, will help us reach and assist the broadest possible swath of graduate students interested in field research. Some of us have spent as little as ten days in a given country or as much as several months, in some instances visiting a given field site location just once and in other instances returning several times. At times, we have been able to plan weeks and months in advance. Other times, we have quickly arranged focus groups and impromptu interviews. Other times still, we have completed interviews virtually, when research participants were in remote locations or when we ourselves were unable to travel, of note during the coronavirus pandemic. We have worked in countries where we are fluent or have professional proficiency in the language, and in countries where we have relied on interpreters. We have worked in settings with precarious security as well as in locations that feel as comfortable as home. Our guide is not intended to be prescriptive or exhaustive. What we offer is a set of experience-based suggestions to be implemented as deemed relevant and appropriate by the researcher and their advisor(s).

In terms of the types of research and data sources and collection, we have conducted archival research, interviews, focus groups, and ethnographies with diplomats, bureaucrats, military personnel, ex-combatants, civil society advocates, survivors of political violence, refugees, and ordinary citizens. We have grappled with ethical dilemmas, chief among them how to get useful data for our research projects in ways that exceed the minimal standards of human subjects’ research evaluation panels. Relatedly, we have contemplated how to use our platforms to give back to the individuals and communities who have so generously lent us their time and knowledge, and shared with us their personal and sometimes harrowing stories.

Our target audience is first and foremost graduate students and early-career researchers who are interested in possibly conducting fieldwork but who either (1) do not know the full potential or value of fieldwork, (2) know the potential and value of fieldwork but think that it is excessively cost-prohibitive or otherwise infeasible, or (3) who have the interest, the will, and the means but not necessarily the know-how. We also hope that this resource will be of value to graduate programs, as they endeavor to better support students interested in or already conducting field research. Further, we target instructional faculty and graduate advisors (and other institutional gatekeepers like journal and book reviewers), to show that fieldwork does not have to be year-long, to give just one example. Instead, the length of time spent in the field is a function of the aims and scope of a given project. We also seek to formalize and normalize the idea of remote field research, whether conducted because of security concerns in conflict zones, for instance, or because of health and safety concerns, like the Covid-19 pandemic. Accordingly, researchers in the field for shorter stints or who conduct fieldwork remotely should not be penalized.

We note that several excellent resources on fieldwork such as the bibliography compiled by Advancing Conflict Research (2020) catalogue an impressive list of articles addressing questions such as ethics, safety, mental health, reflexivity, and methods. Further resources can be found about the positionality of the researcher in the field while engaging vulnerable communities, such as in the research field of migration ( Jacobsen and Landau 2003 ; Carling, Bivand Erdal, and Ezzati 2014 ; Nowicka and Cieslik 2014 ; Zapata-Barrero and Yalaz 2019 ). However, little has been written beyond conflict-affected contexts, fragile settings, and vulnerable communities. Moreover, as we consulted different texts and resources, we found no comprehensive guide to fieldwork explicitly written with graduate students in mind. It is this gap that we aim to fill.

In this paper, we address five general categories of questions that graduate students puzzle over, often without the benefit of others’ “lessons learned.” First, What is field research? Is it just for qualitative scholars? Must it be conducted in a foreign country? How much time in the field is “enough”? Second, What is the purpose of fieldwork? When does it make sense to travel to a field site to collect data? How can fieldwork data be used? Third, What are the nuts and bolts? How does one get ready and how can one optimize limited time and financial resources? Fourth, How does one conduct fieldwork safely? What should a researcher do to keep themselves, research assistants, and research subjects safe? What measures should they take to protect their mental health? Fifth, How does one conduct ethical, beneficent field research?

Finally, the Covid-19 pandemic has impressed upon the discipline the volatility of research projects centered around in-person fieldwork. Lockdowns and closed borders left researchers sequestered at home and unable to travel, forced others to cut short any trips already begun, and unexpectedly confined others still to their fieldwork sites. Other factors that may necessitate a (spontaneous) readjustment of planned field research include natural disasters, a deteriorating security situation in the field site, researcher illness, and unexpected changes in personal circumstances. We, therefore, conclude with a section on the promise and potential pitfalls of remote (or virtual) fieldwork. Throughout this guide, we engage theory and praxis to support an epistemologically and methodologically pluralistic discipline.

The concept of “fieldwork” is not well defined in political science. While several symposia discuss the “nuts and bolts” of conducting research in the field within the pages of political science journals, few ever define it ( Ortbals and Rincker 2009 ; Hsueh, Jensenius, and Newsome 2014 ). Defining the concept of fieldwork is important because assumptions about what it is and what it is not underpin any suggestions for conducting it. A lack of disciplinary consensus about what constitutes “fieldwork,” we believe, explains the lack of a unified definition. Below, we discuss three areas of current disagreement about what “fieldwork” is, including the purpose of fieldwork, where it occurs, and how long it should be. We follow this by offering our definition of fieldwork.

First, we find that many in the discipline view fieldwork as squarely in the domain of qualitative research, whether interpretivist or positivist. However, field research can also serve quantitative projects—for example, by providing crucial context, supporting triangulation, or illustrating causal mechanisms. For instance, Kreft (2019) elaborated her theory of women's civil society mobilization in response to conflict-related sexual violence based on interviews she carried out in Colombia. She then examined cross-national patterns through statistical analysis. Conversely, Willis's research on the United States military in East Asia began with quantitative data collection and analysis of protest events before turning to fieldwork to understand why protests occurred in some instances but not others. Researchers can also find quantifiable data in the field that is otherwise unavailable to them at home ( Read 2006 ; Chambers-Ju 2014 ; Jensenius 2014 ). Accordingly, fieldwork is not in the domain of any particular epistemology or methodology as its purpose is to acquire data for further information.

Second, comparative politics and international relations scholars often opine that fieldwork requires leaving the country in which one's institution is based. Instead, we propose that what matters most is the nature of the research project, not the locale. For instance, some of us in the international relations subfield have interviewed representatives of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), whose headquarters are generally located in Global North countries. For someone pursuing a Ph.D. in the United States and writing on transnational advocacy networks, interviews with INGO representatives in New York certainly count as fieldwork ( Zvobgo 2020 ). Similarly, a graduate student who returns to her home country to interview refugees and native citizens is conducting a field study as much as a researcher for whom the context is wholly foreign. Such interviews can provide necessary insights and information that would not have been gained otherwise—one of the key reasons researchers conduct fieldwork in the first place. In other instances, conducting any in-person research is simply not possible, due to financial constraints, safety concerns, or other reasons. For example, the Covid-19 pandemic has forced many researchers to shift their face-to-face research plans to remote data collection, either over the phone or virtually ( Howlett 2021 , 2). For some research projects, gathering data through remote methods may yield the same if not similar information than in-person research ( Howlett 2021 , 3–4). As Howlett (2021 , 11) notes, digital platforms may offer researchers the ability to “embed ourselves in other contexts from a distance” and glimpse into our subjects’ lives in ways similar to in-person research. By adopting a broader definition of fieldwork, researchers can be more flexible in getting access to data sources and interacting with research subjects.

Third, there is a tendency, especially among comparativists, to only count fieldwork that spans the better part of a year; even “surgical strike” field research entails one to three months, according to some scholars ( Ortbals and Rincker 2009 ; Weiss, Hicken, and Kuhonta 2017 ). The emphasis on spending as much time as possible in the field is likely due to ethnographic research traditions, reflected in classics such as James Scott's Weapons of the Weak , which entail year-long stints of research. However, we suggest that the appropriate amount of time in the field should be assessed on a project-by-project basis. Some studies require the researcher to be in the field for long periods; others do not. For example, Willis's research on the discourse around the United States’ military presence in overseas host communities has required months in the field. By contrast, Kreft only needed ten days in New York to carry out interviews with diplomats and United Nations staff, in a context with which she already had some familiarity from a prior internship. Likewise, Zvobgo spent a couple of weeks in her field research sites, conducting interviews with directors and managers of prominent human rights nongovernmental organizations. This population is not so large as to require a whole month or even a few months. This has also been the case for Irgil, as she had spent one month in the field site conducting interviews with ordinary citizens. The goal of the project was to acquire information on citizens’ perceptions of refugees. As we discuss in the next section, when deciding how long to spend in the field, scholars must consider the information their project requires and consider the practicalities of fieldwork, notably cost.

Thus, we highlight three essential points in fieldwork and offer a definition accordingly: fieldwork involves acquiring information, using any set of appropriate data collection techniques, for qualitative, quantitative, or experimental analysis through embedded research whose location and duration is dependent on the project. We argue that adopting such a definition of “fieldwork” is necessary to include the multitude of forms fieldwork can take, including remote methods, whose value and challenges the Covid-19 pandemic has impressed upon the discipline.

When does a researcher need to conduct fieldwork? Fieldwork can be effective for (1) data collection, (2) theory building, and (3) theory testing. First, when a researcher is interested in a research topic, yet they could not find an available and/or reliable data source for the topic, fieldwork could provide the researcher with plenty of options. Some research agendas can require researchers to visit archives to review historical documents. For example, Greitens (2016) visited national archives in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States to find historical documents about the development of coercive institutions in past authoritarian governments for her book, Dictators and Their Secret Police . Also, newly declassified archival documents can open new possibilities for researchers to examine restricted topics. To illustrate, thanks to the newly released archival records of the Chinese Communist Party's communications, and exchange of visits with the European communist world, Sarotte (2012) was able to study the Party's decision to crack down on Tiananmen protesters, which had previously been deemed as an unstudiable topic due to the limited data.

Other research agendas can require researchers to conduct (semistructured) in-depth interviews to understand human behavior or a situation more closely, for example, by revealing the meanings of concepts for people and showing how people perceive the world. For example, O'Brien and Li (2005) conducted in-depth interviews with activists, elites, and villagers to understand how these actors interact with each other and what are the outcomes of the interaction in contentious movements in rural China. Through research, they revealed that protests have deeply influenced all these actors’ minds, a fact not directly observable without in-depth interviews.

Finally, data collection through fieldwork should not be confined to qualitative data ( Jensenius 2014 ). While some quantitative datasets can be easily compiled or accessed through use of the internet or contact with data-collection agencies, other datasets can only be built or obtained through relationships with “gatekeepers” such as government officials, and thus require researchers to visit the field ( Jensenius 2014 ). Researchers can even collect their own quantitative datasets by launching surveys or quantifying data contained in archives. In a nutshell, fieldwork will allow researchers to use different techniques to collect and access original/primary data sources, whether these are qualitative, quantitative, or experimental in nature, and regardless of the intended method of analysis. 2

But fieldwork is not just for data collection as such. Researchers can accomplish two other fundamental elements of the research process: theory building and theory testing. When a researcher finds a case where existing theories about a phenomenon do not provide plausible explanations, they can build a theory through fieldwork ( Geddes 2003 ). Lee's experience provides a good example. When studying the rise of a protest movement in South Korea for her dissertation, Lee applied commonly discussed social movement theories, grievances, political opportunity, resource mobilization, and repression, to explain the movement's eruption and found that these theories do not offer a convincing explanation for the protest movement. She then moved on to fieldwork and conducted interviews with the movement participants to understand their motivations. Finally, through those interviews, she offered an alternative theory that the protest participants’ collective identity shaped during the authoritarian past played a unifying factor and eventually led them to participate in the movement. Her example shows that theorization can take place through careful review and rigorous inference during fieldwork.

Moreover, researchers can test their theory through fieldwork. Quantitative observational data has limitations in revealing causal mechanisms ( Esarey 2017 ). Therefore, many political scientists turn their attention to conducting field experiments or lab-in-the-field experiments to reveal causality ( Druckman et al. 2006 ; Beath, Christia, and Enikolopov 2013 ; Finseraas and Kotsadam 2017 ), or to leveraging in-depth insights or historical records gained through qualitative or archival research in process-tracing ( Collier 2011 ; Ricks and Liu 2018 ). Surveys and survey experiments may also be useful tools to substantiate a theoretical story or test a theory ( Marston 2020 ). Of course, for most Ph.D. students, especially those not affiliated with more extensive research projects, some of these options will be financially prohibitive.

A central concern for graduate students, especially those working with a small budget and limited time, is optimizing time in the field and integrating remote work. We offer three pieces of advice: have a plan, build in flexibility, and be strategic, focusing on collecting data that are unavailable at home. We also discuss working with local translators or research assistants. Before we turn to these more practical issues arising during fieldwork, we address a no less important issue: funding.

The challenge of securing funds is often overlooked in discussions of what constitutes field research. Months- or year-long in-person research can be cost-prohibitive, something academic gatekeepers must consider when evaluating “what counts” and “what is enough.” Unlike their predecessors, many graduate students today have a significant amount of debt and little savings. 3 Additionally, if researchers are not able to procure funding, they have to pay out of pocket and possibly take on more debt. Not only is in-person fieldwork costly, but researchers may also have to forego working while they are in the field, making long stretches in the field infeasible for some.

For researchers whose fieldwork involves travelling to another location, procuring funding via grants, fellowships, or other sources is a necessity, regardless of how long one plans to be in the field. A good mantra for applying for research funding is “apply early and often” ( Kelsky 2015 , 110). Funding applications take a considerable amount of time to prepare, from writing research statements to requesting letters of recommendation. Even adapting one's materials for different applications takes time. Not only is the application process itself time-consuming, but the time between applying for and receiving funds, if successful, can be quite long, from several months to a year. For example, after defending her prospectus in May 2019, Willis began applying to funding sources for her dissertation, all of which had deadlines between June and September. She received notifications between November and January; however, funds from her successful applications were not available until March and April, almost a year later. 4 Accordingly, we recommend applying for funding as early as possible; this not only increases one's chances of hitting the ground running in the field, but the application process can also help clarify the goals and parameters of one's research.

Graduate students should also apply often for funding opportunities. There are different types of funding for fieldwork: some are larger, more competitive grants such as the National Science Foundation Political Science Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant in the United States, others, including sources through one's own institution, are smaller. Some countries, like Sweden, boast a plethora of smaller funding agencies that disburse grants of 20,000–30,0000 Swedish Kronor (approx. 2,500–3,500 U.S. dollars) to Ph.D. students in the social sciences. Listings of potential funding sources are often found on various websites including those belonging to universities, professional organizations (such as the American Political Science Association or the European Consortium for Political Research), and governmental institutions dealing with foreign affairs. Once you have identified fellowships and grants for which you and your project are a good match, we highly recommend soliciting information and advice from colleagues who have successfully applied for them. This can include asking them to share their applications with you, and if possible, to have them, another colleague or set of colleagues read through your project description and research plan (especially for bigger awards) to ensure that you have made the best possible case for why you should be selected. While both large and small pots of funding are worth applying for, many researchers end up funding their fieldwork through several small grants or fellowships. One small award may not be sufficient to fund the entirety of one's fieldwork, but several may. For example, Willis's fieldwork in Japan and South Korea was supported through fellowships within each country. Similarly, Irgil was able to conduct her fieldwork abroad through two different and relatively smaller grants by applying to them each year.

Of course, situations vary in different countries with respect to what kinds of grants from what kinds of funders are available. An essential part of preparing for fieldwork is researching the funding landscape well in advance, even as early as the start of the Ph.D. We encourage first-time field researchers to be aware that universities and departments may themselves not be aware of the full range of possible funds available, so it is always a good idea to do your own research and watch research-related social media channels. The amount of funding needed thereby depends on the nature of one's project and how long one intends to be in the field. As we elaborate in the next section, scholars should think carefully about their project goals, the data required to meet those goals, and the requisite time to attain them. For some projects, even a couple of weeks in the field is sufficient to get the needed information.

Preparing to Enter “the field”

It is important to prepare for the field as much as possible. What kind of preparations do researchers need? For someone conducting interviews with NGO representatives, this might involve identifying the largest possible pool of potential respondents, securing their contact information, sending them study invitation letters, finding a mutually agreeable time to meet, and pulling together short biographies for each interviewee in order to use your time together most effectively. If you plan to travel to conduct interviews, you should reach out to potential respondents roughly four to six weeks prior to your arrival. For individuals who do not respond, you can follow up one to two weeks before you arrive and, if needed, once more when you are there. This is still no guarantee for success, of course. For Kreft, contacting potential interviewees in Colombia initially proved more challenging than anticipated, as many of the people she targeted did not respond to her emails. It turned out that many Colombians have a preference for communicating via phone or, in particular, WhatsApp. Some of those who responded to her emails sent in advance of her field trip asked her to simply be in touch once she was in the country, to set up appointments on short notice. This made planning and arranging her interview schedule more complicated. Therefore, a general piece of advice is to research your target population's preferred communication channels and mediums in the field site if email requests yield no or few responses.

In general, we note for the reader that contacting potential research participants should come after one has designed an interview questionnaire (plus an informed consent protocol) and sought and received, where applicable, approval from institutional review boards (IRBs) or other ethical review procedures in place (both at one's home institution/in the country of the home institution as well as in the country where one plans to conduct research if travelling abroad). The most obvious advantage of having the interview questionnaire in place and having secured all necessary institutional approvals before you start contacting potential interviewees is that you have a clearer idea of the universe of individuals you would like to interview, and for what purpose. Therefore, it is better to start sooner rather than later and be mindful of “high seasons,” when institutional and ethical review boards are receiving, processing, and making decisions on numerous proposals. It may take a few months for them to issue approvals.

On the subject of ethics and review panels, we encourage you to consider talking openly and honestly with your supervisors and/or funders about the situations where a written consent form may not be suitable and might need to be replaced with “verbal consent.” For instance, doing fieldwork in politically unstable contexts, highly scrutinized environments, or vulnerable communities, like refugees, might create obstacles for the interviewees as well as the researcher. The literature discusses the dilemma in offering the interviewees anonymity and requesting signed written consent in addition to the emphasis on total confidentiality ( Jacobsen and Landau 2003 ; Mackenzie, McDowell, and Pittaway 2007 ; Saunders, Kitzinger, and Kitzinger 2015 ). Therefore, in those situations, the researcher might need to take the initiative on how to act while doing the interviews as rigorously as possible. In her fieldwork, Irgil faced this situation as the political context of Turkey did not guarantee that there would not be any adverse consequences for interviewees on both sides of her story: citizens of Turkey and Syrian refugees. Consequently, she took hand-written notes and asked interviewees for their verbal consent in a safe interview atmosphere. This is something respondents greatly appreciated ( Irgil 2020 ).

Ethical considerations, of course, also affect the research design itself, with ramifications for fieldwork. When Kreft began developing her Ph.D. proposal to study women's political and civil society mobilization in response to conflict-related sexual violence, she initially aimed to recruit interviewees from the universe of victims of this violence, to examine variation among those who did and those who did not mobilize politically. As a result of deeper engagement with the literature on researching conflict-related sexual violence, conversations with senior colleagues who had interviewed victims, and critical self-reflection of her status as a researcher (with no background in psychology or social work), she decided to change focus and shift toward representatives of civil society organizations and victims’ associations. This constituted a major reconfiguration of her research design, from one geared toward identifying the factors that drive mobilization of victims toward using insights from interviews to understand better how those mobilize perceive and “make sense” of conflict-related sexual violence. Needless to say, this required alterations to research strategies and interview guides, including reassessing her planned fieldwork. Kreft's primary consideration was not to cause harm to her research participants, particularly in the form of re-traumatization. She opted to speak only with those women who on account of their work are used to speaking about conflict-related sexual violence. In no instance did she inquire about interviewees’ personal experiences with sexual violence, although several brought this up on their own during the interviews.

