Field Research

There are now numerous textbooks, sets of readings and reflections on doing social research. Much of this textbook material is American and deals with the way in which social research and in particular social surveys should be done. These ‘cookbook’ approaches to social research omit discussions of the interplay between research methods and research experience. Accordingly, research biographies have been produced in which editors have invited researchers to ‘come clean’ about the way in which research is actually done. While such accounts are high on description of the research process, they are often low on analytic discussions of methods of social research in general and field research in particular.