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Abstract

As someone who self-describes as an ethnographer, writing field notes is part and parcel of my everyday job. Even if I am not every day on the field, I am in contact with my fieldwork notebook on a daily basis, either reviewing them to provide proper quotations in a paper I am writing or revisiting them to contextualize a project proposal. For me, writing field notes and reading them regularly as well as capturing important insights from these field notes through other modes of active writing are part and parcel of the regular set of strategies and techniques available to qualitative researchers.

One of the most challenging issues I face when teaching graduate and undergraduate students how to write field notes is that it’s hard to teach how to develop an ethnographic sensibility (McGranahan, 2014; Whittemore, 2005), how to conduct fieldwork (Kleinman, Copp, & Henderson, 1997), and how to write a field note or notes in a fieldwork journal/notebook (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011; Walford, 2009; Wolfinger, 2002). While there’s plenty of scholarship on writing field notes, on conducting fieldwork, on developing an ethnographic sensibility, these abilities and techniques are best absorbed while on the field rather than just consuming literature on the topic. Writing field notes requires less theory, in my view, and more practice, by being on the field, observing, taking notes, reflecting, registering emotional responses, and sometimes, even conducting unstructured observation and capturing what we see for further reflection down the road (Mulhall, 2003).

In this editorial, my goal is 2-fold: First, I want to reflect and side with scholarly writers of all stripes and stages of the academic career in admitting that writing is hard, challenging, frustrating and that even seasoned ethnographers and other qualitative methods–based researchers face the same challenges that students, postdoctoral research fellows, and early-career scholars do: writer’s block. Yes, sometimes I simply want to throw my laptop out the window because I don’t see words flowing. In engaging in a self-reflective exercise for this editorial, I pondered about what kind of writing should, theoretically, simply flow off our fingers. The qualitative scholar in me quickly responded: “ FIELDNOTES !” And this would, again in theory, be true. Theoretically, academics who conduct fieldwork should be able to produce words consistently and frequently, simply by virtue of using these to produce a permanent record of the phenomena they are studying. These words, obviously, are meant to have insight at some point in time, but at the very moment of writing while on the field, we are merely concerned with the act of producing text. We are recording data for us to process down the road. But frequently times, even generating those words can be a challenge.

Frequently, failing to write in fieldwork journals is a result of a lack of vocabulary for field notes (Sanjek, 1990) or a lack of training for deployment on the field (Yanow, 2009). Both can be easily remedied through reading a couple of classics. Reading is, as I’ve previously argued, an integral part of writing. Two of the top books I’ve read to teach how to write ethnographic field notes are recent yet have now become part of the canon. The first one is John van Maanen’s Tales of the Field, and the second one is Emerson et al.’s Writing Ethnographic Field Notes. While the first one is focused on developing stories and helping ethnographers or ethnographers-to-be find the right rhetorical tone, presentation of data, and narrative deployment (van Maanen, 2011), the second one is much more focused on the actual writing of field notes as part of a full-fledged ethnography (Emerson et al., 2011). Reading both books and experimenting with creating draft field notes and engaging in local fieldwork could be one strategy to break free from the writer’s block stronghold. I also recommend Rapport’s excellent guide to writing field notes. Rapport’s (2006) work is particularly useful as he uses Geertz’s prompting imperative as a starting point: an ethnographer writes. That’s what we do, and that’s what we ought to do.

My second goal is to encourage qualitative researchers to use those field notes as a source of data and as motivation to produce scholarly writing, specifically conference papers and journal article manuscripts and books, but not limited to those specific outputs. Something that often gets me out of a writing rut is going back to my fieldwork notebook and reading interview data, whether it is for a current project or simply just to recontextualize my work again. Field notes are particularly useful to enable qualitative researchers to engage in reflective practice (Maharaj, 2016), not only for self-reflection and in-depth consideration of specific phenomena but also to evaluate researchers’ reflexivity as well (Thompson, 2014). More importantly, writing field notes (which include not only the phenomena being observed but also our own feelings, emotions and reactions to said phenomena, and declarations of our own positionality) is an exercise in producing data (Walford, 2009) that can be then analyzed to gain insight and advance our knowledge. Writing field notes is both an exercise in practicing how and what we write, but also who we write into our fieldwork, and who we exclude, and what elements we include in our analysis.

I have also hypothesized that qualitative researchers may feel writer’s block because sometimes they don’t feel like “they belong” either in academia or within a specific community or context where they are engaging in fieldwork. Nevertheless, as Katz (2019) aptly said, “[t]he freedom of ethnographic fieldwork makes it at once an especially democratic methodology, immediately open to all who would advance knowledge of society, and an especially fateful crucible for defining the adult self” (p. 16). Whether you engage in “analytic ethnography” and use a more positivist approach to understand the world (Snow, Morrill, & Anderson, 2003) or use a more abductive, inductive, and postpositivist, interpretive approach (Bajc, 2012), your field notes can always be a source of insight that can then be translated into writing, and they are worth it in and of themselves. These are also important components of writer’s block: feelings of inadequacy and impostor syndrome. But I side with Katz in encouraging up-and-coming qualitative researchers to engage in fieldwork and produce field notes. This is one of the many, but extremely, important ways in which we democratize and advance knowledge. Field notes and fieldwork can also help us understand vulnerable and marginalized populations and help policy makers devise solutions to their problems (Pacheco-Vega & Parizeau, 2018). Writing robust and powerful field notes thus remains a challenge, but as I have argued here, it is also a solvable one.

References

Bajc

(2012). Abductive ethnography of practice in highly uncertain conditions. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 642, 72–85. doi:10.1177/0002716212438197

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R. M.

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L. L.

(2011). Writing ethnographic fieldnotes (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

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(2019). On becoming an ethnographer. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 48, 16–50. doi:10.1177/0891241618777801

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(1997). Qualitatively different: Teaching fieldwork to graduate students. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 25, 469–499. doi:10.1177/0146167299025006006

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(2016). Using field notes to facilitate critical reflection. Reflective Practice, 17, 114–124. doi:10.1080/14623943.2015.1134472

McGranahan

(2014). What is ethnography? Teaching ethnographic sensibilities without fieldwork. Teaching Anthropology, 4, 23–36.

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(2003). In the field: Notes on observation in qualitative research. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 41, 306–313. doi:10.1046/j.1365-2648.2003.02514.x

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(2018). Doubly-engaged ethnography: Opportunities and challenges when working with vulnerable communities. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 17, 1–13.

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(2014). On writing notes in the field: Interrogating positionality, emotion, participation and ethics. McGill Journal of Education, 49, 247–254. doi:10.7202/1025781ar

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(2011). Tales of the field: On writing ethnography (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. doi:10.2307/590904

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Writing Field Notes and Using Them to Prompt Scholarly Writing

Abstract

References