Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science

PETER KRAUSE AND ORA SZEKELY

This book began as a conversation during lunch at a small conference on Middle Eastern politics in May 2018. A group of us began swapping stories about our experiences doing fieldwork in countries across the region. Some stories were funny, some were shocking, and some were touching—but the most striking thing was how readily each story led the group directly to asking questions, giving insightful advice, and sharing the kind of knowledge that can only be gained through hard-earned experience. In that moment, we felt that this type of vibrant discussion should not be limited to irregular, fleeting exchanges among small numbers of academics: Someone, we thought, should really be writing this down. That belief became the basis of the book you are now reading.

As we set about putting this book together, we were guided first and foremost by the belief that the best way to learn how to do fieldwork is to hear directly from those who have done it. Unfortunately, scholars rarely systematically share their personal stories and lessons in print, limiting their reach to conversations with trusted colleagues or words of advice shared with graduate students during office hours. This book pulls back the curtain, making available to all honest stories and insights from forty-four scholars who have made fieldwork a central part of their research.

High-quality fieldwork certainly shares some common practices, but solutions to dilemmas that all of us face in the field vary a great deal across locations, topics, and researchers themselves—far more than they do in controlled lab experiments. There is no single ideal blueprint for successful fieldwork. Excellent fieldwork is done by individuals who make very different decisions about how they gather information, how they interact with the society around them, and to what extent positivist or interpretivist approaches guide their work. Following the example of those particularly effective interviews that give the interviewee the agency to drive parts of the conversation, we gave our contributors agency in shaping this text. The result is a “bottom-up” methods book: we as editors provided the idea but the contributors largely selected the content. We asked our contributors to share with us what they considered their best, most insightful stories and lessons from the field: the ones they tell their grad students and colleagues, the ones they’d like to go back and tell their younger selves. Beyond suggesting some broad themes—methods, logistics, ethics, and personal perspectives—we left the rest up to them. We did not ask or assign contributors to discuss certain topics or methods, nor did we ask them to take particular positions on contested issues.

What we did do was purposely approach scholars from a variety of backgrounds who had done high-quality field research. We are thankful that the vast majority of these scholars agreed to participate. This book includes contributions from scholars who focus on North and sub-Saharan Africa; Central, East, and South Asia; eastern and western Europe; Central and South America; North America; and the Middle East. Our contributors work on diverse topics ranging from political economy to international conflict and civil war, and from civil society and social movements to gender politics. We also ensured that we included contributors who represent a healthy range of academic ranks, genders, and national and ethnic backgrounds. This was especially important to us because we recognize the ways in which the identities carried by researchers, and the lived experience they bring with them to fieldwork, shape their experiences in the field. We hope these perspectives will help readers relate the insights included here to their own experiences.

THE UNORTHODOX NATURE OF THIS BOOK

Our unique approach to assembling this book yielded chapters that were both unorthodox and quite effective in their style and substance. In response to our request to simply tell engaging stories from their own experiences that distilled their most important advice, contributors offered insights not normally seen in methods books, or in any academic books for that matter. Rather than describing how to do everything right, the stories included here provide insight into what researchers do when things go wrong, sometimes quite suddenly, or when complicated ethical or logistical issues arise. Instead of a step-by-step guide to designing a survey, one chapter explains how to handle enumerators in Iraq who were themselves filling out the very surveys they were supposed to distribute. Instead of instructions on how to conduct content analysis, another chapter provides insights on interpreting American politicians’ doodles in the margins of classified documents. Instead of an explanation of the best identification strategy, we received advice on how to cook chickens with the wives of rebel leaders in Sierra Leone. Even chapters centered on more “conventional” topics, such as interviewing, discuss how to safely interview sex traffickers in Lebanon and Russia, how to embed with fascist militias in Italy, and how to talk to terrorists—in person or online, your choice.

What we have here—in style and in substance—is therefore the opposite of most academic work. We tell our students (and ourselves) not to write a novel but, instead, to “put the bottom line up front.” But that’s not how the field research process works, despite our desire to make it seem neat and tidy in our publications. As Nadya Hajj, Daniel Posner, and Marc Trachtenberg all note in their chapters, planning in fieldwork is important, but plans change. As Richard Fenno explains, you “soak and poke,” you stumble around and discover things you didn’t even know you were seeking.1 As these pages attest, even the most respected academics in our field experience uncertainty and sometimes make mistakes. These chapters are presented according to a logic of discovery—not to the classic logic of explanation. With the story first and the takeaways last, you travel with the authors through their challenges, not knowing the end result.

