SOCB05H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Gang Leader, Participant Observation, Institute For Operations Research And The Management Sciences
Document Summary
Whenever we"re observing or participating in any social interactions, we"re engaging in some kind of informal field research. Field research is probably the oldest type of qualitative research and the oldest type of social science research. Field research demands a number of strong skills such as the accumulation of empirical evidence, documentation of that evidence and the capacity to organize large amounts of information. In general, field research is a type of qualitative research but within that, you use different modes of data collection and different theoretical approaches. You"re not engaging in arm-chair philosophy where you"re sitting back outside and analyzing people from afar. You"re also not doing something in an artificial setting ie. experiment. One of the flaws of other types of research is you"re asking people to recall things that"s happened in the past. Field research helps to overcome that flaw because we"re looking at the process as it"s happening.