Finally, if you are conducting research in another country where you have less-than-professional fluency in the language, pre-fieldwork planning should include hiring a translator or research assistant, for example, through an online hiring platform like Upwork, or a local university. Your national embassy or consulate is another option; many diplomatic offices have lists of individuals who they have previously contracted. More generally, establishing contact with a local university can be beneficial, either in the form of a visiting researcher arrangement, which grants access to research groups and facilities like libraries or informally contacting individual researchers. The latter may have valuable insights into the local context, contacts to potential research participants, and they may even be able to recommend translators or research assistants. Kreft, for example, hired local research assistants recommended by researchers at a Bogotá-based university and remunerated them equivalent to the salary they would have received as graduate research assistants at the university, while also covering necessary travel expenses. Irgil, on the other hand, established contacts with native citizens and Syrian gatekeepers, who are shop owners in the area where she conducted her research because she had the opportunity to visit the fieldwork site multiple times.

Depending on the research agenda, researchers may visit national archives, local government offices, etc. Before visiting, researchers should contact these facilities and make sure the materials that they need are accessible. For example, Lee visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Archives to find the United States’ strategic evaluations on South Korea's dictator in the 1980s. Before her visit, she contacted librarians in the archives, telling them her visit plans and her research purpose. Librarians made suggestions on which categories she should start to review based on her research goal, and thus she was able to make a list of categories of the materials she needed, saving her a lot of her time.

Accessibility of and access to certain facilities/libraries can differ depending on locations/countries and types of facilities. Facilities in authoritarian countries might not be easily accessible to foreign researchers. Within democratic countries, some facilities are more restrictive than others. Situations like the pandemic or national holidays can also restrict accessibility. Therefore, researchers are well advised to do preliminary research on whether a certain facility opens during the time they visit and is accessible to researchers regardless of their citizenship status. Moreover, researchers must contact the staff of facilities to know whether identity verification is needed and if so, what kind of documents (photo I.D. or passport) should be exhibited.

Adapting to the Reality of the Field

Researchers need to be flexible because you may meet people you did not make appointments with, come across opportunities you did not expect, or stumble upon new ideas about collecting data in the field. These happenings will enrich your field experience and will ultimately be beneficial for your research. Similarly, researchers should not be discouraged by interviews that do not go according to plan; they present an opportunity to pursue relevant people who can provide an alternative path to your work. Note that planning ahead does not preclude fortuitous encounters or epiphanies. Rather, it provides a structure for them to happen.

If your fieldwork entails travelling abroad, you will also be able to recruit more interviewees once you arrive at your research site. In fact, you may have greater success in-country; not everyone is willing to respond to a cold email from an unknown researcher in a foreign country. In Irgil's fieldwork, she contacted store owners that are known in the area and who know the community. This eased her process of introduction into the community and recruiting interviewees. For Zvobgo, she had fewer than a dozen interviews scheduled when she travelled to Guatemala to study civil society activism and transitional justice since the internal armed conflict. But she was able to recruit additional participants in-country. Interviewees with whom she built a rapport connected her to other NGOs, government offices, and the United Nations country office, sometimes even making the call and scheduling interviews for her. Through snowball sampling, she was able to triple the number of participants. Likewise, snowball sampling was central to Kreft's recruitment of interview partners. Several of her interviewees connected her to highly relevant individuals she would never have been able to identify and contact based on web searches alone.

While in the field, you may nonetheless encounter obstacles that necessitate adjustments to your original plans. Once Kreft had arrived in Colombia, for example, it transpired quickly that carrying out in-person interviews in more remote/rural areas was near impossible given her means, as these were not easily accessible by bus/coach, further complicated by a complex security situation. Instead, she adjusted her research design and shifted her focus to the big cities, where most of the major civil society organizations are based. She complemented the in-person interviews carried out there with a smaller number of phone interviews with civil society activists in rural areas, and she was also able to meet a few activists operating in rural or otherwise inaccessible areas as they were visiting the major cities. The resulting focus on urban settings changed the kinds of generalizations she was able to make based on her fieldwork data and produced a somewhat different study than initially anticipated.

This also has been the case for Irgil, despite her prior arrangements with the Syrian gatekeepers, which required adjustments as in the case of Kreft. Irgil acquired research clearance one year before, during the interviews with native citizens, conducting the interviews with Syrian refugees. She also had her questionnaire ready based on the previously collected data and the media search she had conducted for over a year before travelling to the field site. As she was able to visit the field site multiple times, two months before conducting interviews with Syrian refugees, she developed a schedule with the Syrian gatekeepers and informants. Yet, once she was in the field, influenced by Turkey's recent political events and the policy of increasing control over Syrian refugees, half of the previously agreed informants changed their minds or did not want to participate in interviews. As Irgil was following the policies and the news related to Syrian refugees in Turkey closely, this did not come as that big of a surprise but challenged the previously developed strategy to recruit interviewees. Thus, she changed the strategy of finding interviewees in the field site, such as asking people, almost one by one, whether they would like to participate in the interview. Eventually, she could not find willing Syrian women refugees as she had planned, which resulted in a male-dominant sample. As researchers encounter such situations, it is essential to remind oneself that not everything can go according to plan, that “different” does not equate to “worse,” but that it is important to consider what changes to fieldwork data collection and sampling imply for the study's overall findings and the contribution it makes to the literature.

We should note that conducting interviews is very taxing—especially when opportunities multiply, as in Zvobgo's case. Depending on the project, each interview can take an hour, if not two or more. Hence, you should make a reasonable schedule: we recommend no more than two interviews per day. You do not want to have to cut off an interview because you need to rush to another one, whether the interviews are in-person or remote. And you do not want to be too exhausted to have a robust engagement with your respondent who is generously lending you their time. Limiting the number of interviews per day is also important to ensure that you can write comprehensive and meaningful fieldnotes, which becomes even more essential where it is not possible to audio-record your interviews. Also, be sure to remember to eat, stay hydrated, and try to get enough sleep.

Finally, whether to provide gifts or payments to the subject also requires adapting to the reality of the field. You must think about payments beforehand when you apply for IRB approval (or whatever other ethical review processes may be in place) since these applications usually contain questions about payments. Obviously, the first step is to carefully evaluate whether the gifts and payments provided can harm the subject or are likely to unduly affect the responses they will give in response to your questions. If that is not the case, you have to make payment decisions based on your budget, field situation, and difficulties in recruitment. Usually, payment of respondents is more common in survey research, whereas it is less common in interviews and focus groups.

Nevertheless, payment practices vary depending on the field and the target group. In some cases, it may become a custom to provide small gifts or payments when interviewing a certain group. In other cases, interviewees might be offended if they are provided with money. Therefore, knowing past practices and field situations is important. For example, Lee provided small coffee gift cards to one group while she did not to the other based on previous practices of other researchers. That is, for a particular group, it has become a custom for interviewers to pay interviewees. Sometimes, you may want to reimburse your subject's interview costs such as travel expenses and provide beverages and snacks during the conduct of research, as Kreft did when conducting focus groups in Colombia. To express your gratitude to your respondents, you can prepare small gifts such as your university memorabilia (e.g., notebooks and pens). Since past practices about payments can affect your interactions and interviews with a target group, you want to seek advice from your colleagues and other researchers who had experiences interacting with the target group. If you cannot find researchers who have this knowledge, you can search for published works on the target population to find if the authors share their interview experiences. You may also consider contacting the authors for advice before your interviews.

Researching Strategically

Distinguishing between things that can only be done in person at a particular site and things that can be accomplished later at home is vital. Prioritize the former over the latter. Lee's fieldwork experience serves as a good example. She studied a conservative protest movement called the Taegeukgi Rally in South Korea. She planned to conduct interviews with the rally participants to examine their motivations for participating. But she only had one month in South Korea. So, she focused on things that could only be done in the field: she went to the rally sites, she observed how protests proceeded, which tactics and chants were used, and she met participants and had some casual conversations with them. Then, she used the contacts she made while attending the rallies to create a social network to solicit interviews from ordinary protesters, her target population. She was able to recruit twenty-five interviewees through good rapport with the people she met. The actual interviews proceeded via phone after she returned to the United States. In a nutshell, we advise you not to be obsessed with finishing interviews in the field. Sometimes, it is more beneficial to use your time in the field to build relationships and networks.

Working With Assistants and Translators

A final consideration on logistics is working with research assistants or translators; it affects how you can carry out interviews, focus groups, etc. To what extent constant back-and-forth translation is necessary or advisable depends on the researcher's skills in the interview language and considerations about time and efficiency. For example, Kreft soon realized that she was generally able to follow along quite well during her interviews in Colombia. In order to avoid precious time being lost to translation, she had her research assistant follow the interview guide Kreft had developed, and interjected follow-up questions in Spanish or English (then to be translated) as they arose.

Irgil's and Zvobgo's interviews went a little differently. Irgil's Syrian refugee interviewees in Turkey were native Arabic speakers, and Zvobgo's interviewees in Guatemala were native Spanish speakers. Both Irgil and Zvobgo worked with research assistants. In Irgil's case, her assistant was a Syrian man, who was outside of the area. Meanwhile, Zvobgo's assistant was an undergraduate from her home institution with a Spanish language background. Irgil and Zvobgo began preparing their assistants a couple of months before entering the field, over Skype for Irgil and in-person for Zvobgo. They offered their assistants readings and other resources to provide them with the necessary background to work well. Both Irgil and Zvobgo's research assistants joined them in the interviews and actually did most of the speaking, introducing the principal investigator, explaining the research, and then asking the questions. In Zvobgo's case, interviewee responses were relayed via a professional interpreter whom she had also hired. After every interview, Irgil and Zvobgo and their respective assistants discussed the answers of the interviewees, potential improvements in phrasing, and elaborated on their hand-written interview notes. As a backup, Zvobgo, with the consent of her respondents, had accompanying audio recordings.

Researchers may carry out fieldwork in a country that is considerably less safe than what they are used to, a setting affected by conflict violence or high crime rates, for instance. Feelings of insecurity can be compounded by linguistic barriers, cultural particularities, and being far away from friends and family. Insecurity is also often gendered, differentially affecting women and raising the specter of unwanted sexual advances, street harassment, or even sexual assault ( Gifford and Hall-Clifford 2008 ; Mügge 2013 ). In a recent survey of Political Science graduate students in the United States, about half of those who had done fieldwork internationally reported having encountered safety issues in the field, (54 percent female, 47 percent male), and only 21 percent agreed that their Ph.D. programs had prepared them to carry out their fieldwork safely ( Schwartz and Cronin-Furman 2020 , 8–9).

Preventative measures scholars may adopt in an unsafe context may involve, at their most fundamental, adjustments to everyday routines and habits, restricting one's movements temporally and spatially. Reliance on gatekeepers may also necessitate adopting new strategies, such as a less vehement and cold rejection of unwanted sexual advances than one ordinarily would exhibit, as Mügge (2013) illustratively discusses. At the same time, a competitive academic job market, imperatives to collect novel and useful data, and harmful discourses surrounding dangerous fieldwork also, problematically, shape incentives for junior researchers to relax their own standards of what constitutes acceptable risk ( Gallien 2021 ).

Others have carefully collected a range of safety precautions that field researchers in fragile or conflict-affected settings may take before and during fieldwork ( Hilhorst et al. 2016 ). Therefore, we are more concise in our discussion of recommendations, focusing on the specific situations of graduate students. Apart from ensuring that supervisors and university administrators have the researcher's contact information in the field (and possibly also that of a local contact person), researchers can register with their country's embassy or foreign office and any crisis monitoring and prevention systems it has in place. That way, they will be informed of any possible unfolding emergencies and the authorities have a record of them being in the country.

It may also be advisable to set up more individualized safety protocols with one or two trusted individuals, such as friends, supervisors, or colleagues at home or in the fieldwork setting itself. The latter option makes sense in particular if one has an official affiliation with a local institution for the duration of the fieldwork, which is often advisable. Still, we would also recommend establishing relationships with local researchers in the absence of a formal affiliation. To keep others informed of her whereabouts, Kreft, for instance, made arrangements with her supervisors to be in touch via email at regular intervals to report on progress and wellbeing. This kept her supervisors in the loop, while an interruption in communication would have alerted them early if something were wrong. In addition, she announced planned trips to other parts of the country and granted her supervisors and a colleague at her home institution emergency reading access to her digital calendar. To most of her interviews, she was moreover accompanied by her local research assistant/translator. If the nature of the research, ethical considerations, and the safety situation allow, it might also be possible to bring a local friend along to interviews as an “assistant,” purely for safety reasons. This option needs to be carefully considered already in the planning stage and should, particularly in settings of fragility or if carrying out research on politically exposed individuals, be noted in any ethical and institutional review processes where these are required. Adequate compensation for such an assistant should be ensured. It may also be advisable to put in place an emergency plan, that is, choose emergency contacts back home and “in the field,” know whom to contact if something happens, and know how to get to the nearest hospital or clinic.

We would be remiss if we did not mention that, when in an unfamiliar context, one's safety radar may be misguided, so it is essential to listen to people who know the context. For example, locals can give advice on which means of transport are safe and which are not, a question that is of the utmost importance when traveling to appointments. For example, Kreft was warned that in Colombia regular taxis are often unsafe, especially if waved down in the streets, and that to get to her interviews safely, she should rely on a ride-share service. In one instance, a Colombian friend suggested that when there was no alternative to a regular taxi, Kreft should book through the app and share the order details, including the taxi registration number or license plate, with a friend. Likewise, sharing one's cell phone location with a trusted friend while traveling or when one feels unsafe may be a viable option. Finally, it is prudent to heed the safety recommendations and travel advisories provided by state authorities and embassies to determine when and where it is safe to travel. Especially if researchers have a responsibility not only for themselves but also for research assistants and research participants, safety must be a top priority.

This does not mean that a researcher should be careless in a context they know either. Of course, conducting fieldwork in a context that is known to the researcher offers many advantages. However, one should be prepared to encounter unwanted events too. For instance, Irgil has conducted fieldwork in her country of origin in a city she knows very well. Therefore, access to the site, moving around the site, and blending in has not been a problem; she also has the advantage of speaking the native language. Yet, she took notes of the streets she walked in, as she often returned from the field site after dark and thought she might get confused after a tiring day. She also established a closer relationship with two or three store owners in different parts of the field site if she needed something urgent, like running out of battery. Above all, one should always be aware of one's surroundings and use common sense. If something feels unsafe, chances are it is.

Fieldwork may negatively affect the researcher's mental health and mental wellbeing regardless of where one's “field” is, whether related to concerns about crime and insecurity, linguistic barriers, social isolation, or the practicalities of identifying, contacting and interviewing research participants. Coping with these different sources of stress can be both mentally and physically exhausting. Then there are the things you may hear, see and learn during the research itself, such as gruesome accounts of violence and suffering conveyed in interviews or archival documents one peruses. Kreft and Zvobgo have spoken with women victims of conflict-related sexual violence, who sometimes displayed strong emotions of pain and anger during the interviews. Likewise, Irgil and Willis have spoken with members of other vulnerable populations such as refugees and former sex workers ( Willis 2020 ).

Prior accounts ( Wood 2006 ; Loyle and Simoni 2017 ; Skjelsbæk 2018 ; Hummel and El Kurd 2020 ; Williamson et al. 2020 ; Schulz and Kreft 2021 ) show that it is natural for sensitive research and fieldwork challenges to affect or even (vicariously) traumatize the researcher. By removing researchers from their regular routines and support networks, fieldwork may also exacerbate existing mental health conditions ( Hummel and El Kurd 2020 ). Nonetheless, mental wellbeing is rarely incorporated into fieldwork courses and guidelines, where these exist at all. But even if you know to anticipate some sort of reaction, you rarely know what that reaction will be until you experience it. When researching sensitive or difficult topics, for example, reactions can include sadness, frustration, anger, fear, helplessness, and flashbacks to personal experiences of violence ( Williamson et al. 2020 ). For example, Kreft responded with episodic feelings of depression and both mental and physical exhaustion. But curiously, these reactions emerged most strongly after she had returned from fieldwork and in particular as she spent extended periods analyzing her interview data, reliving some of the more emotional scenes during the interviews and being confronted with accounts of (sexual) violence against women in a concentrated fashion. This is a crucial reminder that fieldwork does not end when one returns home; the after-effects may linger. Likewise, Zvobgo was physically and mentally drained upon her return from the field. Both Kreft and Zvobgo were unable to concentrate for long periods of time and experienced lower-than-normal levels of productivity for weeks afterward, patterns that formal and informal conversations with other scholars confirm to be common ( Schulz and Kreft 2021 ). Furthermore, the boundaries between “field” and “home” are blurred when conducting remote fieldwork ( Howlett 2021 , 11).

Nor are these adverse reactions limited to cases where the researcher has carried out the interviews themselves. Accounts of violence, pain, and suffering transported in reports, secondary literature, or other sources can evoke similar emotional stress, as Kreft experienced when engaging in a concentrated fashion with additional accounts of conflict-related sexual violence in Colombia and with the feminist literature on sexual and gender-based violence in the comfort of her Swedish office. This could also be applicable to Irgil's fieldwork as she interviewed refugees whose traumas have come out during the interviews or recall specific events triggered by the questions. Likewise, Lee has reviewed primary and secondary materials on North Korean defectors in the national archives and these materials contain violent, intense, emotional narratives.

Fortunately, there are several strategies to cope with and manage such adverse consequences. In a candid and insightful piece, other researchers have discussed the usefulness of distractions, sharing with colleagues, counseling, exercise, and, probably less advisable in the long term, comfort eating and drinking ( Williamson et al. 2020 ; see also Loyle and Simoni 2017 ; Hummel and El Kurd 2020 ). Our experiences largely tally with their observations. In this section, we explore some of these in more detail.

First, in the face of adverse consequences on your mental wellbeing, whether in the field or after your return, it is essential to be patient and generous with yourself. Negative effects on the researcher's mental wellbeing can hit in unexpected ways and at unexpected times. Even if you think that certain reactions are disproportionate or unwarranted at that specific moment, they may simply have been building up over a long time. They are legitimate. Second, the importance of taking breaks and finding distractions, whether that is exercise, socializing with friends, reading a good book, or watching a new series, cannot be overstated. It is easy to fall into a mode of thinking that you constantly have to be productive while you are “in the field,” to maximize your time. But as with all other areas in life, balance is key and rest is necessary. Taking your mind off your research and the research questions you puzzle over is also a good way to more fully soak up and appreciate the context in which you find yourself, in the case of in-person fieldwork, and about which you ultimately write.

Third, we cannot stress enough the importance of investing in social relations. Before going on fieldwork, researchers may want to consult others who have done it before them. Try to find (junior) scholars who have done fieldwork on similar kinds of topics or in the same country or countries you are planning to visit. Utilizing colleagues’ contacts and forging connections using social media are valuable strategies to expand your networks (in fact, this very paper is the result of a social media conversation and several of the authors have never met in person). Having been in the same situation before, most field researchers are, in our experience, generous with their time and advice. Before embarking on her first trip to Colombia, Kreft contacted other researchers in her immediate and extended network and received useful advice on questions such as how to move around Bogotá, whom to speak to, and how to find a research assistant. After completing her fieldwork, she has passed on her experiences to others who contacted her before their first fieldwork trip. Informal networks are, in the absence of more formalized fieldwork preparation, your best friend.

