Field survey
Field survey is usually conducted in 4 distinct ways as follows
Steps to conduct a field survey
Due to the nature of field surveying, and the scale of timelines and costs involved, field surveying can be extremely difficult to plan, implement and measure. Some basic steps in field survey management are:
Building the Right Team: To be able to conduct a field survey, it is important to have the right team. The role of the researcher and any supporting team members is very important, and it is important to define the tasks they need to perform with the relevant milestones identified. It is important that senior management is also vested in the field survey for its success.
Recruiting people for the study: The success of a field survey depends on the people being studied. Using sampling methods, it is important to elicit the people who will be part of the study.
Data Collection Methodology: As discussed at length above, data collection methods for field surveys are varied. It can be a combination of surveys, interviews, case studies and observation. All these methods must be identified and the parameters of each method also established at the beginning. For example, if conducting a survey, the survey design is important because it is created and tested even before the survey begins.
Site visit: A site visit is important to the success of a field survey and is always conducted outside traditional sites and in the actual natural environment of the respondent/participants. Hence, planning the site visit along with data collection methods is important.
Data analysis: Analysis of the data collected is important to validate the hypothesis of the field survey and determine the outcome of the field survey.
Communicate results: Once the data has been analyzed, it is important to communicate the results to survey stakeholders so that action can be taken.
Field survey notes
Keeping an ethnographic record is very important in conducting field research. Field notes constitute one of the most important aspects of the ethnographic record. The field notes process begins as the researcher engages in an observational survey process that will later be noted down.
Types of Field Research Notes
The four different kinds of field notes are:
Reasons to Conduct Field Research
Field research has been commonly used in the 20th century in the social sciences. But in general, it takes a lot of time to conduct and complete, is expensive and in a lot of cases invasive. So why then is this commonly used and is preferred by researchers to validate data? We look at 4 major reasons:
