Doing Fieldwork: Ethnographic Methods for Research in Developing Countries and Beyond

Doing Fieldwork: Ethnographic Methods for Research in Developing Countries and Beyond. Wayne Fife. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2005. 174 pages. $22.95.

This book provides a practical guide to conducting ethnographic field research. Fife presents thorough yet concise directives for the entire research process, beginning with preparatory work that precludes immersion in the field, following through each stage of data collection and analysis, and concluding with guidelines to assist the writing process. While the book is geared primarily toward conducting research in developing nations, it is broad enough to be useful for students and professionals who wish to conduct research in the United States and other developed countries.

The book is logically organized to follow the practical order of data collection and analysis. Fife begins with an introduction to ethnography that explains the purpose, logic, and ethics of ethnographic research. Following the introduction, the book is organized into three sections: Methods for Macro-Level Research, Methods for Micro-Level Research, and Putting the Ethnography Together. The first section begins by outlining the procedures that precede research in the field, such as gathering information from historical and contemporary scholarly sources and formulating a theoretical orientation. This section then explains the key components of initial field research, which include accumulating newspaper articles and government documents relevant to the research topic. While Fife accurately warns the researcher to be wary of the validity of journalistic sources, he points out that such documents may represent the knowledge of a subject that is accessible to the general population.

The second section of the book describes the procedures for collecting data in the field through both traditional methods such as observation and interviewing and more creative methods that include participant self-reports through poetry, essays, and art. The chapters in this section provide in-depth explanations of each data-collection and note-taking technique. The third section guides the researcher through the transformation of the collected data into a written analysis. This final section contains chapters on data analysis, developing theory, and...