In the field, seeking the company of locals and of other researchers who are also doing fieldwork alleviates anxiety and makes fieldwork more enjoyable. Exchanging experiences, advice and potential interviewee contacts with peers can be extremely beneficial and make the many challenges inherent in fieldwork (on difficult topics) seem more manageable. While researchers conducting remote fieldwork may be physically isolated from other researchers, even connecting with others doing remote fieldwork may be comforting. And even when there are no precise solutions to be found, it is heartening or even cathartic to meet others who are in the same boat and with whom you can talk through your experiences. When Kreft shared some of her fieldwork-related struggles with another researcher she had just met in Bogotá and realized that they were encountering very similar challenges, it was like a weight was lifted off her shoulders. Similarly, peer support can help with readjustment after the fieldwork trip, even if it serves only to reassure you that a post-fieldwork dip in productivity and mental wellbeing is entirely natural. Bear in mind that certain challenges are part of the fieldwork experience and that they do not result from inadequacy on the part of the researcher.

Finally, we would like to stress a point made by Inger Skjelsbæk (2018 , 509) and which has not received sufficient attention: as a discipline, we need to take the question of researcher mental wellbeing more seriously—not only in graduate education, fieldwork preparation, and at conferences, but also in reflecting on how it affects the research process itself: “When strong emotions arise, through reading about, coding, or talking to people who have been impacted by [conflict-related sexual violence] (as victims or perpetrators), it may create a feeling of being unprofessional, nonscientific, and too subjective.”

We contend that this is a challenge not only for research on sensitive issues but also for fieldwork more generally. To what extent is it possible, and desirable, to uphold the image of the objective researcher during fieldwork, when we are at our foundation human beings? And going even further, how do the (anticipated) effects of our research on our wellbeing, and the safety precautions we take ( Gifford and Hall-Clifford 2008 ), affect the kinds of questions we ask, the kinds of places we visit and with whom we speak? How do they affect the methods we use and how we interpret our findings? An honest discussion of affective responses to our research in methods sections seems utopian, as emotionality in the research process continues to be silenced and relegated to the personal, often in gendered ways, which in turn is considered unconnected to the objective and scientific research process ( Jamar and Chappuis 2016 ). But as Gifford and Hall-Clifford (2008 , 26) aptly put it: “Graduate education should acknowledge the reality that fieldwork is scholarly but also intimately personal,” and we contend that the two shape each other. Therefore, we encourage political science as a discipline to reflect on researcher wellbeing and affective responses to fieldwork more carefully, and we see the need for methods courses that embrace a more holistic notion of the subjectivity of the researcher.

Interacting with people in the field is one of the most challenging yet rewarding parts of the work that we do, especially in comparison to impersonal, often tedious wrangling and analysis of quantitative data. Field researchers often make personal connections with their interviewees. Consequently, maintaining boundaries can be a bit tricky. Here, we recommend being honest with everyone with whom you interact without overstating the abilities of a researcher. This appears as a challenge in the field, particularly when you empathize with people and when they share profound parts of their lives with you for your research in addition to being “human subjects” ( Fujii 2012 ). For instance, when Irgil interviewed native citizens about the changes in their neighborhood following the arrival of Syrian refugees, many interviewees questioned what she would offer them in return for their participation. Irgil responded that her primary contribution would be her published work. She also noted, however, that academic papers can take a year, sometimes longer, to go through the peer-reviewed process and, once published, many studies have a limited audience. The Syrian refugees posed similar questions. Irgil responded not only with honesty but also, given this population's vulnerable status, she provided them contact information for NGOs with which they could connect if they needed help or answers to specific questions.

For her part, Zvobgo was very upfront with her interviewees about her role as a researcher: she recognized that she is not someone who is on the frontlines of the fight for human rights and transitional justice like they are. All she could/can do is use her platform to amplify their stories, bringing attention to their vital work through her future peer-reviewed publications. She also committed to sending them copies of the work, as electronic journal articles are often inaccessible due to paywalls and university press books are very expensive, especially for nonprofits. Interviewees were very receptive; some were even moved by the degree of self-awareness and the commitment to do right by them. In some cases, this prompted them to share even more, because they knew that the researcher was really there to listen and learn. This is something that junior scholars, and all scholars really, should always remember. We enter the field to be taught. Likewise, Kreft circulated among her interviewees Spanish-language versions of an academic article and a policy brief based on the fieldwork she had carried out in Colombia.

As researchers from the Global North, we recognize a possible power differential between us and our research subjects, and certainly an imbalance in power between the countries where we have been trained and some of the countries where we have done and continue to do field research, particularly in politically dynamic contexts ( Knott 2019 ). This is why we are so concerned with being open and transparent with everyone with whom we come into contact in the field and why we are committed to giving back to those who so generously lend us their time and knowledge. Knott (2019 , 148) summarizes this as “Reflexive openness is a form of transparency that is methodologically and ethically superior to providing access to data in its raw form, at least for qualitative data.”

We also recognize that academics, including in the social sciences and especially those hailing from countries in the Global North, have a long and troubled history of exploiting their power over others for the sake of their research—including failing to be upfront about their research goals, misrepresenting the on-the-ground realities of their field research sites (including remote fieldwork), and publishing essentializing, paternalistic, and damaging views and analyses of the people there. No one should build their career on the backs of others, least of all in a field concerned with the possession and exercise of power. Thus, it is highly crucial to acknowledge the power hierarchies between the researcher and the interviewees, and to reflect on them both in the field and beyond the field upon return.

A major challenge to conducting fieldwork is when researchers’ carefully planned designs do not go as planned due to unforeseen events outside of our control, such as pandemics, natural disasters, deteriorating security situations in the field, or even the researcher falling ill. As the Covid-19 pandemic has made painfully clear, researchers may face situations where in-person research is simply not possible. In some cases, researchers may be barred entry to their fieldwork site; in others, the ethical implications of entering the field greatly outweigh the importance of fieldwork. Such barriers to conducting in-person research require us to reconsider conventional notions of what constitutes fieldwork. Researchers may need to shift their data collection methods, for example, conducting interviews remotely instead of in person. Even while researchers are in the field, they may still need to carry out part of their interviews or surveys virtually or by phone. For example, Kreft (2020) carried out a small number of interviews remotely while she was based in Bogotá, because some of the women's civil society activists with whom she intended to speak were based in parts of the country that were difficult and/or dangerous to access.

Remote field research, which we define as the collection of data over the internet or over the phone where in-person fieldwork is not possible due to security, health or other risks, comes with its own sets of challenges. For one, there may be certain populations that researchers cannot reach remotely due to a lack of internet connectivity or technology such as cellphones and computers. In such instances, there will be a sampling bias toward individuals and groups that do have these resources, a point worth noting when scholars interpret their research findings. In the case of virtual research, the risk of online surveillance, hacking, or wiretapping may also produce reluctance on the part of interviewees to discuss sensitive issues that may compromise their safety. Researchers need to carefully consider how the use of digital technology may increase the risk to research participants and what changes to the research design and any interview guides this necessitates. In general, it is imperative that researchers reflect on how they can ethically use digital technology in their fieldwork ( Van Baalen 2018 ). Remote interviews may also be challenging to arrange for researchers who have not made connections in person with people in their community of interest.

Some of the serendipitous happenings we discussed earlier may also be less likely and snowball sampling more difficult. For example, in phone or virtual interviews, it is harder to build good rapport and trust with interviewees as compared to face-to-face interviews. Accordingly, researchers should be more careful in communicating with interviewees and creating a comfortable interview environment. Especially when dealing with sensitive topics, researchers may have to make several phone calls and sometimes have to open themselves to establishing trust with interviewees. Also, researchers must be careful in protecting interviewees in phone or virtual interviews when they deal with sensitive topics of countries interviewees reside in.

The inability to physically visit one's community of interest may also encourage scholars to critically reflect on how much time in the field is essential to completing their research and to consider creative, alternative means for accessing information to complete their projects. While data collection techniques such as face-to-face interviews and archival work in the field may be ideal in normal times, there exist other data sources that can provide comparably useful information. For example, in her research on the role of framing in the United States base politics, Willis found that social media accounts and websites yielded information useful to her project. Many archives across the world have also been digitized. Researchers may also consider crowdsourcing data from the field among their networks, as fellow academics tend to collect much more data in the field than they ever use in their published works. They may also elect to hire someone, perhaps a graduate student, in a city or a country where they cannot travel and have the individual access, scan, and send archival materials. This final suggestion may prove generally useful to researchers with limited time and financial resources.

Remote qualitative data collection techniques, while they will likely never be “the gold-standard,” also pose several advantages. These techniques may help researchers avoid some of the issues mentioned previously. Remote interviews, for example, are less time-consuming in terms of travel to the interview site ( Archibald et al. 2019 ). The implication is that researchers may have less fatigue from conducting interviews and/or may be able to conduct more interviews. For example, while Willis had little energy to do anything else after an in-person interview (or two) in a given day, she had much more energy after completing remote interviews. Second, remote fieldwork also helps researchers avoid potentially dangerous situations in the field mentioned previously. Lastly, remote fieldwork generally presents fewer financial barriers than in-person research ( Archibald et al. 2019 ). In that sense, considering remote qualitative data collection, a type of “fieldwork” may make fieldwork more accessible to a greater number of scholars.

Many of the substantive, methodological and practical challenges that arise during fieldwork can be anticipated. Proper preparation can help you hit the ground running once you enter your fieldwork destination, whether in-person or virtually. Nonetheless, there is no such thing as being perfectly prepared for the field. Some things will simply be beyond your control, and especially as a newcomer to field research, and you should be prepared for things to not go as planned. New questions will arise, interview participants may cancel appointments, and you might not get the answers you expected. Be ready to make adjustments to research plans, interview guides, or questionnaires. And, be mindful of your affective reactions to the overall fieldwork situation and be gentle with yourself.

We recommend approaching fieldwork as a learning experience as much as, or perhaps even more than, a data collection effort. This also applies to your research topic. While it is prudent always to exercise a healthy amount of skepticism about what people tell you and why, the participants in your research will likely have unique perspectives and knowledge that will challenge yours. Be an attentive listener and remember that they are experts of their own experiences.

We encourage more institutions to offer courses that cover field research preparation and planning, practical advice on safety and wellbeing, and discussion of ethics. Specifically, we align with Schwartz and Cronin-Furman's (2020 , 3) contention “that treating fieldwork preparation as the methodology will improve individual scholars’ experiences and research.” In this article, we outline a set of issue areas in which we think formal preparation is necessary, but we note that our discussion is by no means exhaustive. Formal fieldwork preparation should also extend beyond what we have covered in this article, such as issues of data security and preparing for nonqualitative fieldwork methods. We also note that field research is one area that has yet to be comprehensively addressed in conversations on diversity and equity in the political science discipline and the broader academic profession. In a recent article, Brielle Harbin (2021) begins to fill this gap by sharing her experiences conducting in-person election surveys as a Black woman in a conservative and predominantly white region of the United States and the challenges that she encountered. Beyond race and gender, citizenship, immigration status, one's Ph.D. institution and distance to the field also affect who is able to do what type of field research, where, and for how long. Future research should explore these and related questions in greater detail because limits on who is able to conduct field research constrict the sociological imagination of our field.

While Emmons and Moravcsik (2020) focus on leading Political Science Ph.D. programs in the United States, these trends likely obtain, both in lower ranked institutions in the broader United States as well as in graduate education throughout North America and Europe.

As all the authors have carried out qualitative fieldwork, this is the primary focus of this guide. This does not, however, mean that we exclude quantitative or experimental data collection from our definition of fieldwork.

There is great variation in graduate students’ financial situations, even in the Global North. For example, while higher education is tax-funded in most countries in Europe and Ph.D. students in countries such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland receive a comparatively generous full-time salary, healthcare and contributions to pension schemes, Ph.D. programs in other contexts like the United States and the United Kingdom have (high) enrollment fees and rely on scholarships, stipends, or departmental duties like teaching to (partially) offset these, while again others, such as Germany, are commonly financed by part-time (50 percent) employment at the university with tasks substantively unrelated to the dissertation. These different preconditions leave many Ph.D. students struggling financially and even incurring debt, while others are in a more comfortable financial position. Likewise, Ph.D. programs around the globe differ in structure, such as required coursework, duration and supervision relationships. Naturally, all of these factors have a bearing on the extent to which fieldwork is feasible. We acknowledge unequal preconditions across institutions and contexts, and trust that those Ph.D. students interested in pursuing fieldwork are best able to assess the structural and institutional context in which they operate and what this implies for how, when, and how long to carry out fieldwork.

In our experience, this is not only the general cycle for graduate students in North America, but also in Europe and likely elsewhere.

For helpful advice and feedback on earlier drafts, we wish to thank the editors and reviewers at International Studies Review , and Cassandra Emmons. We are also grateful to our interlocuters in Argentina, Canada, Colombia, Germany, Guatemala, Japan, Kenya, Norway, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States, without whom this reflection on fieldwork would not have been possible. All authors contributed equally to this manuscript.

This material is based upon work supported by the Forskraftstiftelsen Theodor Adelswärds Minne, Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation(KAW 2013.0178), National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program(DGE-1418060), Southeast Asia Research Group (Pre-Dissertation Fellowship), University at Albany (Initiatives for Women and the Benevolent Association), University of Missouri (John D. Bies International Travel Award Program and Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy), University of Southern California (Provost Fellowship in the Social Sciences), Vetenskapsrådet(Diarienummer 2019-06298), Wilhelm och Martina Lundgrens Vetenskapsfond(2016-1102; 2018-2272), and William & Mary (Global Research Institute Pre-doctoral Fellowship).

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Home Market Research

What is Field Research: Definition, Methods, Examples and Advantages

What is Field Research?

Field research is defined as a qualitative method of data collection that aims to observe, interact and understand people while they are in a natural environment. For example, nature conservationists observe behavior of animals in their natural surroundings and the way they react to certain scenarios. In the same way, social scientists conducting field research may conduct interviews or observe people from a distance to understand how they behave in a social environment and how they react to situations around them.

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Field research encompasses a diverse range of social research methods including direct observation, limited participation, analysis of documents and other information, informal interviews, surveys etc. Although field research is generally characterized as qualitative research, it often involves multiple aspects of quantitative research in it.

Field research typically begins in a specific setting although the end objective of the study is to observe and analyze the specific behavior of a subject in that setting. The cause and effect of a certain behavior, though, is tough to analyze due to presence of multiple variables in a natural environment. Most of the data collection is based not entirely on cause and effect but mostly on correlation. While field research looks for correlation, the small sample size makes it difficult to establish a causal relationship between two or more variables.

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Methods of Field Research

Field research is typically conducted in 5 distinctive methods. They are:

• Direct Observation

In this method, the data is collected via an observational method or subjects in a natural environment. In this method, the behavior or outcome of situation is not interfered in any way by the researcher. The advantage of direct observation is that it offers contextual data on people management , situations, interactions and the surroundings. This method of field research is widely used in a public setting or environment but not in a private environment as it raises an ethical dilemma.

• Participant Observation

In this method of field research, the researcher is deeply involved in the research process, not just purely as an observer, but also as a participant. This method too is conducted in a natural environment but the only difference is the researcher gets involved in the discussions and can mould the direction of the discussions. In this method, researchers live in a comfortable environment with the participants of the research design , to make them comfortable and open up to in-depth discussions.

• Ethnography

Ethnography is an expanded observation of social research and social perspective and the cultural values of an  entire social setting. In ethnography, entire communities are observed objectively. For example,  if a researcher would like to understand how an Amazon tribe lives their life and operates, he/she may chose to observe them or live amongst them and silently observe their day-to-day behavior.

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• Qualitative Interviews

Qualitative interviews are close-ended questions that are asked directly to the research subjects. The qualitative interviews could be either informal and conversational, semi-structured, standardized and open-ended or a mix of all the above three. This provides a wealth of data to the researcher that they can sort through. This also helps collect relational data. This method of field research can use a mix of one-on-one interviews, focus groups and text analysis .

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A case study research is an in-depth analysis of a person, situation or event. This method may look difficult to operate, however, it is one of the simplest ways of conducting research as it involves a deep dive and thorough understanding the data collection methods and inferring the data.

Steps in Conducting Field Research

Due to the nature of field research, the magnitude of timelines and costs involved, field research can be very tough to plan, implement and measure. Some basic steps in the management of field research are:

• Build the Right Team: To be able to conduct field research, having the right team is important. The role of the researcher and any ancillary team members is very important and defining the tasks they have to carry out with defined relevant milestones is important. It is important that the upper management too is vested in the field research for its success.
• Recruiting People for the Study: The success of the field research depends on the people that the study is being conducted on. Using sampling methods , it is important to derive the people that will be a part of the study.
• Data Collection Methodology: As spoken in length about above, data collection methods for field research are varied. They could be a mix of surveys, interviews, case studies and observation. All these methods have to be chalked out and the milestones for each method too have to be chalked out at the outset. For example, in the case of a survey, the survey design is important that it is created and tested even before the research begins.
• Site Visit: A site visit is important to the success of the field research and it is always conducted outside of traditional locations and in the actual natural environment of the respondent/s. Hence, planning a site visit alongwith the methods of data collection is important.
• Data Analysis: Analysis of the data that is collected is important to validate the premise of the field research and  decide the outcome of the field research.
• Communicating Results: Once the data is analyzed, it is important to communicate the results to the stakeholders of the research so that it could be actioned upon.

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Field Research Notes

Keeping an ethnographic record is very important in conducting field research. Field notes make up one of the most important aspects of the ethnographic record. The process of field notes begins as the researcher is involved in the observational research process that is to be written down later.

Types of Field Research Notes

The four different kinds of field notes are:

• Job Notes: This method of taking notes is while the researcher is in the study. This could be in close proximity and in open sight with the subject in study. The notes here are short, concise and in condensed form that can be built on by the researcher later. Most researchers do not prefer this method though due to the fear of feeling that the respondent may not take them seriously.
• Field Notes Proper: These notes are to be expanded on immediately after the completion of events. The notes have to be detailed and the words have to be as close to possible as the subject being studied.
• Methodological Notes: These notes contain methods on the research methods used by the researcher, any new proposed research methods and the way to monitor their progress. Methodological notes can be kept with field notes or filed separately but they find their way to the end report of a study.
• Journals and Diaries: This method of field notes is an insight into the life of the researcher. This tracks all aspects of the researchers life and helps eliminate the Halo effect or any research bias that may have cropped up during the field research.

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Reasons to Conduct Field Research

Field research has been commonly used in the 20th century in the social sciences. But in general, it takes a lot of time to conduct and complete, is expensive and in a lot of cases invasive. So why then is this commonly used and is preferred by researchers to validate data? We look at 4 major reasons:

• Overcoming lack of data: Field research resolves the major issue of gaps in data. Very often, there is limited to no data about a topic in study, especially in a specific environment analysis . The research problem might be known or suspected but there is no way to validate this without primary research and data. Conducting field research helps not only plug-in gaps in data but collect supporting material and hence is a preferred research method of researchers.
• Understanding context of the study: In many cases, the data collected is adequate but field research is still conducted. This helps gain insight into the existing data. For example, if the data states that horses from a stable farm generally win races because the horses are pedigreed and the stable owner hires the best jockeys. But conducting field research can throw light into other factors that influence the success like quality of fodder and care provided and conducive weather conditions.
• Increasing the quality of data: Since this research method uses more than one tool to collect data, the data is of higher quality. Inferences can be made from the data collected and can be statistically analyzed via the triangulation of data.
• Collecting ancillary data: Field research puts the researchers in a position of localized thinking which opens them new lines of thinking. This can help collect data that the study didn’t account to collect.

