Graduate Fieldwork in Sociology at UC, Davis

Abstract

We think it useful and productive to outline the graduate fieldwork course we offer at the University of California, Davis, and then to compare it with the one taught by Professor Bogdan. Our team-taught effort spans two quarters-the twenty-three weeks of calendar time from January to mid-June. Its prime goals are (1) to provide graduate students in sociology with an intensive and consequential experience in collecting and analyzing qualitative data that results, at the end of the sequence, in (2) a draft of a paper that with further work can be used as one of the required preliminary papers in our doctoral program and that, therefore, has strong prospects for publication. Over the years, a high portion of the course's papers have been so used and published. Because of these goals, the sequence is structured to provide the required training quickly and intensively at the start, moving the student projects progressively to center-stage as the weeks progress. We organize the basic instruction into the first five or six weeks. To facilitate this, we have codified the process of fieldwork into eleven steps or phases that constitute something of a checklist of sequential concerns to which students must attend. These eleven steps can themselves be grouped into four clusters. The first cluster addresses matters of gathering data and mandates: (1) starting where you are in the sense of employing a current situation, past involvement, or deep interest as a topic of research; (2) evaluating data sites in terms of appropriateness and access; (3) getting in, where that is problematic, and facing up to the numerous unavoidable social, political, legal, and ethical considerations; (4) getting along with people in a setting as this is continually problematic in a variety of ways; and (5) logging data with the use of interview guides, field notes, or both. The second cluster is concerned with focusing the gathering and gathered data in a social scientific fashion and involves: (6) thinking units, which is the emerging need to decide the scale of social organizational unit that will be the focus or multiple foci (e.g., meanings, acts, roles, groups, organizations, or whatever); (7) asking questions by posing one or more of the seven basic questions an analyst can ask about any phenomenon; and (8) being interesting by avoiding trite and well established answers to already asked questions through using one or more of several devices (including irony, generic framing, transcendent bracketing). The third cluster concentrates on processes of analyzing and organizing data into reportable form and requires: (9) developing Lofland & Lofland Teaching Fieldwork 181