There is much to be gained by thinking and feeling through those struggles alongside the authors rather than hearing the lesson up front, devoid of the sweat and stress that earned it in the first place. These academics are not distant two-dimensional figures; they are real three-dimensional people. Furthermore, as each chapter’s focus is a story from the field—from a period before the research itself was published—these chapters can be read as prefaces to some of the most interesting books and most productive careers in political science. Readers come to understand why Stathis Kalyvas decided to study Greek history and write The Logic of Violence in Civil War, how David Laitin first acquired local knowledge in Africa, and how Erica Chenoweth has worked to reconcile her interactions with both governments and grassroots activists as she published groundbreaking research on nonviolence. In demystifying the process by which such important research took place, our hope is to encourage readers to think ambitiously and creatively about their own research.

One of the advantages of the “how the sausage gets made” approach is that stories that honestly reflect the complexities of the research process can serve as a starting point for conversations about research ethics, both inside and outside the classroom. Many of the chapters included here involve complicated and difficult ethical challenges that the authors address openly and honestly. Although research ethics are often presented as a simple set of guidelines based on abstract hypothetical scenarios, the real world experiences shared here demonstrate that in practice these questions require a lot of careful thought, and that the best answers aren’t always easy, obvious, or universally agreed upon. Contributors also demonstrate the ways in which norms and guidelines have had to evolve over time to keep pace with the changing nature of field research, particularly with regard to new technologies of communication and data storage, as well as research conducted online.

We should note that these issues stood out to us in part because, in addition to our experience as field researchers, Ora Szekely, coeditor of this book, spent six years as a member of her university’s institutional review board (IRB), charged with authorizing and overseeing research on human subjects. In this role, she observed firsthand the range of questions that this type of research can raise, and the complexity of answering them. Questions such as “How do power disparities shape the nature of informed consent?” and “How do our own identities shape the ways in which our research participants engage with us?” have always been an important part of constructing an ethical research design. Meanwhile, the evolving natures of technology, the research process, and even “the field” itself generate new questions, such as “Are online spaces public or private?” and “How do we most effectively protect digital data?” There is no universally correct set of answers, but we hope these stories spark conversations about these and other questions, help readers think through ethical issues, and give them the tools to develop their own sets of guiding principles.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

Faculty and students who are preparing to go into the field, sharpen their skills for the future, or teach about fieldwork can all make great use of this book. Moreover, the book contributes to our intradisciplinary conversation more broadly in that it serves as a companion to the existing publications of each contributor. Reading these chapters side by side with the books and articles that resulted from the fieldwork they describe provides fascinating context for the authors’ work and a soup to nuts guide to designing, organizing, and conducting one’s own research. To facilitate this process, the publications that resulted from each fieldwork story are listed at the end of each chapter.

We also hope this book will be read as a complement to the growing number of excellent books on research methods, including more formal theoretical guides to field research. These stories add insight on issues and skills that graduate and undergraduate coursework rarely covers, including how to travel securely in conflict zones, how to handle conversations on sensitive topics, and how to eat and drink socially (and safely) when in the field. Readers will learn from our contributors’ mistakes, as many of these chapters serve as humble entries in the “failure CVs” that scholars have begun to post publicly, with narration and lessons-learned attached.

For professors teaching classes on research methods and fieldwork, this book can be effectively assigned to, and happily consumed by, both graduates and undergraduates. As those who have taught or taken research methods courses know, overly dry or instructional textbooks can make it challenging to capture students’ attention and imagination. Furthermore, it can be challenging to find relevant sections among long academic books and articles when there is a limit to the number of pages one can assign for each class meeting. Our hope is that this book will provide a way of addressing these issues. The chapters included here are engaging, practical, and written in an accessible narrative style with no unnecessary jargon—a style that we think students (and other readers) learn from particularly well. Furthermore, the fact that they are generally only a few pages long ensures that there are no wasted words, and a chapter can easily be assigned and read alongside any other content for a given course.