Fieldwork: Learning How to Get the Information You Need

Fieldwork: Learning How to Get the Information You Need

Conducting fieldwork in unfamiliar locations is both an art and a science. For researchers in the disciplines of political science and sociology focusing on comparative and international questions, it is often a necessity, both for the dissertation and for later work. It can be immensely fun and fulfilling. Yet it also contains many challenges and pitfalls. Oddly, while departments typically stuff their graduate curricula with other kinds of methodology courses, few if any teach students how to do fieldwork. One reason why fieldwork is to some extent an art rather than a science is that every project is different. They vary on several dimensions: The type of specific methodologies that are used (interviews, surveys, archival research, experiments, etc.); the skills, contacts, money, time and other resources that the researcher has at his or her disposal; the state of the scholarly literature that is being addressed (whether the topic is terra nova or there are well-developed hypotheses to be addressed); and the difficulty of accessing sources due to the sensitivity of the topic or other constraints.