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What is Field Research: Definition, Methods, Examples and Advantages

What is Field Research?

Field research is defined as a qualitative method of data collection that aims to observe, interact and understand people while they are in a natural environment. For example, nature conservationists observe behavior of animals in their natural surroundings and the way they react to certain scenarios. In the same way, social scientists conducting field research may conduct interviews or observe people from a distance to understand how they behave in a social environment and how they react to situations around them.

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Field research encompasses a diverse range of social research methods including direct observation, limited participation, analysis of documents and other information, informal interviews, surveys etc. Although field research is generally characterized as qualitative research, it often involves multiple aspects of quantitative research in it.

Field research typically begins in a specific setting although the end objective of the study is to observe and analyze the specific behavior of a subject in that setting. The cause and effect of a certain behavior, though, is tough to analyze due to presence of multiple variables in a natural environment. Most of the data collection is based not entirely on cause and effect but mostly on correlation. While field research looks for correlation, the small sample size makes it difficult to establish a causal relationship between two or more variables.

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Methods of Field Research

Field research is typically conducted in 5 distinctive methods. They are:

• Direct Observation

In this method, the data is collected via an observational method or subjects in a natural environment. In this method, the behavior or outcome of situation is not interfered in any way by the researcher. The advantage of direct observation is that it offers contextual data on people management , situations, interactions and the surroundings. This method of field research is widely used in a public setting or environment but not in a private environment as it raises an ethical dilemma.

• Participant Observation

In this method of field research, the researcher is deeply involved in the research process, not just purely as an observer, but also as a participant. This method too is conducted in a natural environment but the only difference is the researcher gets involved in the discussions and can mould the direction of the discussions. In this method, researchers live in a comfortable environment with the participants of the research design , to make them comfortable and open up to in-depth discussions.

• Ethnography

Ethnography is an expanded observation of social research and social perspective and the cultural values of an  entire social setting. In ethnography, entire communities are observed objectively. For example,  if a researcher would like to understand how an Amazon tribe lives their life and operates, he/she may chose to observe them or live amongst them and silently observe their day-to-day behavior.

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• Qualitative Interviews

Qualitative interviews are close-ended questions that are asked directly to the research subjects. The qualitative interviews could be either informal and conversational, semi-structured, standardized and open-ended or a mix of all the above three. This provides a wealth of data to the researcher that they can sort through. This also helps collect relational data. This method of field research can use a mix of one-on-one interviews, focus groups and text analysis .

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A case study research is an in-depth analysis of a person, situation or event. This method may look difficult to operate, however, it is one of the simplest ways of conducting research as it involves a deep dive and thorough understanding the data collection methods and inferring the data.

Steps in Conducting Field Research

Due to the nature of field research, the magnitude of timelines and costs involved, field research can be very tough to plan, implement and measure. Some basic steps in the management of field research are:

• Build the Right Team: To be able to conduct field research, having the right team is important. The role of the researcher and any ancillary team members is very important and defining the tasks they have to carry out with defined relevant milestones is important. It is important that the upper management too is vested in the field research for its success.
• Recruiting People for the Study: The success of the field research depends on the people that the study is being conducted on. Using sampling methods , it is important to derive the people that will be a part of the study.
• Data Collection Methodology: As spoken in length about above, data collection methods for field research are varied. They could be a mix of surveys, interviews, case studies and observation. All these methods have to be chalked out and the milestones for each method too have to be chalked out at the outset. For example, in the case of a survey, the survey design is important that it is created and tested even before the research begins.
• Site Visit: A site visit is important to the success of the field research and it is always conducted outside of traditional locations and in the actual natural environment of the respondent/s. Hence, planning a site visit alongwith the methods of data collection is important.
• Data Analysis: Analysis of the data that is collected is important to validate the premise of the field research and  decide the outcome of the field research.
• Communicating Results: Once the data is analyzed, it is important to communicate the results to the stakeholders of the research so that it could be actioned upon.

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Field Research Notes

Keeping an ethnographic record is very important in conducting field research. Field notes make up one of the most important aspects of the ethnographic record. The process of field notes begins as the researcher is involved in the observational research process that is to be written down later.

