Fieldnotes and Observation Logs

QUESTION: What’s the difference between an observation fieldnote and an observation log?

ANSWER:

FIELDNOTES typically provide as much detail as possible about everything that might be of interest to the researcher, now and in the future. They are typically narrative in form and somewhat discursive, but the focus is on what the researcher can see and hear in the field setting. They can also include reflections by the researcher about the setting and about topics or issues that come to mind in response to what the researcher sees and hears. But the emphasis is on the concrete, specific details about the field setting, actors, activities, events, and contexts–all of this tied tightly to what can be seen and heard. The research ideal is to separate these visible and audible sense data/recordings from inferences, speculation and conjecture by the researcher about what “things mean” or “portend.”

FIELD OBSERVATION LOGS provide an abbreviated and somewhat abstracted account or record of what was observed in a field setting. There’s much less detail than in a full set of fieldnotes, but perhaps a bit more structure. A common logging strategy is to link brief descriptions, comments, notes, or quotes to a timeline for an activity being observed. If the notes and descriptions were extensive, specific and very detailed, that would be considered a fieldnote. If they were brief, more general and much less detailed, that would be considered a log. But a key difference here is that fieldnotes, by definition, include much more information but take twice as much time to prepare as a log. And a log has less information but also takes half the time to prepare as a useful set of fieldnotes.

QUESTION: Can you say this more simply or in a way that someone who has never done either might understand?

ANSWER:  I can try, but the more understandable answer might also be more complex:

Let’s say that culture and social life is something like a huge swirling mishmash of millions of movies, all going on at the same time. You’re a researcher who is interested in some aspect of culture and social life, and when you ask your professor how to study the feature you’re interested in, he points you to the entire mishmash and says something like, “If you really want to understand that feature, you need to take a look at all of these movies and tell me what’s going on out there. And if you want me to believe you, you’ll have to provide not only lots of specifics but also an account of which movies you saw all the way through and which ones you skipped, just glanced at or only read about.”

Now, that might stimulate a little panic because it all seems absolutely overwhelming, but you want to learn how to do this kind of thing, so you plunge in and watch one of those millions of movies and try to pay attention and take notes about everything that you can notice while watching that one movie. And when the movie is over, you look over your notes and see words and phrases and a few sentences, a lot of which need some further explanation. And when you start filling in that explanation you remember more details about the movie you just saw–details that you had not included in your notes at the time, but that now seem at least as interesting or important as the things you did include–and by the time you’ve expanded, edited, formatted and cleaned up this material so that it’s clear enough for someone else to follow, you’ve spent more time on your notes than you did watching the original movie. Whew!

You do the same for another movie and then another. But after spending an average of 2-3 hours of writing afterwards for every  hour of film you’ve been watching, you’re exhausted–not only by how much work it takes to do something like this but also about how overwhelming it would be to try to provide detailed accounts of this sort of the many, many movies related to the “feature” you’re interested in.

So, you say to yourself, “This is impossible. I’m not going to look at any more movies. I’ll just just use the three (or five, or twenty) I’ve seen so far and wrote up in lots of detail and go with that.” But when you check in with your professor about that, she says, “Oh dear, that won’t do! If the feature you’re interested in is manifest in many different kinds of movies, you’ll need to look at many different kinds of movies, not just the ones you’ve done so far.”

Your panic comes back, but the professor is not a sadist and really does want you to succeed (which is true!), so she says: “Look you’ve got some good, detailed notes of several movies, with lots of specifics and rich descriptions. So let’s shift the focus a bit and see how these movies “compare” to some other movies that you have not yet seen. And just to make the task  more manageable, let’s cut back on how much time you spend writing up your observations, from two hours for every hour of film to an hour or somewhat less for every hour of film. Deal?”

Well, it still sounds like a LOT of work. And it IS! Even if it’s half of what you started out to do, there are still lots of movies and that means lots of time spent watching movies. But if you just watch them and don’t take notes, they’ll start blurring together and then they’ll be difficult to compare and that will reduce the significance of the ones for which you already have detailed notes.

What to do!  Well, maybe you could come up with some kind of short-hand, or summary or. . . I know, a “LOG” of each film!  . . . that would focus on some key features and include some context and basic elements but be shorter and quicker to prepare. Something you could read and analyze at a later date in connection with logs of all the other movies you’ll have to see if you want to conduct a credible study.

QUESTION: So a log is a kind of short-cut to taking fieldnotes, and fieldnotes are a kind of expanded version of a log?

ANSWER: Yes, and each has all the strengths and weaknesses you’d expect. As with other short-cuts, you can also get lost pretty quickly if you’re unfamiliar with the area, so it’s best to start with fieldnotes. Depending on the kind of study you’re doing, it may also be best to stay with fieldnotes the whole way through. Many people do!

