Field Notes

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Taking down field notes is the act of recording one's research data as well as the beginning of communicating one's research findings with others. The creation of a permanent record of events, interviews, interpretations, and ideas allows researchers to be clear about what they think they know. Often, in the course of discussing field work as a methodological tool, people wonder how spending time in a particular place with particular people [Page 397]enabled the researcher to come to the conclusion that he or she understands something about them that they may not themselves admit to understanding. Few of us can claim to really understand our own neighbors. However, as trained professionals engaging in field work, case study researchers keep field notes and rely heavily on them as a primary source of data. Through taking down a description of an event, they create the record of an event. As Clifford Geertz describes it, case study researchers inscribe social discourse, turning it from a passing event, existing only in its own moment of occurrence, into an account, which exists in its inscriptions and can be reviewed at a later time.

There is an air of mystery surrounding field notes and what they should contain. Should field notes be a glorified diary, including the researcher's personal feelings, struggles and desires? For some, making note of any personal issue is important in that it might come to shed light on a particular phase of research. For others, keeping a research-based field notebook along with a separate, more personal journal is preferred.

The posthumous publishing of Bronislaw Malinowski's diary in 1967 brought this discussion to the fore of many social science debates. A founding father of anthropology, Malinowski was seen in full exposure, his personal thoughts and desires laid bare in a way he certainly had never intended. His notes and data were full of great depth and breadth and led to the publication of highly respected monographs in the discipline. These portrayed him as a man struggling through both culture shock and assimilation who frankly documented his feelings, which many in a similar circumstance and point in time may have shared. Some see this as a clear showing of the complexity of the human experiences and human beings involved.

Application

Field notes can take many forms. There are the random jottings that take place when one walks from village house to village house or the notes made at a café where one sits between interviews. Some of these notes are descriptive, focusing on the physical space, the mannerisms of the people present, the sounds, smells, and duration of events. Others are merely words taken down to jog one's memory later when one expands on earlier notes. They should be written, expanded upon, reviewed, added to, and reviewed again. For those more accustomed with a natural science model for research, this may sound strange. If field notes are a researcher's data, then how could a researcher add to them, expand on them, “change” them? Well, the techniques of observing and participating require that researchers note their findings through those field work activities and that they do so in a way that will enable them to write their theses later and provide the data to support their findings. Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, in his account of economic and artistic life in Ecuador, engagingly describes his note taking and data collection in Otavalo. Colloredo-Mansfeld not only relies on his written documentation of life in the artisan community, but also sketches scenes of the culture around him, thereby opening himself up as an artist and researcher in the community. Because his field notes included detailed descriptions of household goods, the sketches acted as both a field note and also as a pictorial representation of his jottings. When Alma Gottlieb and Philip Graham were in a West African village, as anthropologist and writer/partner they had multiple encounters with their need to record their experiences. Gottlieb describes her desperation to begin her orderly and systematic collection of field notes by following the census model of her advisor only to find that simple questions, and hoping for simple answers to develop into real field notes, is often easier said than done. Field workers find through their interactions with ethnographic and fiction writing that taking down reality amounts to more than simple notes.

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