Steps in fieldwork
Team planning
We work out the overall process with the help of those playing a part in fieldwork, and capture it. Planning together and sharing an outline of the process helps to build shared understanding at the start and keeps everyone moving in a useful direction.
Outline designs show overall the work we plan to do with the community; also the planning and analysis work that the team will have to do on its own. If we need to change the overall process we can quickly see what the costs and benefits of changes might be.
Detailed designs are facilitators' maps of where to go. Note that facilitators must have freedom to move when actually running workshops, so these might need to be changed. Note also that later bits of a process might be re-designed as we complete earlier bits.
Framing
Framing is what we say when we arrive to do fieldwork - it is how we explain ourselves to people. We call it framing because it puts some boundaries around our research focus so that both we and the people we work with are talking about the same thing.
It is useful to find the words for framing early on in the planning process because it helps greatly to get our own heads clear on what we are doing. For example, explaining the concept of tenure in a way that is real for people is a challenge and it helps to prepare beforehand.
In practice facilitators draw from a framing document rather than quoting it word for word. They may find themselves constrained for time. They may have to work with a group through unexpected difficulties with a particular approach or concept. They may decide to work with framing by interacting with the group rather than by doing an input.
Participatory approaches
Participatory research methods are helpful in getting to people's own understanding and perceptions of their situation, giving them the opportunity to analyze it and the opportunity to decide what they want to do about it. Used correctly they are open-ended - they leave as much space as possible for people's own views.
- Work from the concrete to the more abstract, so that the logic of the process takes people into open discussion of the issues we are interested in. For example, a good place to start is with a map of land use. Such a map can take us into discussions of who has rights to what and how they got these rights, which can take us into discussions of land rights administration processes and authorities, and so on.
- Start broad, get more detailed in later meetings. After the first meeting we assess what we need to know more about, and design later processes to fill gaps in our areas of interest.
- Use structured but open-ended methods like focus groups rather than questionnaires. Discussion usually takes us deeper into difficult questions than questionnaires. Some questionnaires might be useful for detail and cross checking.
- Use visual methods where appropriate (for example, maps and timelines). Some visual methods help people to keep talking about what is real; some help them to see connections between information; some really help shy people to contribute because they can show information....
Checklists
Checklists help the person who carries final responsibility for capturing what people say, especially where he or she is working with tight terms of reference from an outside client. It makes it possible to use processes in which people talk openly and take us beyond our preconceived ideas, while "getting what we need from people". We can use the checklist to
- check how we are doing in terms of collecting information - what do we need to do more work on?
- type in information in point form as we gather it, so as to provide partly organized material for doing analysis, or partly organized material for writing reports and other documents.
Preliminary analysis
At this point the team is trying to make sense of messy real situations. It is also the place where the team finds out how well or how badly it managed the field process! It's a good plan to do some preliminary analysis work after each meeting rather than to leave it all to the end. In the next meeting you can check information or generalizations you are not satisfied with from earlier processes.
The shape of analysis depends very strongly on the exact purpose of fieldwork. For example, analysis for legal entity establishment and analysis for assessment of an existing legal entity will look very different.
Feedback
Preparing feedback to the groups we have worked with is an excellent way to get very clear for ourselves. The feedback process itself is an opportunity to check our understanding and generalizations.