For many research projects, you will need to collect field data. The “field” may be many things—a classroom, a church, a laboratory, or the corner grocery store. As student David Craig discovered, it may even be a collection of instant messages from the Internet. As a field researcher, then, you need to discover where you can find relevant information, how to gather it, and who might provide the best information.

If you decide to conduct field research, check with your instructor about whether your school has a review board that will need to approve your data-gathering plan.

Conducting interviews

Some information is best obtained by interviewing—asking direct questions of other people. If you can talk with an expert in person, on the telephone, or online, you might get information you could not have obtained through any other kind of research.

Your first step is to find interview subjects. Has your research generated the names of people you might contact directly? Brainstorm for additional names, looking for authorities on your topic and people in your community, such as faculty members, war veterans, or food pantry volunteers. Once you identify some promising possibilities, write, telephone, or email them to see whether you can arrange an interview.

When you have identified someone to interview, prepare your questions. You need to know your topic well, and you need to know a fair amount about your interviewee. You will probably want to ask several kinds of questions. Questions about facts and figures (How many employees do you have?) elicit specific answers and don’t invite expansion or opinion. You can lead the interviewee to think out loud and to give additional details by asking open-ended questions: What was the atmosphere like at the company just before the union went on strike? How do you feel now about deciding to enlist in the military after 9/11?

Avoid questions that would encourage vague answers (What do you think of youth today?) or yes/no answers (Should the laws governing corporate accounting practices be changed?). Instead, ask questions that must be answered with supporting details (Why should the laws governing corporate accounting practices be changed?).

Conducting observations

“What,” you might ask, “could be easier than observing something? You just choose a subject, look at it closely, and record what you see and hear.” Yet trained observers tell us that making a faithful record of an observation requires intense concentration and mental agility.

Moreover, observation is never neutral. Just as a photographer has a particular angle on a subject, so an observer always has an angle on what he or she is looking at. If, for instance, you decide to conduct a formal observation of your writing class, the field notes you take will reflect your status as an insider. Consequently, you will need to check your observations to see what your participation in the class may have obscured or led you to take for granted. In other instances, when you are not an insider, you still need to aim for optimal objectivity, altering as little as possible the phenomena you are looking at.

Before you conduct any observation, decide exactly what you want to find out, and anticipate what you are likely to see. Are you going to observe an action repeated by many people (such as pedestrians crossing a street), a sequence of actions (such as a medical procedure), or the interactions of a group (such as a church congregation)? Also decide exactly what you want to record and how. In a grocery store, for instance, decide whether to observe shoppers or store employees and what you want to note about them—what they say, what they buy, how they are dressed, how they respond to one another, and so on.

Conducting surveys

Although surveys can take the form of interviews, they usually depend on questionnaires. To do survey research, all you need is a representative sample of people and a questionnaire that will elicit the information you need.

How do you choose the people you will survey? In some cases, you might want to survey all members of a small group, such as everyone in one of your classes. More often, however, you’ll aim for a random sample of a large group—the first-year class at your university, for example. While a true random sample is probably unattainable, you can aim for a good cross section by, say, emailing every fifth person in the class directory.

On any questionnaire, the questions should be clear and easy to understand and designed so that you will be able to analyze the answers easily. For example, questions that ask respondents to say yes or no or to rank items on a five-point scale are particularly easy to tabulate.

As you design your questionnaire, think about ways your respondents might misunderstand you or your questions. Adding a category called “other” to a list of options you are asking people about, for example, allows them to fill in information you would not otherwise get.

Because tabulating the responses takes time and because people often resent answering long questionnaires, limit the number of questions to no more than twenty. After tabulating your results, put them in an easily readable format, such as a chart or spreadsheet.

Analyzing, synthesizing, and interpreting data

To make sense of the information you have gathered, first try to identify what you want to look at: kinds of language? comparisons between men’s and women’s responses? The point is to find a focus, since you can’t pay equal attention to everything. This step is especially important in analyzing results from observations or survey questionnaires. If you need assistance, see if your instructor can recommend similar research so that you can see how it was analyzed.

Next, synthesize the data by looking for recurring words or ideas that fall into patterns (12f). Establish a system for coding your information, labeling each pattern you identify—a plus sign for every positive response on a questionnaire, for example. If you ask classmates to review your notes or data, they may notice other patterns.

Finally, interpret your data by summing up the meaning of what you have found. What is the significance of your findings? Be careful not to make large generalizations.

David Craig’s field research

A large part of David Craig’s essay (32e) rests on analyzing the data he collected on messaging language. To determine whether the phrases used in online discussions constitute a language, David obtained and analyzed actual IM conversations from U.S. residents aged twelve to seventeen. After examining over eleven thousand lines of text, David identified four common kinds of messaging language and was able to use his field research to support his thesis.