This website brings together some of the notes, forms, samples, guidelines, commentaries and tips I’ve developed for understanding and using fieldwork materials. Fieldwork materials can ideally help researchers learn more about people, culture and social life in particular field settings. Materials that enable investigators do that in ways that are empirical, systematic, and effective are especially important to fieldwork practice.

Fieldwork materials can include field notes, interview questions and transcripts, photographs, audio and video recordings, kinship charts, survey forms and questionnaires, software applications, and databases–as well as observed and collected indigenous artifacts. These materials tie ideals of empirical inquiry and social scientific theory to the pragmatic challenges of studying culture and social life, and they shape how researchers approach both the people they study and their own research colleagues. As such, and for better or worse, research materials reflect tensions around which projects can come together or fall apart. Research artifacts and reports can highlight or skew results. Research records and objects can clarify or conceal truths and encourage or discourage ambiguity. In just these respect, fieldwork materials can also bring researchers, subjects and audiences closer or drive them farther away.

People interested in qualitative research, participant observation, collaborative or participatory research, documentary studies and  ethnography can use this site to explore fieldwork materials that support  these and similar approaches. A bunch of these materials are accessible through the links and tabs above and to the right, with more to come.

Jon Wagner, Professor Emeritus
School of Education
UC Davis
February 2019