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Examples of Field Research

Some examples of field research are:

• Decipher social metrics in a slum Purely by using observational methods and in-depth interviews, researchers can be part of a community to understand the social metrics and social hierarchy of a slum. This study can also understand the financial independence and day-to-day operational nuances of a slum. The analysis of this data can provide an insight into how different a slum is from structured societies.
• U nderstand the impact of sports on a child’s development This method of field research takes multiple years to conduct and the sample size can be very large. The data analysis of this research provides insights into how the kids of different geographical locations and backgrounds respond to sports and the impact of sports on their all round development.
• Study animal migration patterns Field research is used extensively to study flora and fauna. A major use case is scientists monitoring and studying animal migration patterns with the change of seasons. Field research helps collect data across years and that helps draw conclusions about how to safely expedite the safe passage of animals.

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Advantages of Field Research

The advantages of field research are:

• It is conducted in a real-world and natural environment where there is no tampering of variables and the environment is not doctored.
• Due to the study being conducted in a comfortable environment, data can be collected even about ancillary topics.
• The researcher gains a deep understanding into the research subjects due to the proximity to them and hence the research is extensive, thorough and accurate.

Disadvantages of Field Research

The disadvantages of field research are:

• The studies are expensive and time-consuming and can take years to complete.
• It is very difficult for the researcher to distance themselves from a bias in the research study.
• The notes have to be exactly what the researcher says but the nomenclature is very tough to follow.
• It is an interpretive method and this is subjective and entirely dependent on the ability of the researcher.
• In this method, it is impossible to control external variables and this constantly alters the nature of the research.

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Getting to the Source: The Importance of Field Research

An academic and intellectual decline is inevitable without a post-pandemic revival of fieldwork.

By: Alastair Reed, Ph.D. ; Boglarka Bozsogi

Publication Type: Analysis

Travel restrictions and social distancing practices put in place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have largely ground field research to a halt. Fieldwork plays an essential but often underappreciated role in both understanding violent extremism and developing policy responses to it. It is vital, therefore, that funders and policymakers support the return of such important work in a post-pandemic world.

Fieldwork brings important local perspectives to the fore, helping to contextualize conflicts within their wider ecosystems and societal and cultural realities. This forces researchers to challenge their preconceptions and theoretical assumptions as they come face to face with the realities on the ground. And, perhaps most importantly, fieldwork brings to life the human dimension — the human suffering and resilience of the communities affected by violence and the motivations and drivers of the violent actors.

Without understanding the view from the ground, we will continue to struggle to understand violent extremism and develop effective policy responses. 

The Human Side

As many field researchers will admit, there is something about the smell and feel of a place that being on the ground provides and that reading reports and analyzing data cannot capture. On the ground, a researcher has the opportunity to diversify their primary sources and data. They can also better appreciate and absorb the context of the conflict. Without understanding the human side, the unique cultural and societal setting and the physical geography and climate, which together forge the contours within which the violence evolves, we can only have a partial understanding of the conflict ecosystem.

“The value of engagement with human beings cannot be underestimated,” Haroro Ingram, a senior research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University and member of the RESOLVE Research Advisory Council, told a recent RESOLVE Forum session.

Absorbing the context can help the researcher understand and interpret the collected data, but also to reinterpret what they learned from desk-based studies. The subjective experience of sharing is humbling; it offers an intellectual appreciation not only of the complexity on the ground but also of the breadth and depth of the literature and its gaps.

Researchers are only human and bring along preconceived perceptions, biases and assumptions — implicit or explicit — internalized from academic literature and media reports. Seeing the realities on the ground forces them to confront these preconceived assumptions and challenge, reinterpret or discard them. Theoretical explanations and conceptual analysis can only be tested when applied against the world they purport to explain. Field research gives us a chance to improve and develop our understanding, and a chance to glimpse the unknown unknowns, the missing factors that we cannot see or conceive from our academic ivory towers.

It is easy to overlook the human side — the victims of violence and conflict-affected communities that bear the brunt of the human tragedy of extremism — when researching a conflict from a distance. Observing and talking to the most affected communities reminds us of the horrors of war and the depths of depravity humanity can sink to. However, it also brings to light the human side of violent actors on all sides, an insight into the motivations and drivers that led them down the path to violence. Conflicts are ultimately about people; attempts to understand conflicts need to start with understanding the people that drive them. To do that, field researchers need to adopt a methodical approach, informed by the literature, and ensure their research and findings are triangulated, ethical and trustworthy.

“Mindanao, in the last 50 years, has experienced cycles of failed peace processes that international actors tried to support with a top-down understanding, often from a distance, in the absence of genuine bottom-up, grassroot perspectives,” said Ingram, who focuses his field research on the Middle East and Southeast Asia. “Since the most important actors in the grassroots population do not have electricity, let alone internet, the only effective outreach is getting to the source to build trust, engage with communities respectfully and learn of cultural subtleties through conversations. Collaborative effort, trust and the contribution to research can create actionable, nuanced and effective recommendations for policy and practice,” he added.

Contextual Understanding

Field research strengthens academic rigor, theories and methodologies, complements desk research and brings a different vantage point to understanding conflict. One constant risk in academic research is the tendency to be reductionist, and to focus on an isolated issue and miss the dynamic connections between it and its wider context. It can be appealing to zoom in on a particular violent extremist group and examine a singular aspect, such as ideology and group dynamics, rather than to see it as part of a complex ecosystem and dynamic processes. Conflict contexts often comprise multiple, interlinked armed actors, all influenced by and influencing each other. These contexts are further complicated by cross-cutting dynamics of ethnic, customary, kinship or religious dimensions.

Field research contextualizes the conflict and the issues that matter, helps understand drivers and motivations behind conflict actors and breaks free of embedded preconceptions. It can bring to life the unseen complexities: policemen fighting rebelling siblings, women fleeing insurgent cousins, parents losing children to armed groups, government officials persecuting family members as non-state actors. “People often said: ‘My brother joined that armed group, my cousin is in the police force,’” said Ingram, recalling conversations with locals in conflict areas that may seem, on the surface, to be absurd but that actually reflect a sober, clinical rational choice decision-making. Conflict ecosystems are invariably messy, counterintuitive and seemingly incomprehensible, yet remain the reality we seek to understand.

Sukanya Podder, defense studies senior lecturer at King’s College London and member of the RESOLVE Research Advisory Council, who also participated in the RESOLVE Forum session, conducted research in Mindanao, the Philippines, and Liberia where she focused on children and young people recruited into armed groups. Observing youth relationships with families and commanders in their communities, she was able to break free of preconceptions from media imagery and simplistic assumptions that children join community-based armed groups because they are drugged. Her fieldwork unearthed much more diverse motivations and choices: many children chose to join or decided to refrain of their own will.

Ethics and Safety

With any type of research, ethics and safety must be paramount. Fieldwork poses distinct challenges for each venue, context and participant. “Do no harm” should be the central principle of fieldwork planning to ensure the safety and integrity of researchers, respondents and their communities. Research fatigue is a growing issue that has negative implications on the quality of data. If respondents are wary about the benefits of research and are hesitant to participate, the authenticity of results is harder to determine. Researchers must be careful not to instrumentalize fieldwork and budget enough time and resources for in-depth quality research to produce authentic, reliable and valid data; this data should be periodically updated.

Getting approval from institutional review boards for fieldwork can often be challenging, and rightly so, but this rigor helps researchers address potential challenges and ensure the integrity of their research. While standards procedures, bureaucratic processes, reviews, clearances and preparations may seem taxing, they are indispensable for rich contributions of the highest integrity.  

Strengthening Research and Policy

The effectiveness and ultimate success — however we choose to measure it — of policy approaches to countering violent extremism depend on a thorough understanding of the phenomenon they try to address. Sound research should be the rock on which good policy is built. Podder’s research in West Africa has informed disarmament, demobilization and reintegration programs with a nuanced understanding of the implications of different types of armed groups. Returnees from community-based armed groups or community defense groups found reintegration less problematic, as reconciliation could be locally administered through local, tribal judicial processes. Such findings from field research can avoid wasting money on programs that cannot yield the desired outcome.

Our understanding of violent extremism has benefitted from an interdisciplinary research field where each discipline and method, qualitative and quantitative, brings a new lens to gathering and analyzing data. Collectively, this cross-pollination of research methods has allowed us to see further than one approach alone ever could. Within a complementary and overlapping web of methods, fieldwork has an important but sometimes overlooked role to play. Without a post-pandemic revival of fieldwork, an academic and intellectual decline is inevitable.

Boglarka Bozsogi is executive coordination and network manager at the RESOLVE Network housed at USIP. 

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A guide to field studies

Last updated

18 April 2023

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Cathy Heath

Field studies allow researchers to observe and collect data in real-world settings. Unlike laboratory-based or traditional research methods, field studies enable researchers to investigate complex phenomena within their environment, providing a deeper understanding of the research context.

Researchers can use field studies to investigate a wide range of subjects, from the behavior of animals to the practices of businesses or the experiences of individuals in a particular setting.

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• What is a field study?

A field study is a research method that involves conducting observations and collecting data in a natural setting. This method includes observing, interviewing, and interacting with participants in their environment, such as a workplace, community, or natural habitat.

Field studies can take many forms, from ethnographic studies involving extended periods of observation and using an anthropological lens to shorter-term studies focusing on specific behaviors or events. Regardless of its form, a successful field study requires careful planning, preparation, and execution to ensure the data collected is valid and reliable.

• How to plan a field study

Planning a field study is a critical first step in ensuring successful research. Here are some steps to follow when preparing your field study:

1. Define your research question

When developing a good research question , you should make it clear, concise, and specific. It should also be open-ended, allowing for various possible answers rather than a simple yes or no response. Your research question should also be relevant to the broader field of study and contribute new knowledge to the existing literature.

Once you have a defined research question, identify the key variables you need to study and the data you need to collect. It might involve developing a hypothesis or research framework outlining the relationships between different variables and how you’ll measure them in your study.

2. Identify your research site

A research site is a location where you’ll conduct your study and collect data. Here are the types of research sites to consider when planning a field study:

Natural habitats: For environmental or ecological research, you may need to conduct your study in a natural habitat, such as a forest, wetland, or coral reef.

Communities : If your research relates to social or cultural factors, you may need to study a particular community, such as a neighborhood, village, or city.

Organizations : For questions relating to organizational behavior or management, your location will be in a business environment, like a nonprofit or government agency.

Events : If your research question relates to a particular event, you may need to conduct your study at that event, such as, at a protest, festival, or natural disaster.

Ensure your research site represents the population you're studying. For example, if you're exploring cultural beliefs, ensure the community represents the larger population and you have access to a diverse group of participants.

3. Determine your data collection methods

Choosing a suitable method will depend on the research question, the type of data needed, and the characteristics of the participants. Here are some commonly used data collection methods in field studies:

Interviews : You can collect data on people's experiences, perspectives, and attitudes. In some instances, you can use phone or online interviews.

Observations : This method involves watching and recording behaviors and interactions in a specific setting. 

Surveys : By using a survey , you can easily standardize and tailor the questions to provide answers for your research. Respondents can complete the survey in person, by mail, or online.

Document analysis : Organizational reports, letters, diaries, public records, policies, or social media posts can be analyzed to gain context. 

When selecting data collection methods, consider factors such as the availability of participants, the ethical considerations involved, and the resources needed to carry out each method. For example, conducting interviews may require more time and resources than administering a survey.

4. Obtain necessary permissions

Depending on the research location and the nature of the study, you may require permission from local authorities, organizations, or individuals before conducting your research. 

This process is vital when working with human or animal subjects and conducting research in sensitive or protected environments.

Here are some steps you can take to obtain the necessary permissions:

Identify the relevant authorities , including local governments, regulatory bodies, research institutions, or private organizations, to obtain permission for your research.

Reach out to the relevant authorities to explain the nature of your study. Be ready to hand out detailed information about your research. 

If you're conducting research with human participants, you must have their consent . You'll also need to ensure the participants have the right to withdraw from the study at any time.

Obtain necessary permits from regulatory bodies or local authorities. For example, if you're conducting research in a protected area, you may need a research permit from the relevant government agency.

The process of obtaining permissions can be time-consuming, and failure to obtain the necessary permits can lead to legal and ethical issues.

• Examples of field research

Researchers can apply field research to a wide range of disciplines and phenomena. Here are some examples of field research in different fields:

Anthropology : Anthropologists use field research methods to study different communities' social and cultural practices. For instance, an anthropologist might conduct participant observation in a remote community to understand their customs, beliefs, and practices.

Ecology : Ecologists use field research methods to learn the behavior of organisms and their interactions with the environment. For example, an ecologist might conduct field research on the behavior of birds in their natural habitat to understand their feeding habits, nesting patterns, and migration.

Sociology : Sociologists may use field research methods to study social behavior and interactions. For instance, a sociologist might conduct participant observation in a workplace to understand organizational culture and communication dynamics.

Geography : Geographers use field research methods to study different regions’ physical and human contexts. For example, a geographer might conduct field research on the impact of climate change on a particular ecosystem, such as a forest or wetland.

Psychology : Psychologists use field research methods to study human behavior in natural settings. For instance, a psychologist might conduct field research on the effects of stress on students in a school setting.

Education : Researchers studying education may use field research methods to study teaching and learning in real-world settings. For example, you could use field research to test the effectiveness of a new teaching method in a classroom setting.

By using field research methods, researchers can gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of the natural world, human behavior, and social interaction theory and how they affect each other.

• Advantages of field research

Field research has several advantages over other research methods, including:

Authenticity : Field research conducted in natural settings allows researchers to observe and study real-life phenomena as it happens. This authenticity enhances the validity and accuracy of the data collected.

Flexibility : Field research methods are flexible and adaptable to different research contexts. Researchers can adjust their strategies to meet the specific needs of their research questions and participants and uncover new insights as the research unfolds.

Rich data : Field research provides rich and detailed data, often including contextual information that’s difficult to capture through other research methods. This depth of knowledge allows for a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the research topic.

Novel insights : Field research can lead to discoveries that may not be possible with other research methods. Observing and studying phenomena in natural settings can provide unique perspectives and new understandings of complex issues.

Field research methods can enhance the quality and validity of research findings and lead to new insights and discoveries that may not be possible with other research methods.

• Disadvantages of field research

While field research has several advantages, there are also some disadvantages that researchers need to consider, including:

Time-consuming : Researchers need to spend time in the field, possibly weeks or months, which can be challenging, especially if the research site is remote or requires travel.

Cost : Conducting field research can be costly, especially if the research site is remote or requires specialized equipment or materials.

Reliance on participants : It may be challenging to recruit participants, and various factors, such as personal circumstances, attitudes, and beliefs, may influence their participation.

Ethical considerations : Field research may raise ethical concerns, mainly if the research involves vulnerable populations or sensitive topics. 

Causality: Researchers may have little control over the environmental or contextual variables they are studying. This can make it difficult to establish causality and then generalize their results with previous research. 

Researchers must carefully weigh the advantages and disadvantages of field research and select the most appropriate research method based on their research question, participants, and context.

What is another name for field study?

Field study is also known as field research or fieldwork. These terms are often used interchangeably and refer to research methods that involve observing and collecting data in natural settings.

What is the difference between a field study and a case study?

Why is field study important.

Field study is critical because it allows researchers to study real-world phenomena in natural settings. This study can also lead to novel insights that may not be possible with other research methods.

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Field Research

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• pp 3108–3112
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Gathering information by observing individuals in their natural setting.

Introduction

Field research (“fieldwork”) refers to information gathered by observing individuals in their natural setting. Field research can be both qualitative and quantitative in nature. Qualitative research emphasizes the importance of observing variables and their interactions. Quantitative research attempts to objectively gather data to make associations, comparisons, and predictions among variables. Field studies that sought to associate behavior with inter-individual interactions and/or the environment formed the foundation for the field of behavioral ecology (Martin and Bateson 2007 ).

Field research involves observations of free-living wild animals in their natural habitats while minimizing perturbations or disturbances to their environment or behavior. Field excursions may require some or all of the following (Lagler 1956 ): funding for travel, salary, supplies, and...

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Bart, J., Fligner, M., & Notz, W. (1998). Sampling and statistical methods for behavioral ecologists . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Nice, M. M. (1937). Studies in the life history of the song sparrow. I. A population study of the song sparrow. Transactions of the Linnean Society of New York, 4 , 1–247.

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

Field studies.

January 12, 2024 2024-01-12

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UX researchers are responsible for learning about users, their goals, challenges, and activities, and for bringing that understanding to the organization. If you notice gaps in your knowledge and you want to understand what user behavior is like in real life, then it might be time to leave the office to run a field study.

In This Article:

What is a field study, types of field studies, when is the best time to run a field study, when should you consider other methods, tips for planning field studies.

A field study is a type of context research that takes place in the user's natural environment (sometimes referred to as in situ , Latin for "in place") as opposed to a lab or an orchestrated setting.

Other research methods like secondary (desk) research , diary studies , unmoderated usability testing , remote - or lab-moderated (in-person) usability research  are often popular because they are either easier to set up or they are less resource-intensive (or both) compared to a field study. However, field studies can fill the gaps left by these other methods:

• Observing users in real scenarios will provide you with specific data that directly applies to your audience. Field studies that focus on specific tasks help researchers learn how to best support these tasks. For example, do people tend to use the product or service in the car? While checking in at a facility? At a kiosk? Field studies can reveal how well (or not well) the design supports realistic use cases.
• The context in which people do their tasks can reveal things you wouldn’t know to ask about, such as problems that crop up when new tools or processes are introduced into existing work practices. It also allows you to understand how well systems work in their normal context of use: when people are, say, distracted, in noisy places, or interacting with other people.

The range of possible field studies is very wide. Field studies can be either entirely immersive and open-ended or less immersive and more directed, involving prototypes or usage of specific existing systems.

Direct Observation

Direct observation  is a purely observational study in which the researcher is a “fly on the wall;" they do not intervene in the participants’ activities, nor do they ask any questions. This method is useful for conducting research into user processes — for instance, to help create natural task flows. It is also great for learning users' vocabularies and mental models , understanding businesses’ interactions with customers, and discovering common workarounds — for example by listening in on support calls, watching people moving through amusement parks, or observing sales staff and customers in stores.

Contextual Inquiry

Contextual inquiry  involves a combination of in-depth observation and interviews of a small sample of users to gain a robust understanding of work practices and behaviors. Most qualitative usability tests   in the field fall under this category.

Customer-Site Visits

Customer-site visits are a combination of direct observations and customer interviews, often led by the customer or client. For example, you might take a tour of a facility or walk through a system with them. These visits can help you understand usability issues that arise in particular industries or business contexts, or at certain scales.

Ethnography

Ethnography  requires complete immersion within a person’s or group’s natural setting for a sustained period, in some cases, living as a member of the group. It allows you to gain insight into mental models and social situations that can help products and services fit into people’s lives. This type of research is particularly helpful when your target audience lives in a culture or environment that is different from yours.

Field studies can be done at any time , but it often makes sense to do them before design (or redesign) begins, because such research can lead to fundamental shifts in understanding your users and can change what you would design for them. In particular, it makes sense to use these in the discovery phase of research, while you are still understanding the problem space.

Field studies can also be used in later stages of design or development, as an evaluative research technique . Sometimes this is referred to as “field testing” or “beta testing.” Field testing is a form of field research in which an existing prototype is utilized in its typical context.

