Field Research Exercise

Purpose  Doing this activity will give you practice at developing a plan for conducting field research. You will develop an understanding of the many choices that you have to make in order to collect valid data. Due to time constraints there will be a larger emphasis placed on the planning stage than on actually conducting the research.

Scenario

The Humanities, Social Science, and Education (HSSE) Library has just undergone significant remodeling. The library staff wants to know what types of problems, library patrons (i.e., anybody who uses the library) are experiencing since the remodeling. You have been charged with the responsibility of learning about patrons use of the new space and attitudes towards various features that this new space offers.

Research Questions

As a class, develop a set of research questions that will help you to address the needs of HSSE's staff. Do not forget that research questions are the questions that address the problem or the need. After you have developed your research questions, you decide which research methods (e.g., interviews, surveys, observations, textual) will help you to answer these questions.

Part 1, Interview & Questionnaires

Interviews and Questionnaires would allow you to learn people's knowledge, attitudes and opinions about a particular topic. For the first part of this exercise, you and your group will develop a research plan for answering the research questions by either conducting interviews or distributing questionnaires. The plan will include 1) a detailed description of how you will collect data, 2) the research tool, and 3) a justification of the plan. Remember that a research tool is what you use to facilitate the collection of data (e.g., the set of interview questions, the actual questionnaire that participants receive).

Work with your group to develop a research tool using the assigned method:

  • Interviews (Usability Testing, Observations, Archiving)
  • Questionnaires (Interviewing, Textual, Reporting)

    Writing Assignment

    In these groups use the research questions developed by the class to guide your construction of a research plan. As you develop this plan

    • explain how the research will be conducted
    • develop a set of questions that you would ask. Use the suggestions provided by Sims and Bishop to guide this development of the research tool. For those handing a questionnaire to an audience, you will have to think about the layout of the questionnaire.
    • Justify the entire plan; explain how the plan that you have developed will help to answer the research questions. This is a difficult task that often leads to circular arguments (i.e., "it will because it will."). Therefore, as you write this section think of your audience as a very meticulous boss or somebody who has never conducted research before and really needs to have each detailed explained.


    After 25 minutes, we will workshop these plans with the rest of the class.

Part 2, Observation

Observations allow you to see how people interact with each other or interact with their surrounding. For the second part of this exercise you will develop a plan that will help guide your observation of the space. When you conduct an observation, you need to know what you should be looking at and what you should be looking for. Therefore, like a interview or survey, you should develop a tool to guide your data collection.

Writing Assignment

For the first ten minutes of class, on a piece of paper develop a list of places that you would look at and what you would be looking for. Be prepared to justify these decisions in terms of the research questions for this project.

Observation Plan

As a class, we will develop a plan for conducting an observation(s); everybody will be expected to contribute to this conversation.

Conducting Research

Each individual will conduct field research. For this exercise, you will either...

  • do a thirty minute observation
  • do five to ten questionnaires
  • or do a five question interview

To collect your data revise/develop the appropriate tool to do your field research. Bring your data to class on Tuesday, February 11th.

Part 3, Triangulation

When conducting qualitative research, as you have, you will want to bring the data from your different research methods together so that you can answer your research questions. Once you have answers to your research questions, you can 1) pose recommendations, present arguments, or inform people, or you can 2) use these results to develop more refined research questions that you use to collect more data on the given topic.

Writing Assignment

Get together with the following groups:

* Note that these are your principles groups, not what you did for this exercise.

For the first twenty minutes of class work as two groups filling in the data grid and answering the prompts. Then for the next ten minutes, work just with your principles group to answer the prompts on the bottom of the data grid.

Submitting Your Fieldwork Exercises

After completing the data grid, each group will submit the following work in a single pack...

  • the research tools that you produced for Part 1 of the exercise.
  • the two or three data collections (i.e., tools with data collected) from each member of the group
  • data grid and conclusions