 

Turning Big Projects into Little Chunks

Some years back I prepared a chart to keep a book-length research and writing project from overwhelming me. Each row represented one chapter the book in progress, with the working chapter title/theme on the far left. Each column represented a research or writing “step” towards completing the chapter defined by that row, and the writing steps were framed as different kinds of “chunks.” Some chunk titles represented topics, themes or arguments that I would need to write from scratch; others referred to parts of manuscripts I’d already written (as notes, parts of other draft articles, or publications); and still others referred to works by other scholars that I planned to examine as a central feature of the chapter. The cells in any one row read from left to right as a series of incremental steps for completing a chapter, so there was always one “next step” to do for that chapter until the chapter itself was done. You can see a copy of how this table looked at about the half-way point here:
Writing Themes/Chunks Matrix

Before setting up this kind of chart (as I’d typically done with previous projects), I had developed an outline for the book project—as a study of efforts by teachers to develop shared standards in a feeder school cluster–and started developing separate outlines for individual chapters. However, when trying to write from the chapter outlines, I frequently got too deep into issues tangential to that chapter but still important to the overall book. At some point, I’d step back, pull a tangential “chunk” out of the chapter I was working on and set it aside so I could push ahead with the chapter. But it was hard to keep track of the chunks I was pulling out without attaching them to another part of the outline, and they might not be developed fully enough for me to see where they could best fit. Not only that, but the research and writing for this project took place over several years. On more than one occasion, I’d start writing a section of a chapter from scratch then find a chunk I’d already written that covered the same content. A messy way to work, and very inefficient!

One way of thinking about the challenges I faced was that the various outlines, notes and chunks I was preparing did not enable me to “see” what I’d done and what needed doing. This was important for a couple of reasons: First, if I couldn’t “see” the whole project, I could get confused or bewildered about how best to move it forward. Second, without that kind of overall vision, I could get demoralized by long lists of work that remained to be done.

I remember reading once that the author John McPhee used 3×5 cards tacked or taped to the wall to organize essays and books he was working on, and I thought about giving that a try. [I just noticed that the New Yorker of Jan 7th (2013) has a new piece by McPhee about how his books and essays are organized!]. However, I’m kind of a matrix-head, so I chose instead to convert my various file folders of chapter outlines, notes, draft book outlines and work lists into a single table.

Preparing the table helped me articulate the how the concepts, organization, and tasks of writing this book might fall together. As something of a surprise, it also provided me with a nice balance of options and constraints for moving ahead. As long as I was moving from left to right in at least one of the rows, I was moving ahead with getting the book done. But if I got stuck on that particular row, or needed a break, I could also look up or down a row and find something else to work on—something that was also helping to get the book done. By turning the outlines and work plan entries for the book into research and writing chunks I could see on the grid, I could also play with the idea of moving a chunk from one chapter to another, or revising chapter titles to better reflect the chunks listed farther out along that row.

Of course, the topics, chunks and table itself were always provisional. But preparing this as a MS Word document, I could revise as I went along, coloring in cells/steps/chunks when I finished them, or highlighting a few steps from different columns and rows as my top priorities for getting the whole shebang done and out the door. By printing out and keeping copies of the table from time to time, I also documented how my thinking about the book changed as I worked on it.

These were all positive outcomes of creating the table, and I don’t remember any negatives. But I must confess that this particular project was never finished—at least not in the book form represented by the table I’ve displayed here, though that’s not the table’s fault. At a point right about where this version was current, I got caught up in a couple of other big projects and had to set this one aside. By the time those other projects were wrapped up, six or seven years had gone by. I really enjoyed the other projects and felt quite good about the work I put into them and what came out of that—but I haven’t yet abandoned the book represented by this table, which, by my reckoning is about half done. What’s interesting to me now is that almost a decade later, the table still provides a relatively precise picture of what it will take to finish off the other half, which is something I’m heading into now.

Beyond the specifics of this particular project, using some sort of table like this to organize little chunks of big projects has become an attractive routine for me in many other research and writing projects, and in designing courses I teach as well. But in the last few years I’ve also shifted somewhat from tables to databases—FileMaker Pro in particular. In the database approach, each “chunk” becomes a record that can be labeled by values from one or more fields. That opens up prospects for a lot more links between chunks than will fit well in a table. Some chunks, for example, may appear useful for more than one chapter or more than one book. “Seeing” that through a database can be useful in working across projects, and it’s also a tool for rethinking the broader significance of an individual chunk, including how that reflects back on my own intellectual growth—or lack thereof.

Reflections of this sort are interesting enough to keep me occupied from time to time, but I do also want to get a few things done, not just figure out how to do them! So at some point it’s time to stop organizing the organizing tools and do some writing. After all, what good is a matrix or database for visualizing chunks of writing if you don’t have any chunks of writing you need to visualize!

Audio Recording Methodologies

Tools and methods for recording interviews with enough audio fidelity, integrity and selectivity to support social research may seem relatively mundane or matter-of-fact. And for some research purposes, almost any digital or tape-based audio recorder will suffice. But choices among different methods and technologies can also shape important theoretical priorities and concerns. That’s also true for choices about how a recorded interview will be processed, converted, examined, analyzed or reproduced.

Traditionally, the first step in the post-interview workflow was to make a written transcript of the audio recording, a verbatim text that could then be edited or analyzed. That’s still a very common practice, but recent software and hardware developments make possible some intriguing alternatives. Choices between these alternative “methods” involve matters of personal preference and technical skill, but they also reflect and support different kinds of theorizing about the substance of culture and social life in general and the “content” of interviews in particular.

 Alternative Audio Analysis Strategies

Some of these choices are displayed in the figure above as four different strategies for working with an audio recording of an interview. Each strategy appears as a vertical column (labeled at the bottom as A, B, C and D) that starts with the same audio recording “stream.” In column ‘A,’ the strategy involves listening to the recording and making more or less detailed notes with a standard word processing program. The product of this method could be a log of the interview (in which a few details or themes are indexed to sequence or duration), a narrative or thematic summary of the interview, or a verbatim transcript (that might also include some features of a log or summary). When the process is complete, the researcher has in hand a text that can stand in for the audio recording in any subsequent rounds of analysis or reporting.

The second and third columns (‘B’ and ‘C’) suggest two different ways of building computer data base functions into the analysis of the same audio recording. In the Column ‘B,’ a written transcript is prepared, much as it might be in column ‘A’, but the transcript is then broken into chunks that are imported as individual records in a data base program. Each chunk of text, or record, can be coded and annotated, retrieved, and re-assembled according to different themes. This “code and retrieve” approach enables a researcher to bring together related comments from the same or different interviews for further analysis. It entails the same kind of conversion from audio to text that takes place in strategy ‘A’, but the “text” product itself is enriched to include not only a sequential summary or transcript, but a database of text “chunks” drawn from it.

In strategy ‘C’ the same data base features appear that were part of strategy ‘B,’ but with an interesting twist. Rather than first converting the audio recording into a text, and then breaking up the text into meaningful chunks, the audio recording itself is broken into chunks, with each chunk then identified with particular themes, questions or issues. Once again each chunk appears as an individual data base record, but the records themselves include a section of the audio recording. In contrast to ‘B,’ strategy ‘C’ allows analysis of the interview to be based on the audio recording itself (not a text translation of the interview) and leaves open the option of selective transcription after analysis is concluded. That said, both ‘B’ and ‘C’ split the continuous coherent “stream” of the audio recording (or its text transcription) into discrete chunks, which may or may not make sense for a particular line of inquiry.

In the far right column I have suggested a fourth approach that combines features of the preceding three. Strategy ‘D’ starts with the same audio recording as ‘A,’ ‘B’ and ‘C,’ but preserves that recording intact through subsequent rounds of analysis or transcription. In contrast to the other three approaches, text transcriptions, codes and annotations are attached directly to the audio recording as another “layer” of a digital file. This transforms the audio stream into an audio-text database; text is segmented and indexed to different sections of the audio recording without fragmenting the recording. Working with strategy ‘D,’ a researcher could listen to the entire recording, locate audio segments by searching for code words or summaries assigned to them– within or across interviews. This strategy thus preserves all the information of the source audio recording throughout the process of analysis.

These four different approaches present somewhat different technical challenges, but they also support different kinds of interview-based studies and different kinds of theorizing about culture and social life. To understand the implications of these contrasts it’s useful to consider four related distinctions: data “chunks” and “streams;” analytical “annotation” and “coding;” “audio” and “text” representations;” and the boundaries between “informants,” “colleagues,” and “audiences.”

Field Recordings as Literature

As a listener, reader, social researcher, and citizen, I’m a great fan of good audio recordings and interviews and of field recordings in particular. There’s something about listening to what people have to say, recorded cleanly and fairly in their own voices, that I find stimulating, entertaining and enlightening. I don’t think of audio interviews as short stories, poems or novels, but as documents that are nevertheless akin to literature and, as such, objects that are worthy of cultural appreciation and critique. Audio recordings can also provide valuable data for social and cultural analysis, either on their own or when converted to written transcripts, which can then be annotated, indexed and coded. That makes them well worth attending to as a medium and method of social research.

