Doing global fieldwork: a social scientist's guide to mixed-methods research far from home

Abstract

With this book, Jesse Driscoll opens a door to the backstage of fieldwork in political science, comparative politics and International Relations. As an ‘advice book’ (p. xi), a ‘how-to practitioner guide’ (p. 205) and a professional reflection written to a ‘younger version of [him]self’ (p. xiii), Driscoll has written a book that—as he puts it—especially the ‘young, directionless, and honest about the fact that they do not actually know what they want to do’ (p. 92) will find informative, reassuring and inspiring. As the title suggests, the book is mainly concerned with fieldwork as part of a multi-method research agenda and as something that happens ‘globally’, in ‘exotic’ (p. 32) places far away from ‘home’. This is based on an understanding of ‘fieldwork’ as a strategy ‘to collect measurements on theoretically-important variables that [one] cannot observe or measure using library and internet resources alone’ (p. 18); and an understanding of...