FIELDWORK AND THE QUALITATIVE - INTERPRETATIVE ANALYSIS

Abstract

Fieldwork is scholarly and professional research work that requires first-hand observation, recording or documenting what one sees and hear in a particular setting with the aim to understand and to know what people under the study are doing from their perspectives. Fieldwork is a study of conceptualisation as much as observation. In qualitative fieldwork, the researcher is the instrument of inquiry. With that notion, the ontological (nature of being, becoming and/or reality), epistemological (nature of knowledge) and axiological (values) underpinnings related to the researcher are paramount importance in making the research acceptable. With an emphasis on the importance of recovering and reading meanings, beliefs and preferences or practices of the people in the field, the researcher is expected to perform hermeneutical action, with Collaizzi’s help, where the knower and the known are inseparable, interacting and influencing one another in shared interpretation. In this regard, semiotic as a device of knowing is an asset. Specifically, the researcher must get engaged with hermeneutical process of circular understanding that celebrates vorurteil (‘prejudices’). In that appreciation, verstehen, instead of erklaren, as a method of interpreting human action must be employed. Meanwhile bracketing is becoming a prerequisite for research trustworthiness. As fieldwork is a situate activity, metaphorically, turning oneself into a bricoluer makes fieldwork as an engagement a worthwhile journey. In the nutshell, as the field is a terrain of alterity that lives on ‘otherness’, fieldwork concerns with deep understanding via thick description on ‘local interpretation’ and ‘local knowledge’.