As both documentary literature and data, audio recordings provide a distinctive way of depicting the interplay of voice, meaning and situation. Audio recordings allow us to feel that we’re listening to another person, for example, not just “encountering a text.” And in some sense we are, just not at the same time and place in which that person spoke.

Audio recordings enable us to discern deliberation, word choices and self-consciousness (or the lack thereof) in how someone speaks. These are reminders that talk is dynamic, flowing and performed, that one word does not follow another until someone uses her or his voice to make that happen. Audio recordings can also offer a leg up on understanding what people mean by what they say. That’s important to social researchers who want to understand what people think and do, not just the words they use, and it’s also important when we want to document forms of narrative and story telling that both illustrate and rely on subtleties of the spoken word.

Realizing the special virtues of audio recordings for both literary-documentary and social scientific purposes depends in part on the technical quality of the recording itself. When recording quality is so poor that there’s no audible difference between one voice and another, for example, we can forget that the words are coming from someone in particular. When a conversation is submerged by unwelcome ambient sounds, phrases become unintelligible and we can lose track of ideas and meaning. When an otherwise clear recording is fractured by bursts of static, or precipitous volume swings, we’re distracted from the flow and cadence of what a person says.

Problematics such as these frame three key challenges in making “good audio recordings”: First is the challenge of fidelity, or the level of acoustic detail and accuracy provided by the audio recording and how well this corresponds to the original sound source. Second is the challenge of integrity, ensuring that no additional or unwanted sounds are introduced by the recording equipment itself. A third challenge is selectivity, or the degree to which recorded sounds are inclusive of what we are interested in and exclusive of everything else.

Thoughtful efforts to address these challenges depend on an appropriate alignment of ideas and purposes with techniques and equipment. If the purpose is to create a set of personal voice memos or a written transcript, for example, trying to achieve broadcast quality standards of fidelity will be wasted effort. On the other hand, for the scientific analysis of audio signals and spectra–-a routine practice among ornithologists–-even broadcasting equipment can fall short of what’s required.

As these last comments suggest, there’s no such thing as a perfect audio recording, and there are different ideas about what’s good enough. These ideas reflect personal preferences for different kinds of equipment or effects, but they also reflect the fact that people make audio recordings for quite different reasons. Rarely are these reasons teased apart in audio recording accounts and guides in precisely the way someone would like to inform their next project (or understand shortcomings of their last). However, as described in the attached document (Recording Interviews), some general principles do apply in matching purposes to equipment, equipment to method, and method to methodology.

Fieldwork and Everyday Life

We all practice casual forms of fieldwork just to stay alive and to navigate different situations (settings) that characterize the world in which we live. We do this by looking more or less closely (observations) at where we’re going, have been or hope to go; by asking people questions (interviews) about what goes on in places we’re trying to get a fix on, by collecting odds and ends (artifacts) that we can study to figure out what to do next–moving around, getting something done, or avoiding trouble. Along the way, we also develop and use our wits, skills and handy tools to represent what we’ve observed, heard, and collected in conversation with ourselves or others (depictions).

These same  features–settings, observations, interviews, artifacts and depictions–also form the basis of the more ambitious, systematic and formal forms of fieldwork practiced by sociologists and anthropologists. But important differences do exist between the kind of fieldwork that everyone does to navigate daily life and the fieldwork social researchers practice to understand people, culture and social life.

One way of thinking about these differences, is that social researchers conduct fieldwork by getting engaged with a distinctive constellation of ideas and things. The ideas include professional perspectives that researchers bring to their fieldwork, theories about what’s going on within and across different kinds of settings, and concepts or arguments that others scholars have made about similar or related phenomena. The things include specialized fieldwork materials and data sources, techniques for organizing those materials, and an assortment of recording, analysis and presentation tools.

Taken together, the confluence of these ideas and things constitutes the material culture of professional fieldwork. As examined in the post and pages of this website, that kind of fieldwork is a distinctive domain within the material culture of social research–which is itself a specialized strand of empirical inquiry. Throughout it all, the idea is to use empirical evidence to test ideas and use ideas to organize and analyze empirical evidence. The kind of fieldwork practiced by social researchers has no monopoly on that process, but it does have an interesting history.

Among people who have a professional interest in understanding culture and social life, fieldwork stands in pretty good stead. Some exemplary practitioners have also found fieldwork a compelling complement to everyday life and celebrate its potential to fuel personal or social transformation. Others have found it somewhat stimulating and kind of fun. Perhaps you will as well.