If money were no object, we would probably all do much more field research. Unfortunately, field methods have not become cheaper at the same rate as other usability methods, and they can be challenging to facilitate. Beyond reasons of resource constraint, you might decide to stay out of the field in certain other cases.

Remote, Moderated Usability Research

With the advent of digital meeting tools and video chat, field studies can somewhat be facilitated remotely , with participants and facilitators each in their chosen locations. This remote, interactive approach can often be  cheaper and faster  than field or lab studies, since everyone avoids expensive and time-consuming travel to unfamiliar places. Being in your own space also offers comfort, familiar tools, and convenience.

Remote, moderated studies  make sense when:

• Your  participants are all over the map , and traveling to meet in person is too difficult or expensive.
• It’s important to get answers quickly and cheaply, and  you already understand the people, tasks, and contexts in depth .
• You need to conduct a few sessions at a time , for example when testing early designs with only a couple of users for each iteration.
• Many stakeholders or interested parties wish to observe the session , which would be impractical and disruptive during a field study, either by limiting rapport or literally crowding the room. These folks could be “hidden” from participants’ eyes with digital-meeting tools.

Still, remote moderated studies are often limited in how much external context is observable. In other words: you can’t see what the user’s camera doesn’t show you. That missing context is often important when you are trying to understand people and their environment, and extra steps need to be taken  to ensure these studies yield fruitful insights.

Lab Research (Including Traditional and XR or Simulation-Based Research)

You might wish to conduct in-person research in labs, conference rooms, or other spaces when:

• What you are testing or researching is particularly confidential, sensitive, or private.
• You need to record the session (but cannot do so remotely or in the users’ secured location).
• You have several observers who wish to observe these sessions and you can place them into an observer room with a one-way mirror.
• The scenario you need to study is impossible, impractical, or unethical to observe in person (for example: natural disasters, traumatic events, or high-risk scenarios), and must be simulated with extended-reality (XR) headsets or other technology.

While planning your field study , there are steps you can take to optimize your time spent observing users in their context. Ensure your research plan considers the following:

What Are Your Research Questions ?

Carefully consider what your team wants to learn, and how that (and other contextual factors) might factor into the field study’s setup.

• Participants: Who are your target users? Depending on the research method you use, you might need a professional recruiter or a team member to help you  screen and schedule  people.
• Setting: Go where your potential users are most likely doing the tasks you would like to observe: workplaces, schools, shopping centers, airports, and so on. Is there a specific environment or scenario that would be most realistic for your target users? Are there travel considerations (for you and the participants)? Do you have a private room where you can debrief with fellow researchers and observers?
• Timing: What time of day are these activities typically happening (or, alternatively, when in the customer journey)? Will you need to coordinate these sessions outside your normal working hours to accommodate participant schedules?
• Method: How much (or how little) do your participants reveal about their workflow? Does probing seem to significantly disrupt your users’ workflows? Will you need to prepare followup questions for after the observational portion to limit disruptions in users’ natural process? Or, are these questions better asked contextually, in the moment?

Who Is Accompanying You During the Field Study?

While there are certainly cases where a sole researcher will conduct field research alone, it’s far more common to be accompanied by other people, be it fellow researchers (either taking notes or running sessions concurrently) or observers.

Fellow Researchers

During a field study, side chatter can not only be distracting, but it can also bias the results of your study. Similarly, lack of alignment about research questions and intent behind studying tasks can result in researchers observing the wrong things or missing key details. To reduce chatter and increase alignment with others, consider having a research plan and facilitator guide available, with research questions clearly outlined. That way, researchers can not only follow quietly and confidently, but can run sessions in a consistent manner that reduces bias.

Decide whether to allow stakeholders to watch, and if so, what logistical constraints need to be communicated to them. Although it’s often  strategically important and desirable to involve stakeholders in observing user research , it’s not always possible with field studies. Sometimes observers won’t fit in the space, or they would make the research situation too intimidating or otherwise create an awkward situation for the participants. When that happens, you won’t get to observe the most natural behavior and you might not get the candid information that you need.

However, sometimes outside researchers can’t be left alone with participants as a matter of organizational policy, so observers  must  be present. In any case, consider having “slots” for observers to claim, and provide clear guidelines during signup to ensure observers know how to observe and how to help collect data , so they won’t  behave badly .

Do You Have the Right Permissions?

Make sure you have permission to run the study; not just from supervisors or participants, but also from the facility managers. When applicable, work with an ally onsite. When visiting a business, for example, you might need help recruiting, scheduling, reminding, rewarding, and briefing participants. An onsite helper can escort you, introduce you, and help you with equipment or space issues. You may need to get permission in advance to conduct research in public or commercial spaces.

When you encounter problems or behavior that you don’t understand around existing products or services, field studies can help you take a step back and find a new perspective, based on realistic user behavior in realistic contexts.

Doing research where people are can also be crucial to understanding whether new products and services will help, hinder, or fall flat for the people you aim to assist. Set aside assumptions and allow insights to reframe what you’re creating and how it will affect the experiences of the people you’re designing for.

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Field Research explained

Field research: this article explains the concept of field research in a practical way. The article starts with the definition of this term, followed by a general explanation and some practical examples of field research. You will also find an explanation of the various methods and a step-by-step plan for conducting field research. Enjoy reading!

What is field research?

Field research, also known as fieldwork, is a method of collecting raw data outside of the lab, library, or usual workplace.

It involves observing and interacting with people, animals or phenomena in their natural environment to gain a deeper understanding of their behavior, social interactions and the dynamics of their environment. Read more about experimental research .

Field research methods vary by field. For example, biologists observe animals in their natural habitats, and social scientists conduct interviews and observations to study human societies.

The definition of Field research

Field research is a qualitative research method that focuses on observing and understanding individuals, groups, communities or society as a whole.

It aims to capture authentic and contextual data by immersing researchers in the environments they study.

Through direct observation and interaction with subjects, field researchers gain firsthand insight into their behaviour, beliefs, cultural practices and social structures.

It encompasses a wide variety of well-defined methods, including:

• Formal interviews
• Informal interviews

Direct observation

Participating observation.

• Collective discussions
• Analysis of personal documents
• Self-analysis
• Offline and online activities

Although this type of research is mainly qualitative, it can also contain quantitative aspects, depending on the research goals and methodologies applied.

History and the origin of Field research

Field research has a long history, especially within cultural anthropology . Anthropologists have made extensive use of field research to study different cultures, often focusing on so-called primitive cultures or cultural differences based on factors such as class.

The term “field” refers to defined areas of research, such as education, industrial environments or Amazon rainforests, where social research is conducted.

Influential figures in the early development of this type of research include Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and Bronisław Malinowski, who laid the foundations for future work in anthropology.

Field research versus laboratory research

Field research and laboratory research differ in their approach to data collection.

Field research takes place in natural environments, where researchers make direct observations and interact. It provides contextual data and insight into complex processes, but may be limited in establishing causal relationships.

On the other hand, laboratory research takes place in controlled environments, where variables are manipulated and repeatability is ensured.

It is well suited for testing hypotheses and obtaining accurate measurements, but may lack the complexity of natural environments.

Both approaches complement each other and the choice depends on the research questions and available resources .

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Methods for field research

Field research involves the use of various methods to collect valuable data and gain insight into the phenomena under investigation.

Here are some common methods applied in field research:

This method involves carefully observing people, animals, or events in their natural environment. By watching closely, researchers can study behaviors, interactions, and responses to specific situations without actively participating.

In this method, the researcher actively participates in the group, community, or environment under study. By participating in activities, having conversations and being involved in daily routines, researchers can develop a deep understanding of the social structures, norms and values, and the meaning attached to certain actions.

Qualitative interviews

This includes conducting interviews with individuals or groups to find out their perspectives, experiences and opinions. By asking open-ended questions and delving deeper into topics, researchers can gain insight into participants’ thoughts and feelings.

Data analysis of documents

In this method, documents, such as letters, diaries, reports, or other written materials, are analyzed to obtain information and insights. These documents can provide valuable context and provide a historical perspective on the issues examined.

Informal conversations

Sometimes having informal conversations with people in the research environment can yield useful information. These can be casual chats during breaks or informal gatherings where people talk freely about their experiences and perspectives.

The use of these different methods allows researchers to collect a wide range of data and develop an in-depth understanding of the social, cultural and behavioral aspects of the phenomena under study.

Case studies

Case studies are a useful approach in field research to gain in-depth insights into specific situations, groups or phenomena.

Step-by-step plan for conducting field research

Follow the steps below to get started conducting field research yourself.

Step 1: define your research goal

Determine the specific goal of your research. What do you want to discover, understand or observe? Clearly formulate your research question(s) and objective(s).

Step 2: design your research plan

Consider which methods and approaches are best suited to your research question. Consider the location, participants/population, data collection methods and time frame.

Step 3: Get permission

If necessary, obtain permission from relevant agencies, organizations or individuals to access the study site and collect data. Make sure you follow ethical guidelines and procedures.

Step 4: collect data

Go to the research site and start collecting data according to your research plan. This may include direct observation, interviews, surveys, participant observation or collection of documentation.

Step 5: Analyze and interpret your data

Evaluate and analyze the collected data . Identify patterns, themes or trends relevant to your research question. Interpretation of the data should be based on accurate and systematic analysis.

Step 6: draw conclusions and formulate results

Based on your analysis and interpretation, you come to conclusions that answer your research question . Formulate clear results and present them in a structured way .

Step 7: Report and share your findings

Write a research report describing the methodology, findings and conclusions. Share your results with the scientific community, stakeholders or the wider public through publications, presentations or other appropriate channels.

Step 8: Reflect and Evaluate your field research

Take the time to evaluate your research experience . What were the strengths and challenges of your research? What would you do differently in the future? Reflect on possible improvements and learning points for subsequent studies.

Examples of known field studies

Numerous interesting discoveries have been made while conducting research. Here are three examples of discoveries made while conducting this type of research:

New animal species

Field research has led to the discovery of several new animal species. For example, in 2018, during a field research expedition in the rainforests of Ecuador, researchers discovered a new species of tree frog.

This discovery highlighted the importance of field research in identifying biodiversity and understanding the ecological systems in which these species live.

Ecological changes

Field research has also helped identify ecological changes and understand their causes.

For example, by studying coral reefs in different parts of the world, scientists have found that coral bleaching, a consequence of climate change, is having a devastating effect on coral reef health.

It’s Your Turn

What do you think? Do you recognize the explanation about field research? Have you ever heard of this type of research before? Have you ever conducted this yourself? What do you think are the advantages compared to, for example, research in a laboratory? Do you have tips or other comments?

Share your experience and knowledge in the comments box below.

More information

• Barick, R. (2021). Research Methods For Business Students . Retrieved 02/16/2024 from Udemy.
• Burgess, R. G. (Ed.). (2003). Field Research: A sourcebook and field manual (Vol. 4) . Routledge.
• Burgess, R. G. (2002). In the field: An introduction to Field Research (Vol. 8) . Routledge.
• Edmondson, A. C., & McManus, S. E. (2007). Methodological fit in management Field Research . Academy of management review, 32(4), 1246-1264.
• McKinnon, J. (1988). Reliability and validity in Field Research: some strategies and tactics . Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 1(1), 34-54

How to cite this article: Janse, B. (2023). Field Research . Retrieved [insert date] from Toolshero: https://www.toolshero.com/research/field-research/

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How to Conduct Field Research Study? – A Complete Guide

There is a challenge in undergoing a research which involves a vast understanding of the environment and the study of subjects staying in that environment. Although the outcome of this study will help fill in the gaps evidently seen in the literature but the process involves a lot of planning. How does one plan such a humongous research study?  In this article, we will discuss how to conduct a field research and what are the different methods used to streamline the field study !

Research is much more than performing the experiment and analyzing results. It involves gathering raw data and understanding the subject of research in its environment. These type of researches are more elaborate and are the reason for producing real information on a large scale.

Table of Contents

What is Field Research?

Field research is a process where data is collected through a qualitative method. The objective of field study  is to observe and interpret the subject of study in its natural environment. It is used in the field of study of humans and health care professions. Furthermore, it connects theory and practical research study by qualitatively analyzing the data.

Why to Conduct Field Study?

Field study allows researchers to identify and observe the subjects and helps draw correlations between subjects and surroundings, and how the surroundings may influence the behavior.

It gives an in-depth information on subjects because they are observed and analyzed for a long period of time.

Field study allows researchers to fill the gaps in data which can be understood by conducting in-depth primary research.

How is a Field Research different from a Lab Research?

Different methods of field study research.

There are four main types of methods for conducting a field research .

1. Ethnographic Field Notes

This type of field work is particularly associated with field work that records and analyzes culture, society or community. Most commonly this method of research is used in social anthropology, societies and communities.

2. Qualitative Interviews

Qualitative interviews give researchers detailed information. This vast information is segregated in order to make inferences related to the sample group. This data is gathered by conducting interviews either informally, conversationally or in an open ended interview.

3. Direct Observation

Researchers gather information on their subjects through close visual observation. The researcher can record the observations and events as field notes holistically without a guided protocol. This form of research approach is termed as unstructured observation. However, in a structured observation the researcher uses a guide or set protocols to observe people and events. Furthermore, in direct observation the observer is detached and does not obstruct the research setup. It does not work as an alternative method for conducting field research , and rather works as an initial approach to understand the behavior of the research. This type of method is extensively used in fields of sociology and anthropology wherein the researchers focus on recording social life details in a setting, community, or society.

4. Participant Observation

In this research method, the researcher takes part in the everyday life of the members chosen for observation. This gives the observer a better understanding of the study. Additionally, these observation notes are a primary type of data which the researchers later develop into detailed field notes.

Steps to Conduct a Field Study

1. identify and acquire researchers of the field.

It is essential to acquire researchers who are specialized in the field of research. Moreover, their experience in the field will help them undergo the further steps of conducting the field research .

2. Identify the topic of research

Post acquiring the researcher, they will work on identifying the topic of research. The researchers are responsible for deciding what topic of research to focus on based on the gaps observed in the existing research literature.

3. Identify the right method of research

After fine tuning the research topic, researchers define the right method to approach the aim and objectives of the research.

4. Visit the site of the study and collect data

Based on the objectives, the observations begin. Observers/Researchers go on field and start collecting data either by visual observation, interviews or staying along with the subjects and experiencing their surroundings to get an in-depth understanding.

5. Analyze the data acquired

The researchers undergo the process of data analysis once the data is collected.

6. Communicate the results

The researchers document a detailed field study report , explaining the data and its outcome. Giving the field study a suitable conclusion.

Advantages of Field Study

The major advantage of field study is that the results represent a greater variety of situations and environments. Researchers yield a detailed data analysis which can be used as primary data for many different research hypotheses. Furthermore, field research has the ability to find newer social facts which the setting or community and the participants may be unaware of. Most importantly, there usually is no tampering of data or variable, as data is collected from the natural setting.

Disadvantages of Field Study

Various methods of field study involve researchers conducting research study and immersing themselves on the research field to gather data. This collection of data can be expensive and time consuming. Moreover, the information acquired is usually undertaken through observation of small groups and this may lack understanding and implications to the larger group of study.

Did you ever conduct a field research? How did you find the process? Which type of field research method did you use? Let us know about it in the comment below.

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Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Visualizing a field of research: A methodology of systematic scientometric reviews

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Software, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliations Department of Information Science, College of Computing and Informatics, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America, Department of Information Science, Yonsei University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department of Information Science, Yonsei University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

• Chaomei Chen, 

• Published: October 31, 2019
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994
• Peer Review
• Reader Comments

Systematic scientometric reviews, empowered by computational and visual analytic approaches, offer opportunities to improve the timeliness, accessibility, and reproducibility of studies of the literature of a field of research. On the other hand, effectively and adequately identifying the most representative body of scholarly publications as the basis of subsequent analyses remains a common bottleneck in the current practice. What can we do to reduce the risk of missing something potentially significant? How can we compare different search strategies in terms of the relevance and specificity of topical areas covered? In this study, we introduce a flexible and generic methodology based on a significant extension of the general conceptual framework of citation indexing for delineating the literature of a research field. The method, through cascading citation expansion, provides a practical connection between studies of science from local and global perspectives. We demonstrate an application of the methodology to the research of literature-based discovery (LBD) and compare five datasets constructed based on three use scenarios and corresponding retrieval strategies, namely a query-based lexical search (one dataset), forward expansions starting from a groundbreaking article of LBD (two datasets), and backward expansions starting from a recently published review article by a prominent expert in LBD (two datasets). We particularly discuss the relevance of areas captured by expansion processes with reference to the query-based scientometric visualization. The method used in this study for comparing bibliometric datasets is applicable to comparative studies of search strategies.

Citation: Chen C, Song M (2019) Visualizing a field of research: A methodology of systematic scientometric reviews. PLoS ONE 14(10): e0223994. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994

Editor: Wolfgang Glanzel, KU Leuven, BELGIUM

Received: June 12, 2019; Accepted: October 2, 2019; Published: October 31, 2019

Copyright: © 2019 Chen, Song. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript, Supporting Information files, and on Figshare: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9939773.v1 .

Funding: CC acknowledges the support of the SciSIP Program of the National Science Foundation (Award #1633286), the support of Microsoft Azure Sponsorship. Data sourced from Dimensions, an inter-linked research information system provided by Digital Science ( https://www.dimensions.ai ). MS acknowledges the support of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A3A2075114) and partial support from the Yonsei University Research Fund of 2019-22-0066. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Systematic reviews play a critical role in scholarly communication [ 1 ]. Systematic reviews typically synthesize findings from original research in a field of study, assess the degree of consensus or the lack of it concerning the state of the art in the field, and identify challenges and future directions. For newcomers to a field of study, a timely and comprehensive systematic review can provide a valuable overview of the intellectual landscape and guide new researchers to pursue their research effectively. For experienced and active researchers, systematic reviews can be instrumental in keeping their knowledge of the field up to date, especially when involving areas that are potentially relevant but fall outside the immediate topic of one’s interest. Researchers have also studied scientific literature to uncover potentially significant but currently overlooked connections between disparate bodies of literature, notably, as demonstrated in the research of literature-based discovery (LBD) [ 2 – 7 ].

A fast-growing trend is the increase of systematic reviews conducted with the assistance of science mapping tools [ 8 ]. A science mapping tool typically takes a set of bibliographic records of a research field and generates an overview of the underlying knowledge domain, e.g. as with CiteSpace [ 9 , 10 ] and VOSviewer [ 11 ]. For example, systematic reviews facilitated by using CiteSpace include a diverse range of research areas such as regenerative medicine [ 12 ], natural disaster research [ 13 ], greenhouse gas emission [ 14 ], and identifying disruptive innovation and emerging technology [ 15 ]. Similarly, VOSviewer was used in reviews of topics such as citizen science [ 16 ] and climate change [ 17 ]. A scientometric overview of a field of research provides a valuable source of input to conducting systematic reviews, especially in situations when relevant and up-to-date systematic reviews may not be readily available or accessible. The quality of the input data therefore is critical to the overall quality of subsequent analyses and reviews. This practical issue is particularly significant when we need to select subsets of articles from a large pool of available data or when we want to limit the scope of a study to specific disciplines as opposed to open to all disciplines.

Considerations concerning the scope of selection have been discussed in the literature in terms of local, global, and hybrid approaches [ 18 ]. Global maps of science by definition provide a comprehensive coverage of all scientific disciplines [ 19 ], whereas local maps typically focus on selected areas of interest. Hybrid maps may use a global map as a base map and superimpose local maps as overlays [ 20 ]. Generating global maps of science requires a substantial array of resources that are not commonly accessible to most of researchers, whereas resources required for generating local maps are more reachable, especially with the increasing accessible science mapping tools. Global maps are valuable as they provide a broad context of a specific research interest. In practice, generating global maps is resource consuming and demanding, for example, requiring direct access to large data sources that are only accessible to a small number of researchers. Consequently, global maps may not be updated as frequently as needed by end users. For example, a significant update of a global model may not be undertaken for 5 years [ 20 ]. The underlying structure of a research field is often subject to a variety of changes as the scientific literature grows over time [ 21 , 22 ]. Therefore, it is reasonable to question whether an existing global model created a few years ago remains a valid representation of the underlying structure for specific analytic tasks in hand, although the answer may differ at different levels of granularity.

In contrast, approaches of localism face different challenges. For example, a common challenge for individual researchers of science mapping tools such as CiteSpace [ 9 , 10 ], VOSviewer [ 11 ], and HistCite [ 23 ] is to select a representative subset of articles from tens of millions or more of scholarly publications in the Web of Science, Scopus, Dimensions, and/or the Lens. Researchers have used lexical search, citation expansion, and hybrid strategies [ 24 – 26 ].

Complex and sophisticated queries are typically constructed with the input from domain experts and iteratively refined as demonstrated in several in-depths studies [ 25 – 27 ]. We refer such strategies as query-based approaches in this article. The role of relevant and sufficient domain expertise in such approaches is critical, which may lead to a double-edged sword. As we will see in this article, using computational approaches to reduce the cognitive burden from domain experts is a noticeable area of research. Following the principles of LBD to emphasize potentially valuable but currently overlooked connections in scientific literature, it is conceivable that there are undiscovered connections where even domain experts’ input may be limited. Reducing the initial reliance on domain expertise can increase the applicability of query-based strategies.

In this article, we propose a flexible computational approach to the construction of a representative dataset of scholarly publications concerning a field of research through iterative citation expansions. Starting from an initial dataset or even a single seed article, the expansion process will automatically expand the initial set by adding articles through citation links in forward, backward, or both directions. This flexibility is particularly valuable in some common scenarios in practice. For example, Swanson’s article on fish oil and Raynaud’s syndrome [ 6 ] is widely considered as a groundbreaking one in LBD research. A researcher may want to retrieve subsequently published articles that are connected to the groundbreaking article through potentially lengthy citation paths. Such expansions are valuable to preserve the continuity of research literature identified across an extensive time span. In contrast, a researcher may come across a recently published review article of LBD and would like to find previously published articles that lead to the state of the knowledge summarized in the review. For example, in 2017, Swanson’s long-term collaborator Smalheiser published an article entitled “Rediscovering Don Swanson: the past, present and future of literature-based discovery” [ 28 ] and researchers may be interested in tracing several generations of relevant articles.

Pragmatically speaking, the ability to expand any set of articles of interest provides a smooth transition across a local-global continuum. The agility of the approach enables us to improve the quality of an input dataset of scientometric studies by refining the context incrementally. We demonstrate the expansion and evaluation of five datasets retrieved by different strategies on literature-based discovery (LBD). The field of LBD is potentially very broad as it is applicable to numerous scientific disciplines. Swanson’s pioneering studies in the 1980s have been a major source of inspiration [ 6 , 7 , 29 , 30 ], followed by a series of studies in collaboration with Smalheiser [ 31 – 33 ], who recently reviewed the past, present, and future of LBD [ 28 ]. Significant developments have also been made by other researchers along this generic framework, for example, [ 34 – 36 ]. It would be challenging to formulate a complex query to capture a diverse range of relevant research activities, some of which may have drifted away from the core literature of LBD.

Judging the relevance of topics is often situational in nature and therefore challenging even with domain expertise. In LBD, the threshold of relevance is by definition lower than other fields because the focus is on undiscovered connections, which in turn leads to a demand for an even higher level of recall for conducting systematic scientometric reviews. Shneider proposed a four-stage model to characterize how a scientific field may evolve, namely, identifying the problem, building tools and instruments, applying tools to the problem, and codifying lessons learned [ 22 , 37 ]. The application stage may also reveal unanticipated problems, which in turn may lead to a new line of research and form a new field of research. The LBD research may continue along the research directions set off by the pioneering studies in LBD. According to Shneider’s four-stage model, new specialties of research may emerge. A systematic review of LBD should open to such new developments as well as the established ones that we are familiar with. What can we gain by using cascading citation expansions? What might we miss if we rely on the simple query-based search strategy alone? What types of biases may be introduced or avoided by cascading expansions as well as by selecting points of departure?

To address these questions, we develop an intuitive visual analytic method to compare multiple search strategies and reveal the strengths and weaknesses of a specific procedure. We compare a total of five datasets in this study, including a dataset from a simple query with phrases of “literature-based discovery” as a baseline reference and four datasets from cascading citation expansions based on two singleton seed article sets using Dimensions as the source of data.

The rest of the article is organized as follows. We characterize existing science mapping approaches in terms globalism and localism, especially their strengths and weaknesses for conducting systematic reviews of relevant literature. We introduce a flexible citation expansion approach–cascading citation expansion–to improve the data quality for conducting systematic scientometric reviews. We first demonstrate what a query-based strategy may reveal about the LBD research, then we combine the five datasets to form a common baseline for comparing the topics covered by the five individual datasets.

Mapping the scientific landscape

Considerations concerning the scope of a study of scientific literature can be characterized as global, local, and hybrid in terms of their intended scope and applications.

Global maps of science aim to represent all scientific disciplines [ 18 ]. Commonly used units of analysis in global maps of science include journals and, to a much less extent, articles. Clusters of journals are typically used to represent disciplines of science.

Global maps of science are valuable for developing an understanding of the structure of scientific knowledge involving all disciplines. Global maps provide a relatively stable representation of the underlying structure of knowledge, which can be rather volatile at finer levels of granularity. Klavans and Boyack compared the structure of 20 global maps of science [ 38 ]. They arrive at a consensus map generated from edges that occur in at least half of the input maps. A stable global representation is suitable to serve the role of an organizing framework to accommodate additional details as overlays [ 19 , 20 , 39 ]. Global maps may reveal insights that may not be possible at a smaller scale. For example, in studies of structural variations caused by scholarly publications, detecting a potentially transformative link in a network representation of the literature relies on the extent to which the contexts of both ends of the link are adequately represented [ 21 ].

On the other hand, the validity of a global map as a base map is likely to decrease over time as subsequent publications may change the underlying knowledge structure considerably [ 21 ]. Given that updating a global map of science is a very resource demanding task and it may be years before a major update becomes available [ 20 ], is the structure shown in a global map still a valid representation at the intended level of granularity? If a global map is updated too often, it may lose its stability value as an organizing framework to sustain overlays. A fundamental question is not necessarily whether the representation is categorically comprehensive, but whether the structural representation as a context for analyzing the literature is adequate and effective.

To localism, the focus is on communicating the structure of a subject matter of interest at the level of scientific inquiry and scholarly communication, including analytic reasoning, hypothesis generation, and argumentation. Many studies of science and systematic scientometric reviews belong to this category. Scientometric studies commonly draw bibliographic data, especially citation data, from long-established sources such as the Web of Science and Scopus. More recent additions include Microsoft Academic Search, Dimensions, and the Lens. Knowledge domain visualization, for example, focuses on knowledge domains as the unit of analysis [ 10 , 40 , 41 ]. The concept of a knowledge domain emphasizes that the boundary of a research field should reflect the underlying structure of knowledge. Relying on organizing structures such as institutions, journals, and even articles along has the risk of missing potentially significant articles.

Query-based search is perhaps by far the most popular strategy for finding articles relevant to a topic of interest or a field of research. A query-based search process typically starts with a list of keywords or phrases provided by an end user. For example, a query of “ literature-based discovery ” OR “ undiscovered public knowledge ” could be a valid starting point to search for articles in the field of LBD. The quality of retrieval is routinely measured in terms of recall and precision. Initial search for systematic reviews tends to give a higher priority to recall than precision.

Formulating a good query is a non-trivial task even for a domain expert because the quality of a query can be affected by several factors, including our current domain knowledge and our motivations of the search [ 24 ]. Furthermore, if our goal is to identify emerging topics and trends in a research field, which is very likely when we conduct a systematic review of the field, then it would be a significant challenge to formulate a complex query effectively in advance. As a result, iteratively refining queries over lessons learned from the performance of previous queries is a common strategy, especially when combined with the input from relevant domain experts [ 25 , 26 ]. Scatter/Gatherer [ 42 ] is an influential early example of iteratively improving the quality of retrieved information based on feedback.

A profound challenge to query-based search is the detection of an implicit semantic connection, or a latent semantic relation. Search systems have utilized additional resources such as WordNet [ 43 ] and domain ontologies [ 44 , 45 ] to enhance users’ original terms with their synonyms and/or closely related concepts. With techniques such as latent semantic indexing [ 46 ] and more recent advances in distributional semantic learning [ 47 ], the relevance of an article to a topic can be established in terms of its distributional properties of language use. The semantic similarity of an article can be detected without an explicit presence of any keywords from users’ original query. This is known as the distributional hypothesis: linguistic items with similar distributions have similar meanings.

Cascading citation expansion

In this article, we conceptualize a unifying framework that accommodates both globalism and localism as special cases on a consistent and continuous spectrum through a combination of query-based search and cascading citation expansion. Under the new conceptualization, the coverage of a local map can grow incrementally as the expansion process may continue as many generations of citation as needed. Thus, the gap between a local map and a global map can be reduced considerably. Table 1 summarizes the major advantages and weaknesses of globalism and localism along with potential benefits that the conceptualized incremental expansion may provide.

• PPT PowerPoint slide
• PNG larger image
• TIFF original image

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994.t001

In this article, we demonstrate the flexibility and extensibility of a incremental expansion approach–cascading citation expansion–by applying this methodology to a few common scenarios in research in relation to a field of research of own interest, i.e. literature-based discovery (LBD).

Citation indexing was originally proposed by Eugene Garfield to tackle the information retrieval problem in the context of scientific literature [ 48 ]. While the nature of a citation may vary widely as many researchers have documented [ 49 ], an instance of a citation from one article to another provides evidence of some potentially significant connections. A unique advantage of a citation-based search method is that it frees us from having to specify a potentially relevant topic in our initial query, which is useful to reduce the risk of missing important relevant topics that we may not be aware of.

We often encounter situations in which we have found a small set of highly relevant articles and yet they are still not fully satisfactory for some reasons. For example, if we were new to a topic of interest and all we have to start with is a systematic review of the topic published many years ago, how can we bring our knowledge up to date? If what we have is a newly published review written by a domain expert, how can we expand the review to find more relevant articles? Another common scenario is when we want to construct a relatively comprehensive survey of a target topic, how can we generate an optimal dataset that is comprehensive enough but also contains the least amount of less relevant articles.

When we encounter these situations, an effective method would enable us to build on what we have found so far and add new articles iteratively. Scatter/Gather [ 42 ] was a dynamic clustering strategy proposed in mid-1990s by allowing users to re-focus on query-specific relevant documents as opposed to query-independent clusters in browsing search results. From the citation indexing point of view, articles that cite any articles in the initial result set are good candidates for further consideration. Thus, an incremental expansion strategy can be built based on these insights to uncover additional relevant articles.

Incremental expansion processes can be performed in parallel or in sequence. When an expansion step is applied to a base set S of articles, articles associated with S through citation links are added to S thus expand the set S. Users may define an inclusion threshold such that the expansion is limited to adding articles with sufficient citations. We refer successive citation expansions as cascading citation expansion [ 50 ]. The concept of cascading citation expansion is intrinsic to the general framework of citation indexing. An expansion process is capable of generating an adequate context for a systematic scientometric review of a research field by incrementally retrieving more and more articles from the literature.

Cascading citation expansion requires a constant programmatic access to a master source of scientific articles. We utilize the Dimensions API to access their collection of over 98 million publications (at the time of writing). A cascading citation expansion process may move forward and backward along citation paths. If the entire universe of all the scientific publications is completely reachable from one article to another, then cascading citation expansion will eventually reach all the publications, which means that one can achieve a coverage as large as we wish. If the entire universe is in fact made of several galaxies that are not reachable through citation links, the question is whether this is desirable to transcend the void and reach other galaxies. Strategies using hybrid lexical and semantic resources may become useful in such situations, but in this study we assume it is acceptable to terminate the expansion process once citation links associated with a chosen starting point are exhausted.

Fig 1 illustrates the cascading citation expansion process. Given an initial set of seed articles, which can be a singleton set, a 1-generation forward citation expansion will add articles that cite any member article of the seed set directly, i.e. with a one-step citation path. A 2-generation forward expansion will add articles connecting to the seed set with two-step citation paths. We include a 5-generation forward expansion in this study.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994.g001

Use scenarios and corresponding search strategies

Here we consider two common scenarios in research. In the first scenario, we have identified a well-known classic work, for example, Swanson’s 1986 article on fish oil and Raynaud’s syndrome [ 6 ], and would like to retrieve all follow-up studies and articles that cited the original work directly or indirectly since 1986. What are the newly developed major topics ever since? What are the hottest and the most far-reaching topics in more recent years? Are there any areas branching off the main paths?

In the second scenario, we are attracted to a very interesting recently published article and we would like to collect relevant studies in the past that lead to the article, i.e., its intellectual base. Smalheiser’s 2017 review of LBD [ 28 ] is an example. Smalheiser has co-authored with Swanson on several landmark studies in the development of literature-based discovery. Smalheiser cited 71 references in his review. What would be a broader context of Smalheiser’s 71-reference review? Are there LBD-relevant topics but excluded by the authoritative domain expert?

Pragmatically, if we were to rely on the simple full text search alone, how much would we miss? Are there topics that we might have missed completely? What would be an optimal search strategy that not only adequately captures the essence of the development of the field but also does in the most efficient way? Borrowing the terminology from information retrieval, an optimal search strategy should maximize the recall and the precision at the same time.

Cascading citation expansion functions are implemented in CiteSpace based on the Dimensions’ API. The expansion process starts with an initial search query in DSL, which is Dimensions’ search language. Users who are familiar with SQL should be able to recognize the resemblance immediately. The result of the initial query forms the initial set of articles. In fact, in addition to publications, one can retrieve grants, patents, and clinical trials from Dimensions. In this study, we concentrate on publications.

Constructing five datasets of literature-based discovery

To demonstrate the flexibility and extensibility of the incremental expansion approach, we take the literature-based discovery (LBD) research as the field to study. We choose LBD for several reasons: 1) we are familiar with the early development of the domain, 2) we are aware of a recent review written by one of the pioneer researchers and we would like to set it in a broader context, and 3) we would like to take this opportunity to demonstrate how one can apply the methodology to a visual exploration of the relevant literature and develop a good understanding of the state of the art. These reasons echo the common scenarios discussed earlier.

Table 2 summarized the construction of the five datasets included in the study, including key parameters such as citation thresholds.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994.t002

Fig 2 illustrates the process of the comparative study of five datasets retrieved based on a query-based search and cascading citation expansions. In this study, we applied a citation filter in cascading citation expansions to the selection of citing and cited articles. Articles with citations below the threshold are filtered out from the expansion processes. These filters provide users with a flexible trade-off option between concentrating on major citation paths with a reduced completion time versus retrieving articles comprehensively with a much longer completion time. Since the distribution of citations of articles follows power law, a comprehensive expansion process may become too long to be viable for a daily use of these functions. The DSL query searched for Swanson’s two articles published in 1986, namely, the fish oil and Raynaud’ syndrome article 1986a [ 6 ] and the undiscovered public knowledge article 1986b [ 7 ]. The query search found 1,777 articles as the set F for Full data search. Swanson 1986a is used as the seed article for two multi-generation forward citation expansions, one for 3 generations (as set S 3 ) and the other for 5 generations (as set S 5 ). S 3 contains 748 articles, whereas S 5 is about 60 times larger, containing 45,178 articles. The other two datasets are expanded from Smalheiser’s 2017 review as the seed, N F and N B , where N is for Neil, Smalheiser’s first name. Smalheiser’s review contains 71 references. At the time of the experiment, a forward expansion from it found two articles that cite the review. The 73 articles form the set N F . The N B set is obtained by applying backward citation expansions on the set N F . The expansion stopped in 1934 with 2,451 articles. The five datasets are combined as the set All 5 , containing 48,298 unique articles. S 5 contributed most of articles to the combination. The five datasets overlap to a different extent. S3 is a subset of S5. NB expands from NF. F overlaps with S5 the most (702 articles out of its 1,777 articles). Each of the five individual datasets and the combined dataset are visualized in CiteSpace as networks of co-cited references with thematic labels for clusters.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994.g002

Given a dataset, its core is defined by references that satisfy two conditions, inspired by [ 24 ]: 1) global citation scores (GCS) in Dimensions are greater than two and 2) the ratio between local citation scores (LCS) within the analyzed dataset to corresponding GCS are greater than or equal to 0.01. According to [ 24 ], the core represents articles with a sufficient specificity to the field of research in question. The core will downplay the role of an article that has a very high GCS but a low LCS because it suggests that the article probably belongs to a field elsewhere. It may be possible for an article to have its citations evenly split across multiple fields, but its LCS/GCS ratio in any of these fields should have a good chance to qualify the article for the core.

Researchers have used main paths of a citation network to study major flows of information or the diffusion of ideas [ 51 , 52 ]. Main paths of a dataset are derived from the corresponding direct citation networks of the dataset. Direct citation networks are generated in CiteSpace with GCS of 1 as the selection threshold. Pajek is used to select main paths based on Search Path Link Count (SPLC) using top 30 key routes found by local search.

Datasets, their cores, main paths, and clusters can be used as the initial seed set for cascading citation expansion. They can all be used as network overlays in CiteSpace to delineate the scope of a research field at various levels of granularity.

Fig 3 shows logarithmically transformed distributions of the five datasets. The distributions shown under the title are the original ones.

• The F dataset (in blue) is evenly distributed except a surprising peak in 2009, which turns out due to many articles from an encyclopedia. The number of articles each year ranges between 60 and 130.
• Both S 5 (red) and S 3 (orange) are forward expansions starting with Swanson’s 1986 article on fish oil and Raynaud’s syndrome [ 6 ]. In S 3 , the inclusion threshold was at least 10 citations, whereas it was 20 in S 5 so as to keep the total processing time down. The majority of the articles in S 3 appeared between 2006 and 2018. S 3 had the first peak in 1984. It didn’t return to the same level for the next 10 years until it started to climb up from 2003 and reached the second peak in 2012. In contrast, the distribution of the more extensive forward expansion S 5 shows a steady increase all the way over time.
• N F , a forward expansion from Smalheiser’s review of Swanson’s work [ 28 ], includes articles that cited the references used in Smalheiser’s review. Its distribution steadily increased between 1986 and 2017 with a rise of 5 over the 31-year span till 2016.
• N B , a backward expansion from the set N F , contains articles that are cited by N F . The earliest article in N B was published in 1936. A noticeable hump from 1983 followed by a valley around early 1990s. Two peaks appeared in 2006 and 2011, respectively.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994.g003

We will focus on how these datasets differ in terms of networks of co-cited references in the following analysis. There are of course many other ways to conduct scientometric studies based on these datasets, but we will limit to the co-citation networks generated with CiteSpace. It is important to note that co-citation networks in CiteSpace include much more information than a classic co-citation network, notably including various indicators and thematic labels derived from citing articles to clusters of co-cited references, year-by-year concept labels to track the evolution of a cluster, and a hierarchical representation of concept terms extracted from citing articles’ titles and abstracts. Some of these features will be illustrated in the following sections.

