Field Notes

Field notes are a qualitative approach most often used in ethnography. Field notes are written observations recorded during or immediately following participant observations in the field and are considered critical to understanding phenomena encountered in the field. Field notes are commonly associated with scratch notes, diaries, and journals. They are one way of collecting data that can be combined with interviews and focus groups or stand on their own as a text for analysis. Field notes are a collection of documents from a researcher’s observed experience in a specific setting or environment. Documents such as written notes, reports, and materials from the environment, including pictures, videos, and pamphlets, can all be used to help the researcher become immersed in the environment under observation. As part of the ethnographic process, the researcher becomes a participant observer and pays careful attention to what is going on within a specific community or event and takes notes of certain behaviors, conversations, and settings. An example of becoming a participant observer and taking field notes is going to a local coffee shop and sitting down with the intent of carefully observing and recording what is taking place. A skilled researcher observes an environment and pays careful attention to the smallest of details, including the physical setting, what people are wearing, [Page 564]conversations, and what is not being said. After the researcher is done observing and leaves the setting for the day, he or she typically expands on the field notes and writes additional information or questions he or she has about the observation.

This entry defines field notes and discusses how the researcher creates them in a study. To begin, ethnography and participant observation are discussed to help contextualize how and where field notes are often used. While field notes are commonly associated with ethnography and using participant observation to understand unknown social and cultural contexts, they can also be supplemental to interviews and focus groups to capture additional details about the context and content of interaction. Details related to writing and organizing field notes in a manner that can be considered best practices for producing quality field notes are discussed. The entry concludes by examining some of the challenges posed by this particular method of data collection.