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!