The five datasets and the combined dataset are processed in CiteSpace with the consistent configurations. In particular, the link-to-node ratio is 3, look back years is 10, annual citation threshold is 2, and the node selection is based on g-index with a scaling factor of 30. These configuration settings are derived empirically, which tend to identify meaningful patterns. Given a dataset, CiteSpace first develops a network model by synthesizing a time series of annual networks of co-cited references. Then the synthesized network is divided into clusters of cited references. Themes in each clusters are identified based on noun phrases extracted from citing articles’ titles and abstracts. Citing articles to a cluster are defined as articles that cite at least one member of the cluster. Extracted noun phrases are further computed to identify the most representative ones as the thematic labels for their cluster. CiteSpace supports three ways to select cluster labels based on Latent Semantic Indexing, Log-Likelihood Ratio Test, and Mutual Information [ 53 ]. CiteSpace supports a built-in database. Many attributes of datasets can be compared with the database. The core of a dataset, for example, can be identified using SQL queries.

Interactive visualizations in CiteSpace support several views, i.e., types of visualization, including a cluster view, a timeline view, a history view, and a hierarchical view. A network can be superimposed to another network as a layer. A list of references can be superimposed to a network as well. We use this feature to overlay the core and main paths of a dataset to its own network or to a network of another dataset. CiteSpace reports network and cluster properties such as modularity and silhouette scores. The modularity score of a network reflects the clarity of the network structure at the level of decomposed clusters. The silhouette score of a cluster measures the homogeneity of its members. A network with a high modularity and a high average of silhouette scores would be desirable. We will focus on the largest connect component of each network, which is shown as the default visualization. Users may choose to reveal all components of a network if they wish.

Table 3 summarizes various properties of the five individual datasets and the combined set along with their networks and core references. The F dataset, for example, contains 1,777 articles, which in turn cite 30,606 unique references. Among them, 367 references are identified as the core references based on the LCS/GCS ratio and the threshold of 3 for GCS. The resultant network contains 1,269 references as nodes and 5,937 co-citation links. The largest connected component (LCC) consists of 1,029 references, or 74% of the entire network. The modularity with reference to the clusters is 0.76, indicating a relatively high level of clarity. The average silhouette score of 0.34 out of 1.0 is moderate.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994.t003

The modularity of a network measures the clarity of the network structure in terms of how well the entire network can be naturally divided into clusters such that nodes within the same cluster are tightly coupled, whereas nodes in different clusters are loosely coupled. The higher the modularity is, the easier to find such a division. The silhouette score of a network measures the average homogeneity of derived clusters [ 53 ]. The higher the average silhouette score is, the more meaningful a group is in terms of a cluster. The smallest dataset N F has the highest modularity of 0.93. It also has the highest average silhouette score of 0.50. The full text search has the modularity of 0.76, which is slightly lower than N B , but its silhouette value of 0.34 is lower than others except S 5 .

Literature-based discovery

In this section, we visualize the thematic landscape of the field of literature-based discovery from multiple perspectives of the five datasets. We will start with the full text search results and then cascading citation expansions.

Full text search

The query for the full text search on Dimensions consists of ‘literature-based discovery’ and ‘undiscovered public knowledge.’ The phrase ‘literature-based discovery’ is commonly used as the name of the research field. The phrase ‘undiscovered public knowledge’ appears in the titles of two Swanson’s publications in 1986. One is entitled “Fish oil, Raynaud’s Syndrome [ 6 ], and Undiscovered Public Knowledge” in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine and the other is “Undiscovered Public Knowledge” in Library Quarterly [ 7 ].

The full text search found 1,777 records. Dimensions’ export center supports the export of up to 50,000 records to a file in a CSV format for CiteSpace [ 9 , 40 ]. Publication records returned from Dimensions do not include abstracts. We found 431 matched records in PubMed with their abstracts, but in this study the analysis is based on the full set of 1,777 records regardless they have abstracts or not because we primarily focus on the references they cite.

Fig 4 shows an overview map of LBD according to the dataset F. The color of a link indicates the earliest year when two publications were co-cited for the first time in the dataset. In this visualization, the earliest work appeared from the top of the network, whereas the most recent ones appeared at the bottom, although CiteSpace does not utilize any particular layout mechanisms to orient the visualization. The network is decomposed into clusters of references based the strengths of co-citation links. Clusters are numbered in the descending order of their size. The largest one is numbered as #0, followed by #1, and so on. Fig 4 also depicts the core of the F set as an overlay (in green) and its main paths (in red).

CiteSpace configuration: LRF = 3, LBY = 10, e = 2.0, g-index (k = 30). Network: 1,269 references and 5,937 co-citation links.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994.g004

The largest cluster is #0 machine learning. More recent clusters, further down in the visualized network, include #1 semantic predication, and #7 citation network.

Fig 5 shows more features of the dataset F through colormaps of time (a), an overlay of its core (b), its and main paths (c). Labeled nodes on main paths include Swanson DR (1986), which also appears to be one of the oldest core references, Swanson DR (1997), Smalheiser (1998), Webber W (2001), and the most recently Cohen T (2010).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994.g005

Fig 5 also contrasts references cited by Smalheiser’s 2017 review of LBD and the main paths (d) and references cited by another LBD review published in 2017 by Sebastian et al. [ 5 ] in part (e). There are several notable differences. Torvik VI (2007) cited in Smalheiser’s review was not on the main paths. In contrast, a few articles on the main paths such as Hunter L (2006), Zweigenbaum P (2007), and Agarwal P (2008) are not cited in Smalheiser’s review. Similarly, Sebastian et al.’s review also cited Torvik VI (2007) and a few other articles off the main paths, including Kostoff RN (2009), Chen C (2009), and Kostoff RN (2008). The general area of Sebastian et al.’s review overlaps with that of Smalheiser’s review considerably except Sebastian et al.’s review reached further towards cluster #7 citation network. The boundaries of clusters are show in distinct colors in part (f) of Fig 5 . According to the colored cluster areas, the main paths go through #0 machine learning, whereas the two LBD reviews did not.

In Fig 6 , references cited by the two LBD review articles are shown as overlays on a timeline visualization. Each cluster is shown horizontally and advances over time from the left to the right. Both LBD reviews make substantial connections between #1 semantic predication and #6 validating discovery. Given the recency of #1 semantic predication, the role of semantic predication is significant. Our own ongoing research also investigates the role of semantic predication in understanding uncertainties of scientific knowledge [ 22 ]. Sebastian et al.’s review reached further down to #8 biomarker discovery, which was not cited in Smalheiser’s review.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994.g006

Comparing five individual datasets

In order to compare the coverage of individual datasets, we construct a baseline map based on the combined dataset. The base map is created with the same procedure that was applied to individual datasets. The base map is divided into clusters. As a measure of the specificity of a dataset, we calculate the K-L divergence between normalized GCS and LCS scores. A low K-L divergence would suggest that the dataset is representative of the underlying field of research, whereas a high K-L divergence would indicate that the dataset contains many out-of-place articles ( Table 4 ). S 3 has the lowest K-L divergence. F and N F have similar scores. N B and S 5 have higher scores as expected given their size.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994.t004

The overview of a visualized network based on the combined dataset is shown in Fig 7 . The colors in the map on the left depict the time of a link is added. For example, the youngest areas are located towards the lower left of the network, whereas the oldest ones are located near the top. The colors in the map on the right are encoded to depict the membership of clusters. The largest cluster is shown in red, following a rainbow colormap, so that we will know the relative size of a cluster. We will overlay networks from each individual dataset to identify what each search strategy brings unique topics to the overall landscape.

Modularity: 0.84. Silhouette: 0.34.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994.g007

Table 5 lists the distribution of each of the largest 10 clusters in the combined network across the five individual datasets. Thematic labels of each cluster include terms selected by Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and by log-likelihood ratio. The former tends to identify common themes, whereas the latter tends to highlight unique themes. The two selections may differ as well as agree. Among the 10 largest clusters, the oldest one is #4 information retrieval with 1990 as the average year of publication. The youngest one is #8 deep learning with 2014 as the average year of publication. The largest cluster #0 systems biology/protein interaction network has the lowest silhouette score, which is expected given its size of 284 references. #6 microRNAs/drosophila melanogaster development has the highest silhouette score of 0.967, followed by the 0.965 of #7 big data, suggesting both them are highly uniformed.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994.t005

The distributions of clusters across individual datasets show that clusters 0–1 and 3–5 are well represented in F with over 50% of the members of these cluster (highlighted in the table). N B is essentially responsible for Cluster #6, whereas S 5 is responsible for #7 big data and #8 deep learning. Independently we can identify the unique contributions associated with #6, #7, and #8 from network overlays shown in Fig 8 .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994.g008

Fig 8 shows a set of network overlays of individual datasets (in red) and core reference overlays of the F and S 5 datasets. The three circles in part g highlight the three unique clusters. #6 is contributed essentially by N B , whereas #7 and #8 are captured by S 5 . The effect of cascading citation expansions is evident. The query-based approach (F) failed to capture #7 big data and #8 deep learning as the 5-generation forward expansion from Swanson’s pioneering article did. Are these clusters relevant enough to be still considered as part of a systematic scientometric review of LBD or rather they should be considered as applications of computational technologies to literature-based discovery? Similarly, #6 microRNAs is missed by forward expansions from Swanson’s 1986 article. What is the basis of its relevance? We will address these questions as follows.

Each cluster can be further analyzed by applying the same visual analytic procedure at the next level, i.e. Level 2. The cluster at the original level is known as a Level-1 cluster. One may continue this drill-down process iteratively as needed. Level-2 clusters are useful for interpreting their Level-1 cluster in terms of more specific topics.

Fig 9 illustrates a few reports from CiteSpace on Cluster #, including a visualization that shows Level-2 clusters of the Level-1 cluster (left), a hierarchy of concepts (top), and year-by-year thematic terms of Level-2 clusters. The hierarchy of concepts, also known as a concept tree, provides a useful context to identify the major themes of a cluster according to the degree of a concept node in the tree, or the number of children in the tree. In this case, RNA interference has the highest degree and it suggests that the cluster’s overarching theme is to do with RNA interference. A concept tree provides an informative context for selecting thematic labels. Labels selected through LSI or LLR do not have the benefit of such contextual information. As shown in Fig 9 , #6 appears to be different from other clusters because connections to the study of scientific literature are not obvious.

It is a very specific domain on RNA interference.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994.g009

Since N B is exclusively responsible for the cluster #6, we overlay references cited by Smalheiser’s review, i.e. its footprints, on a network visualization of N B ( Fig 10 ). The NB network consists of two components that are loosely connected with each other. The footprints of Smalheiser’s review mostly appear in the lower component, indicating that the lower component is strongly relevant to LBD. In contrast, the upper component only contains two footprint references, namely Smalheiser NR (2001) and Lugli G (2005). The two references may hold the key to the formation of #6.

The upper area is responsible for the formation of Cluster #6, which is in turn due to two references cited in Smalheiser in his 2017 review.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994.g010

We examine the full text of Smalheiser’s review for the contexts in which these two references are cited. As it turns out, Smalheiser cited the two references as atypical examples of LBD that “arose haphazardly during the course of laboratory investigation” and they are unlike typical LBD examples, in which complementary bodies of literature were purposefully sought after. Lugli G (2005) was cited in the first example of how Smalheiser and his colleagues put two lines of studies together that involved concepts such as double-stranded RNA, which is featured in the concept tree of #6 in Fig 9 . Smalheiser NR (2001) was cited in the second example of atypical LBD, which was about RNA interference in mammalian brain. It took them a decade to find provisional evidence that may valid the discovery in 2012.

Now it becomes evident that the upper component is connected to LBD through this specific connection. Thus the inclusion of #6 by expansion is reasonable. On the other hand, if the upper component does not contain any other references specifically relevant to LBD, then it seems to be necessary to investigate whether the N B expansion should be cut short in this area.

The query-based search (F) did not capture clusters #7 big data and #8 deep learning. As shown in Fig 11 , the red lines indicate the coverage of F. No red lines even remotely approach to either of the clusters.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994.g011

The relevance of Cluster #8 deep learning is investigated as follows. Fig 12 depicts a drill-down analysis of Cluster #8 deep learning, which is the youngest cluster among the 10 largest Level-1 clusters. The concept tree of the cluster identifies deep learning as the primary theme. More specifically, the concept of deep learning appears in contexts that are relevant to LBD, namely in association with drug discovery and biomedical literature. Level-2 clusters include #0 deep learning, #1 deep learning, #2 ensemble gene selection, #3 neuromorphic computing, #4 drug discovery, and #5 medical record. Year-by-year thematic terms include deep learning for the last four years since 2016 along with domain-specific terms such as radiology, breast ultrasound, and precision medicine. Given the multiple connections to biomedical literature, drug discovery, and other domain-specific terms, the cluster on deep learning should be considered as a relevant development of LBD.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223994.g012

Discussions and conclusions

We have proposed and demonstrated a flexible method to improve the quality of data retrieved for systematic scientometric reviews. We have demonstrated how one may use the approach to develop search strategies to meet the needs in common scenarios in practice. The comparisons of network visualization overlays of five datasets have revealed what a commonly used full text search strategy could have missed. Such omissions are likely to be recently emerged topics and missing them in a systematic review may undermine its overall quality. A strategy that combines query-based search and cascading citation expansion is likely to provide a more balanced coverage of a research domain and to reduce the risk of overly relying on topics explicitly specified in the initial queries. A practical implication on finding a representative body of the literature is its potential to uncover emerging topics that are currently connected to the main body of the literature through a chain of weak links. We recommend researchers to consider this strategy in situations when they only have a small number of relevant articles to begin with. As our study demonstrated, a wide variety of articles can serve as a starting point of an expansion process and multiple processes can be utilized and the combination of their results is likely to provide a comprehensive coverage of the underlying thematic landscape of a research field or a discipline.

The present study has some limitations and it raises new questions that need to be addressed in future studies. Our approach implies an assumption that the structure of scientific knowledge can be essentially captured through semantically similar text and/or explicit citation links. Is this assumption valid at the disciplinary level? To what extent does the choice of the seed articles for the expansion process matter? Does the choice of seed articles influence the stability of the expansion process? How many generations of expansion would be optimal?

We have made a few observations and recommendations that are potentially valuable for adapting this type of search strategies to develop a systematic review of a body of scientific literature of interest.

• Using a combination of multiple cascading citation expansions with different seed articles is recommended to obtain a more balanced representation of a field than using a full text search alone.
• Multi-generation citation expansions provide a systematic approach to reduce the risk of missing topics that we may not be familiar with or not aware of altogether.
• Triangulating multiple aggregations of articles such as the core references of a dataset and main paths of a dataset as well as multiple review articles provide useful insights.
• The flexibility of the approach enables researchers to apply the expansion and visual analytic procedure iteratively at multiple levels of granularity, for example, expanding a cluster, comparing the footprints of review articles with main paths, and drilling down a cluster in terms of Level-2 clusters.
• Choosing the starting point and an end point of a cascading expansion process may lead to different results, suggesting the complexity of the networks and threshold selections may play important roles in reproducing the results in similar studies.
• Modularity and cluster silhouette measures can help us to assess the quality of an expansion process.

Comparing multiple networks in the same context allows us to identify the topic areas that are particularly well represented in some of the datasets but not in other ones. Such an understanding of the landscape of a field provides additional insights into the structure and the long-term development of the field.

As a methodology for generating systematic scientometric reviews of a knowledge domain, it bridges the formally mutual exclusive globalism and localism by providing a scalable transition mechanism between them. The most practical contribution of our work is the development and dissemination of a tool that is readily accessible by end users.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Neil Smalheiser for his valuable suggestions on the paper. The work is supported by the SciSIP Program of the National Science Foundation (Award #1633286). CC acknowledges the support of Microsoft Azure Sponsorship. Data sourced from Dimensions, an inter-linked research information system provided by Digital Science ( https://www.dimensions.ai ). This work is also supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A3A2075114). This research is also partially supported by the Yonsei University Research Fund of 2019-22-0066.

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Child Care and Early Education Research Connections

Field research.

Field research is a qualitative method of research concerned with understanding and interpreting the social interactions of groups of people, communities, and society by observing and interacting with people in their natural settings. The methods of field research include: direct observation, participant observation, and qualitative interviews. Each of these methods is described here. Terms related to these and other topics in field research are defined in the  Research Glossary .

Direct Observation

Participant observation, qualitative interviews.

Direct observation  is a method of research where the researcher watches and records the activities of individuals or groups engaged in their daily activities. The observations may be unstructured or structured. Unstructured observations involve the researcher observing people and events and recording his/her observations as field notes. Observations are recorded holistically and without the aid of a predetermined guide or protocol. Structured observation, on the other hand, is a technique where a researcher observes people and events using a guide or set protocol that has been developed ahead of time.

Other features of direct observation include:

• The observer does not actively engage the subjects of the study in conversations or interviews, but instead strives to be unobtrusive and detached from the setting.
• Data collected through direct observation may include field notes, checklists and rating scales, documents, and photographs or video images.
• Direct observation is not necessarily an alternative to other types of field methods, such as participant observation or qualitative interviews. Rather, it may be an initial approach to understanding a setting, a group of individuals, or forms of behavior prior to interacting with members or developing interview protocols.
• Direct observation as a research method is most appropriate in open, public settings where anyone has a right to be or congregate. Conducting direct observation in private or closed settings -- without the knowledge or consent of members -- is more likely to raise ethical concerns.

Participant observation  is a field research method whereby the researcher develops an understanding of a group or setting by taking part in the everyday routines and rituals alongside its members. It was originally developed in the early 20th century by anthropologists researching native societies in developing countries. It is now the principal research method used by ethnographers -- specialists within the fields of anthropology and sociology who focus on recording the details of social life occurring in a setting, community, group, or society. The ethnographer, who often lives among the members for months or years, attempts to build trusting relationships so that he or she becomes part of the social setting. As the ethnographer gains the confidence and trust of the members, many will speak and behave in a natural manner in the presence of the ethnographer.

Data from participant observation studies can take several forms:

• Field notes are the primary type of data. The researcher takes notes of his/her observations and experiences and later develops them into detailed, formal field notes.
• Frequently, researchers keep a diary, which is often a more intimate, informal record of the happenings within the setting.
• The practice of participant observation, with its emphasis on developing relationships with members, often leads to both informal, conversational interviews and more formal, in-depth interviews. The data from these interviews can become part of field notes or may consist of separate interview transcripts.

There are a number of advantages and disadvantages to direct and participant observation studies. Here is a list of some of both. While the advantages and disadvantages apply to both types of studies, their impact and importance may not be the same across the two. For example, researchers engaged in both types of observation will develop a rich, deep understanding of the members of the group and the setting in which social interactions occur, but researchers engaged in participant observation research may gain an even deep understanding. And, participant observers have a greater chance of witnessing a wider range of behaviors and events than those engaged in direct observation.

Advantages of observation studies (observational research):

• Provide contextual data on settings, interactions, or individuals.
• A useful tool for generating hypotheses for further study.
• Source of data on events and phenomena that do not involve verbal interactions (e.g., mother-child nonverbal interactions and contact, physical settings where interactions occur).
• The researcher develops a rich, deep understanding of a setting and of the members within the setting.

