RECOUP/Community scoping

Community Scoping

One basic principle of qualitative research design is that the people being researched should be understood in their social context. This requires some means of understanding that context. This session is designed to provide some ways into this process.

Time 90 minutes

Objectives:

• to understand some strategies to start a process of getting to know the basic details about a community, a village (or part of one), or an urban neighbourhood. It could also be used (with suitable amendments) for people whose case study will be an organisation.

Preparation:

• PowerPoint is available to be used or amended if desired
• Flip chart and big markers (OR use someone sitting at a computer and typing in points raised so that they are shown on a projector)

Process:

This session can be conducted through a mixture of didactic (PowerPoint) and brainstorm approaches. The following areas should be discussed:

• Need for community scoping
• The processes of community scoping
• Participatory approaches (map-making, transect walks, wealth ranking)
• Household census (as basic source of data on community, to provide a sampling frame)
• The role and importance of 'gatekeepers'

The main points to get across

• The importance of establishing egalitarian relationships at the start of the research process, such as being willing to answer personal questions as well as questions about the research – especially if the research involves the poor
• The value of walking around and being seen by as many people as possible
• The issues generated by getting permission from ‘gate-keepers’ as well as participants
• The opportunities to use ‘participatory’ methods as well as semi-structured interviews to collect basic general community-level data
• The potential of carrying out a simple census exercise

Introduction to Ethnographic Fieldwork

Recording informal conversations or actual events is an essential part of ethnographic fieldwork. This is about writing (in some senses, more than about ‘participating’ or ‘observing’): there is no point in observing if the observations remain locked up in the heads of the researchers. Therefore, the session is designed to lead up to a fieldwork exercise in which participants do some observation (in as participatory a way as is possible, given local constraints), to write fieldnotes, to share them with the facilitators and the rest of the group, and to engage in some positive reflection on their own and others’ writing styles. Some time is needed to get participants’ permission and understanding of the benefits of getting and giving constructive feedback in these ways.

Time: Allow for 3 hours (a half-day session)

Objectives:

The basic objective of this session is to help participants develop an understanding of the aims and process of ‘participating in order to write’ as a research tool. They should also be aware of the issues of negotiating access, deciding what to observe, how to record field-notes and what should be included in those notes. They should have reflected on important social and cultural norms that researchers must be sensitive to in the field.

By the end of the section, workshop participants should:

• be aware of the main methodological issues raised by ethnographic fieldwork
• be able to reflect on their own conduct in recording informal conversations in everyday life, and be able to assess critically other pieces of research carried out in this tradition
• be aware of the main ethical and theoretical issues raised by this research method.

Preparation:

• PowerPoint is available to be used or amended if desired
• Examples of appropriate fieldnotes from your own research or some other appropriate project should be available (preferably 1-2 pages of two or three different styles of fieldnotes).
• Flip chart and big markers (OR use someone sitting at a computer and typing in points raised so that they are shown on a projector)

Process:

• Mixture of didactic (PowerPoint) and brainstorming activities, either in small groups or with the whole group. For example, at different points in the session you might want to get people into small groups (2-3 people in each) to:
  • to come up with three things that need to be recorded when carrying out a participant observation exercise (5 minutes), followed by feed-back sessions in which issues are listed and areas of agreement and disagreement are explored (10 minutes)
  • to discuss the ethical issues that arise in ethnographic fieldwork: brainstorm first in small groups on what they might be and how they might be resolved and then run a collective discussion
• Consider distributing some handouts at the beginning or in the course of this session

Key Issues

• During this workshop, participants’ writings will be available to the rest of the group: but usually, fieldnotes remain private to the researcher. This raises the more general issues of ‘for whom’ fieldnotes are written.
• The ethical issues raised by fieldwork will also inevitably be raised by participants: decide whether you want to go into these in detail during this session, or address them in a dedicated session on ethics.

Topics to be covered (not necessarily in this order):

• The fieldworker is the research instrument: what does this mean for issues of replicability and reliability? Are issues of validity central?
• Roles in fieldwork: What do people actually do when they are doing ‘fieldwork’?
• Planning access to field-sites, negotiating with gate-keepers, thinking through the implications of different kinds of roles in the field.
• Negotiating ethical issues: privacy of field notes, anonymising individuals, what to do about people whose positions make them immediately identifiable?
• Different kinds of field-notes: from jottings to field-notes.
• Discussion of experience of diary-keeping; differences between diaries and other kinds of field-notes.
• Issues raised by emotions.
• What to do with analytic thoughts.
• Problems of doing research in different cultures: trying to understand and interpret other people’s behaviour
• Problems of doing research in one’s own culture: how to make ‘the familiar’ seem ‘strange’, in order to understand and explain the ‘strange’.
• Learning to describe cultural and body languages.
• Basic issues in ‘talking with a purpose’: Where? When? How? What to do about reactivity, leading questions, the use of background information, confidentiality.
• What to do about encouraging informal ‘focus groups’ in the field: how and what to record.
• Feedback to the community at the end: who can see what? Who should see what?

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Singal, N., and Jeffery, R. (2008). Qualitative Research Skills Workshop: A Facilitator's Reference Manual, http://oer.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/RECOUP, Cambridge: RECOUP (Research Consortium on Educational Outcomes and Poverty, http://recoup.educ.cam.ac.uk/). CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. (original page)