Rapid Field Research: How Short-Term Encounters in the Field Deliver Intense, Rapid Routes to Knowin

Abstract

Inductive field researchers are all too familiar with the ‘long march’. Slow and steady, researchers dive deep into the field to explore a complex phenomenon in a holistic fashion. In this paper, we call for more rapid, intense routes to knowing. A rapid approach is particularly needed to address disruptions and crises situations such as the Covid-19 pandemic in ‘real time’ or phenomena that may be only fleeting or captured in transient episodes of organizational life. By drawing on an idiographic logic, we offer a rapid field research approach which places an emphasis on a demarcated phenomenon in intense short-term encounters in the field that afford a deeper understanding in ‘real time’. We develop three core principles for rapid field research, namely ‘perceptive researcher’, ‘sensemaking in the field’, and ‘selectivity in telling the story’. We conduct a review of rapid ethnography studies in medical education and health research. Through this synthesis, we characterize the tenets of field research, which have the quality of intensity to support a rapid approach (demarcating the research focus, strategies for data intensity, simultaneous data collection and analysis, rapid writing). Our study considers the implications of valorising a rapid route to knowing for horizontal knowledge accumulation and revisits the requisite skills and professional norms of writing and publishing that may enable this rapid approach.