Disadvantages of observation studies:

• Behaviors observed during direct observation may be unusual or atypical.
• Significant interactions and events may take place when observer is not present.
• Certain topics do not necessarily lend themselves to observation (e.g., attitudes, emotions, affection).
• Reliability of observations can be problematic, especially when multiple observers are involved.
• The researcher must devote a large amount of time (and resources).
• The researcher's objectivity may decline as he or she spends more time among the members of the group.
• The researcher may be faced with a dilemma of choosing between revealing and not revealing his or her identity as a researcher to the members of the group. If he or she introduces him/herself as a researcher, the members may behave differently than if they assume that he or she is just another participant. On the other hand, if the researcher does not, they may feel betrayed upon learning about the research.

Qualitative interviews  are a type of field research method that elicits information and data by directly asking questions of individuals. There are three primary types of qualitative interviews: informal (conversational), semi-structured, and standardized, open-ended. Each is described briefly below along with advantages and disadvantages.

Informal (Conversational) Interviews

• Frequently occur during participant observation or following direct observation.
• The researcher begins by conversing with a member of the group of interest. As the conversation unfolds, the researcher formulates specific questions, often spontaneously, and begins asking them informally.
• Appropriate when the researcher wants maximum flexibility to pursue topics and ideas as they emerge during the exchange

Advantages of informal interviewing:

• Allows the researcher to be responsive to individual differences and to capture emerging information.
• Information that is obtained is not constrained by a predetermined set of questions and/or response categories.
• Permits researcher to delve deeper into a topic and what key terms and constructs mean to study participants.

Disadvantages of informal interviewing:

• May generate less systematic data, which is difficult to classify and analyze.
• The researcher might not be able to capture everything that the interviewee is saying and therefore there is potential for important nuance or information to be lost. For example, the researcher might not have a tape recorder at that moment due to the spontaneous nature of these interviews.
• Quality of the information obtained depends on skills of the interviewer.

Semi-Structured Interviews

• Prior to the interview, a list of predetermined questions or probes, also known as an interview guide, is developed so that each interviewee will respond to a similar series of questions and topics.
• Questions are generally open-ended to elicit as much detail and meaning from the interviewee as possible.
• The researcher is free to pursue and probe other topics as they emerge during the interview.

Advantages of semi-structured interviewing:

• Systematically captures data across interviewees.
• The researcher is able to rephrase or explain questions to the interviewee to ensure that everyone understands the questions the same way and probe (follow-up) a response so that an individual's responses are fully explored.
• Interviewee is allowed the freedom to express his or her views in their own words.

Disadvantages of semi-structured interviewing:

• Does not offer as much flexibility to respond to new topics that unfold during the interview as the informal interview.
• Responses to questions that have been asked in slightly different ways can be more difficult to compare and analyze.
• Interviewer may unconsciously send signals about the types of answers that are expected.

Standardized, Open-Ended Interviews

• Similar to a survey since questions are carefully scripted and written prior to the interview, which serves to minimize variability in question wording and the way questions are asked.
• The researcher asks a uniform series of questions in the same order to each interviewee.
• The questions are open-ended to capture more details and individual differences across interviewees.
• Particularly appropriate for qualitative studies involving multiple interviewers.

Advantages of standardized interviewing:

• All questions are asked the same to each study participant. Data are comparable across interviewees.
• Reduces interviewer effects when several interviewers are used.
• Standardization helps to facilitate the processing and analysis of the data.

Disadvantages of standardized interviewing:

• Does not offer as much flexibility to respond to and probe new topics that unfold during the interview.
• Standardized wording of questions may limit the responses of those being interviewed.

Both standardized and semi-structured interviews involve formally recruiting participants and are typically tape-recorded. The researcher should begin with obtaining informed consent from the interviewee prior to starting the interview. Additionally, the researcher may write a separate field note to describe the interviewee's reactions to the interview, or events that occurred before or after the interview.

See the following for additional information about field research and qualitative research methods.

• Ethnography, Observational Research and Narrative Inquiry  (PDF)
• An Introduction to Qualitative Research  (PDF)

The content on this page was prepared by Jerry West. It was last updated March 2019.

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• What is field research: Definition, steps & examples

Defne Çobanoğlu

Ever wondered how scientists draw conclusions on groups of people? Or want to know what are the common characteristics of people living in rural areas? Well, when the aim of the study is to explain people’s lives and characteristics through their natural environment, field research is usually the best method scientists choose to go with. The researcher can observe communities, cultures, groups of people, or individuals.

In this article, we discuss the definition, types, and methods of field research and provide some examples of field research. With all this information and the pros and cons of field research, you can make a conscious decision about your next research. Let us get started with the definition!

• What is field research?

Field research is a qualitative method of research where its main concern is conducting research on individuals about the social setting they are in. 

The main focus of field research is understanding and interpreting groups of people, societies, and communities through observation in real-world settings. This research design opens a brand new perspective to any concept, pre-explored or not.

• Why and when to conduct field research?

Field research is an effective method of data collection when the main research topic is about a group of people and the environment they live in. Social scientists try and explore the cause-and-effect relationships between humans and their natural environment. It also gives in-depth information on specific subjects. And, in which circumstances would you need to conduct a field study?

1. When you want to understand the concept of the study

Field research allows scientists to draw conclusions from the data gathered from a focus group and their environment. In some instances, there may be studies conducted on the same subject matter. However, the studies conducted may be insufficient and give improper conclusions. In this instance, a field study can shed light on events. 

2. When there is a lack of data

This method can be used to fill the gaps only different data collection methods can. Usually, on a specific subject, knowledge gathered from previous case studies tends to be limited. And they can only be proven right or wrong by conducting primary research using mixed methods. Field research is a great way to cross-reference what is already known.

3. When you want to acquire high-quality data

Researchers conducting various methods obtain different types of data that can be successfully analyzed via the triangulation method. When more than one research method is used to essentially “fact-check” the data, it proves the accuracy of the information.

• 4 field research methods

Different research methods can be used according to the aim of the study. There are 4 main field research methods, and it is up to the head researcher to use which one. Sometimes, it is a good idea to mix more than one method as well. Let us see the field research methods:

4 methods to conduct field research

1. Direct observation

This is the type of field research method where the researcher has no interventions to the subjects and their environment. The whole purpose of this method is to directly observe the subject in their natural world and draw conclusions.

2. Participant observation

In this field research method, the researcher is not merely an observer but one of the participants. The environment is the same as the direct observation, but this time, the researcher can be an active participant. With good skills in communication and interpersonal relations, the researcher can encourage subjects to engage in discussions effectively.

3. Qualitative interviews

The method of qualitative interviews is achieved when close-ended questions are directly asked to the research subjects. Qualitative interviews provide solid data from a number of sources and can be performed through focus groups, written surveys, and individual interviews . Also, they could be informal, conversational, semi-structured, open-ended, or a mix of all of them.

4. Ethnography

This is a type of field study that records and analyzes cultures, communities, regions, and societies. In ethnography, entire communities or individuals are studied to gain an in-depth perception of cultural values, societal perspectives, and social structure. The field researcher can observe the communities from afar or live among them and silently observe their day-to-day lives.

• How to conduct field research (Step by step)

When you have an objective in mind and want to do field research on the subject to gain insight, there are some steps you should follow. As with every project, a structured plan makes the whole process easier. When you have your study question or know the community you want to explore, you can start with the first step.

1  - Find researchers in the field: You may want to conduct the study yourself, but you can always have outside help.

2  - Clearly identify the topic: It is best to start with a clear study question in mind to have everybody on the same page.

3  - Identify the research method: You can choose one method or have a mix of observations, interviews, surveys , etc. 

4  - Visit the site of the study: When the steps above are successfully completed, the researcher can go into the field and start collecting data either with or without observation.

5  - Use effective note-taking:

Usually, field research takes a long time, and effective note-taking is quite crucial so as not to lose any precious data. There is more than one way of doing this. The researcher can use:  

• Job notes ( short notes taken during the research), 
• Field notes (detailed and precise notes), 
• Journals and diaries (insightful notes into the life of the researcher),
• Methodological notes (notes about methods used and their progress)

6  - Analyze the data: 

Once the data collection is completed, it is time to analyze them carefully.

7  - Communicate the results:

The next and final step is to make a field study report and explain the outcome.

• Field research examples

Basically, field research can be successfully used when the aim is to draw correlations between people and their environments. The study can be about marketing, sociology, medicine, or psychology. Let us see some examples of field research:

Field research example #1

A result of some studies show that in poorer neighborhoods, obesity levels being higher and more intense than in richer neighborhoods may be attributed to poor living conditions and lack of parental figures in families. However, data analysis from field research may show that a big factor playing a role in obesity levels is the fact that there are fewer healthy market options and more fast-food restaurants in the area. That finding gives a whole new perspective to the subject.

Field research example #2

The researcher can choose a specific region that has a high population of homeless people and observe their day-to-day life, see how they manage and what are their daily routines. They can go into homeless shelters or streets and observe these people. And they can ask them some pre-planned interview questions to get more information if they want.

• Pros and cons of field research

As with every research method, field research also has its pros and cons. It is up to the head researcher to find the best method for their objective. Let us see the advantages of field research and disadvantages of field research to have a better idea.

Pros of field research

• Field research allows researchers to draw correlations between subjects and their environments
• Field research is more natural than lab research. Therefore, it is more reflective of real-life behavior . 
• The researcher is able to gain in-depth insight into the subjects thanks to their proximity to them.

Cons of field research

• Field research may be expensive and time-consuming as some studies may take years to complete.
• Field research is a subjective method and is up to the researcher’s ability .
• Documenting observations can be a challenge as there are many contributing variables .
• Key points to take away

Field research is a type of research where researchers can make conscious decisions on communities, cultures, and groups of people. They can find brand new study questions and create new theories, or they can build on what is already known. It is a great way to collect primary data directly from sources. Here are the key points to take away about field research

• Field research is used when there is a lack of data or when high-quality is needed on a subject.
• A structured step-by-step guide answers researchers' questions about the process of the study.
• Taking effective notes during the study is critical.
• Field studies may be too expensive for some and may take years to complete.
• Field research provides insight directly from real-life situations.
• In addition to observations, interviews, and surveys can be used as well.

In conclusion, field research is an effective way to gain insight into people and their environments. It has its own positive and negative aspects, and it is up to the researcher to successfully complete the study. We have gathered this article to explain field research effectively. Lastly, for your research needs and so much more, forms.app is a great helper and can make your day easier with a few buttons!

Defne is a content writer at forms.app. She is also a translator specializing in literary translation. Defne loves reading, writing, and translating professionally and as a hobby. Her expertise lies in survey research, research methodologies, content writing, and translation.

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• Published: 08 May 2024

All-optical subcycle microscopy on atomic length scales

• T. Siday   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0157-3233 1   na1 ,
• J. Hayes   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8446-1573 1   na1 ,
• F. Schiegl   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0002-2963-4130 1   na1 ,
• F. Sandner 1 ,
• P. Menden 1 ,
• V. Bergbauer 1 ,
• M. Zizlsperger 1 ,
• S. Nerreter 1 ,
• S. Lingl 1 ,
• J. Repp   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2883-7083 1 ,
• J. Wilhelm   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8678-8246 1 ,
• M. A. Huber   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5324-9895 1 ,
• Y. A. Gerasimenko   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5337-284X 1 &
• R. Huber   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6617-9283 1  

Nature volume  629 ,  pages 329–334 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Nanophotonics and plasmonics
• Nanoscale materials
• Optical techniques
• Ultrafast photonics

Bringing optical microscopy to the shortest possible length and time scales has been a long-sought goal, connecting nanoscopic elementary dynamics with the macroscopic functionalities of condensed matter. Super-resolution microscopy has circumvented the far-field diffraction limit by harnessing optical nonlinearities 1 . By exploiting linear interaction with tip-confined evanescent light fields 2 , near-field microscopy 3 , 4 has reached even higher resolution, prompting a vibrant research field by exploring the nanocosm in motion 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 . Yet the finite radius of the nanometre-sized tip apex has prevented access to atomic resolution 20 . Here we leverage extreme atomic nonlinearities within tip-confined evanescent fields to push all-optical microscopy to picometric spatial and femtosecond temporal resolution. On these scales, we discover an unprecedented and efficient non-classical near-field response, in phase with the vector potential of light and strictly confined to atomic dimensions. This ultrafast signal is characterized by an optical phase delay of approximately π/2 and facilitates direct monitoring of tunnelling dynamics. We showcase the power of our optical concept by imaging nanometre-sized defects hidden to atomic force microscopy and by subcycle sampling of current transients on a semiconducting van der Waals material. Our results facilitate access to quantum light–matter interaction and electronic dynamics at ultimately short spatio-temporal scales in both conductive and insulating quantum materials.

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Acknowledgements

We thank C. Bustamante, F. Bonafé, A. Rubio and F. J. Gießibl for discussions and M. Furthmeier for technical assistance. This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project-ID, 314695032 – SFB 1277 (Subprojects A05 and B02), major instrumentation grant INST 89/505-1 FUGG and through research grants HU1598/8, HU1598/9-RE2669/8 and WI5664/3-1. We acknowledge the computing time provided on the high-performance computers Noctua 2 at the NHR Center PC2. These are funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the state governments participating on the basis of the resolutions of the GWK for the national high-performance computing at universities ( www.nhr-verein.de/unsere-partner ).

Author information

These authors contributed equally: T. Siday, J. Hayes, F. Schiegl

Authors and Affiliations

Department of Physics and Regensburg Center for Ultrafast Nanoscopy (RUN), University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

T. Siday, J. Hayes, F. Schiegl, F. Sandner, P. Menden, V. Bergbauer, M. Zizlsperger, S. Nerreter, S. Lingl, J. Repp, J. Wilhelm, M. A. Huber, Y. A. Gerasimenko & R. Huber

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

T.S., M.A.H., Y.A.G. and R.H. conceived the study. T.S., J.H., F. Schiegl, F. Sandner, P.M., V.B., S.L., M.A.H. and Y.A.G. performed the experiments and analysed the data. T.S. and Y.A.G. fabricated the samples. T.S., J.H., F. Schiegl, F. Sandner, P.M., V.B., M.Z., S.N., S.L., J.R., J.W., M.A.H., Y.A.G. and R.H. contributed to the discussions of the experimental results. T.S., J.H., M.A.H., Y.A.G. and R.H. developed and computed the dipole emission model. J.W. developed and computed the ab initio quantum simulations. The paper was written by T.S., Y.A.G. and R.H. with input and contributions from all authors.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to J. Wilhelm , M. A. Huber or Y. A. Gerasimenko .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

After the final round of submission, the University of Regensburg applied for a German patent (no. 10 2024 108 203.8) on near-field optical tunnelling emission microscopy. The authors declare no further competing interests.

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Peer review information.

Nature thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended data fig. 1 tip-sample distance dependence of the scattered transients for the first and third harmonic..

First ( a ) and third ( b ) harmonic, \({E}_{1}^{{\rm{scat}}}\) and \({E}_{3}^{{\rm{scat}}}\) , of the scattered electric fields, measured simultaneously with the transients shown in Fig. 1b (peak far-field strength \({\hat{E}}_{{\rm{light}}}=1.3\) kV cm −1 ). For the closest tip-sample distance about 900 electrons are rectified per pulse on average. The colours correspond to the distances shown in Fig. 1c . The strong underlying nonlinearity is highlighted by the increased difference in signal strength for different tip-sample separations when going to higher demodulation orders.

Source Data

Extended Data Fig. 2 Decay of the NOTE signal at large tip-tapping amplitudes.

a , Electro-optically detected scattered THz transients demodulated at the second harmonic of the tip-tapping frequency ( \({E}_{2}^{{\rm{scat}}}\) ) with A  = 5 nm and \({\hat{E}}_{{\rm{light}}}=1.1\) kV cm −1 . For the transient acquired at the closest tip-sample distance \(\langle \,{J}_{{\rm{lw}}}\,\rangle =-180\) pA, on average about 80 rectified electrons per pulse. b , Peak of the THz transient ( \({\hat{E}}_{2}^{{\rm{scat}}}\) ) at t = 0 fs, measured at a tip-tapping amplitude A  = 5 nm for increasing tip-sample separation \(\Delta z\) . c , Logarithmic-scale plot of the data shown in Fig. 2b : \({\hat{E}}_{2}^{{\rm{scat}}}\) measured at the second harmonic of the tip-tapping frequency ( A  = 200 pm, \({\hat{E}}_{{\rm{light}}}=0.8\) kV cm −1 ), alongside the time-integrated lightwave tunnelling current \(\langle \,{J}_{{\rm{lw}}}\,\rangle \) measured for increasing tip-sample separation (on average about 200 electrons per pulse are rectified for the closest tip-sample distance).

Extended Data Fig. 3 NOTE transients sampled on Au(111).

Electro-optically detected scattered THz transients measured at the first three harmonics of the tip-tapping frequency ( A  = 1 nm). In each panel, the red curve shows the case of an approached tip, where tunnelling currents can flow ( \(\langle \,{J}_{{\rm{lw}}}\,\rangle =-300\,{\rm{pA}}\) , on average about 140 rectified electrons per pulse, Δ ν = −4.8 Hz, \({\hat{E}}_{{\rm{light}}}=1.3\) kV cm −1 ). The blue curve shows the case where the tip is retracted away from the tunnelling barrier.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Steady-state tunnelling spectrum of Au(111) and optical detection bandwidth.

a , Experimental tunnelling spectrum, measured with steady-state STM on the surface of Au(111). b , Amplitude and phase of the response of the EOS detection, including the detector response of gallium phosphide and focusing conditions of the parabolic mirrors.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Distribution of tunnelled charges at the tip apex.

a , Distribution of charges on the surface of a sphere with radius r  = 100 Å at distance d  = 5 Å from a large sphere with radius R . The local strength of the surface charge is indicated by the diameter of the blue circles. b , Surface charge density around the surface of the sphere as a function of the polar angle θ shown in a .

Extended Data Fig. 6 Numerical model of the tip-transfer function.

a , Spatial distribution of the electric field magnitude on a cross-section of the STM tip. The inset shows the near fields in the vicinity of the nanoscale apex. b , Magnitude and phase of the field enhancement at the tip apex as a function of frequency.

Extended Data Fig. 7 Atomic-scale decay of the NOTE signal in the quantum simulation.

a , Amplitude of the simulated NOTE dipoles ( A  = 1 Å) evaluated at t = 0 fs, for increasing average tip-sample separation \(\left\langle z\right\rangle \) . b , Simulated peak of the ultrafast tunnelling current ( \({\hat{J}}_{{\rm{l}}{\rm{w}}}\) ) for a static tip as a function of the tip-sample separation z . The angstrom-scale decay of the NOTE dipole in panel a closely follows that of the ultrafast tunnelling current.

Extended Data Fig. 8 Bias spectroscopy of mono- and trilayer WSe 2 on Au(111).

Normalized steady-state differential conductance of WSe 2 mono- and trilayer on Au(111). In the monolayer, some electrons tunnel directly from tip to Au(111), resulting in a measurable current within the gap. The additional tunnelling barriers introduced by the trilayer remove this current pathway.

Extended Data Fig. 9 Far-field THz transient and spectrum.

a , Incident THz transient sampled in the far field. b , Corresponding spectrum of the incident THz field.

Source data

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Siday, T., Hayes, J., Schiegl, F. et al. All-optical subcycle microscopy on atomic length scales. Nature 629 , 329–334 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07355-7

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Received : 12 May 2023

Accepted : 26 March 2024

Published : 08 May 2024

Issue Date : 09 May 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07355-7

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