Types of Field Research Notes

The four different kinds of field notes are:

• Job Notes: This method of taking notes is while the researcher is in the study. This could be in close proximity and in open sight with the subject in study. The notes here are short, concise and in condensed form that can be built on by the researcher later. Most researchers do not prefer this method though due to the fear of feeling that the respondent may not take them seriously.
• Field Notes Proper: These notes are to be expanded on immediately after the completion of events. The notes have to be detailed and the words have to be as close to possible as the subject being studied.
• Methodological Notes: These notes contain methods on the research methods used by the researcher, any new proposed research methods and the way to monitor their progress. Methodological notes can be kept with field notes or filed separately but they find their way to the end report of a study.
• Journals and Diaries: This method of field notes is an insight into the life of the researcher. This tracks all aspects of the researchers life and helps eliminate the Halo effect or any research bias that may have cropped up during the field research.

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Reasons to Conduct Field Research

Field research has been commonly used in the 20th century in the social sciences. But in general, it takes a lot of time to conduct and complete, is expensive and in a lot of cases invasive. So why then is this commonly used and is preferred by researchers to validate data? We look at 4 major reasons:

• Overcoming lack of data: Field research resolves the major issue of gaps in data. Very often, there is limited to no data about a topic in study, especially in a specific environment analysis . The research problem might be known or suspected but there is no way to validate this without primary research and data. Conducting field research helps not only plug-in gaps in data but collect supporting material and hence is a preferred research method of researchers.
• Understanding context of the study: In many cases, the data collected is adequate but field research is still conducted. This helps gain insight into the existing data. For example, if the data states that horses from a stable farm generally win races because the horses are pedigreed and the stable owner hires the best jockeys. But conducting field research can throw light into other factors that influence the success like quality of fodder and care provided and conducive weather conditions.
• Increasing the quality of data: Since this research method uses more than one tool to collect data, the data is of higher quality. Inferences can be made from the data collected and can be statistically analyzed via the triangulation of data.
• Collecting ancillary data: Field research puts the researchers in a position of localized thinking which opens them new lines of thinking. This can help collect data that the study didn’t account to collect.

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Examples of Field Research

Some examples of field research are:

• Decipher social metrics in a slum Purely by using observational methods and in-depth interviews, researchers can be part of a community to understand the social metrics and social hierarchy of a slum. This study can also understand the financial independence and day-to-day operational nuances of a slum. The analysis of this data can provide an insight into how different a slum is from structured societies.
• U nderstand the impact of sports on a child’s development This method of field research takes multiple years to conduct and the sample size can be very large. The data analysis of this research provides insights into how the kids of different geographical locations and backgrounds respond to sports and the impact of sports on their all round development.
• Study animal migration patterns Field research is used extensively to study flora and fauna. A major use case is scientists monitoring and studying animal migration patterns with the change of seasons. Field research helps collect data across years and that helps draw conclusions about how to safely expedite the safe passage of animals.

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Advantages of Field Research

The advantages of field research are:

• It is conducted in a real-world and natural environment where there is no tampering of variables and the environment is not doctored.
• Due to the study being conducted in a comfortable environment, data can be collected even about ancillary topics.
• The researcher gains a deep understanding into the research subjects due to the proximity to them and hence the research is extensive, thorough and accurate.

Disadvantages of Field Research

The disadvantages of field research are:

• The studies are expensive and time-consuming and can take years to complete.
• It is very difficult for the researcher to distance themselves from a bias in the research study.
• The notes have to be exactly what the researcher says but the nomenclature is very tough to follow.
• It is an interpretive method and this is subjective and entirely dependent on the ability of the researcher.
• In this method, it is impossible to control external variables and this constantly alters the nature of the research.

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Field research.

Field research is a qualitative method of research concerned with understanding and interpreting the social interactions of groups of people, communities, and society by observing and interacting with people in their natural settings. The methods of field research include: direct observation, participant observation, and qualitative interviews. Each of these methods is described here. Terms related to these and other topics in field research are defined in the  Research Glossary .

Direct Observation

Participant observation, qualitative interviews.

Direct observation  is a method of research where the researcher watches and records the activities of individuals or groups engaged in their daily activities. The observations may be unstructured or structured. Unstructured observations involve the researcher observing people and events and recording his/her observations as field notes. Observations are recorded holistically and without the aid of a predetermined guide or protocol. Structured observation, on the other hand, is a technique where a researcher observes people and events using a guide or set protocol that has been developed ahead of time.

Other features of direct observation include:

• The observer does not actively engage the subjects of the study in conversations or interviews, but instead strives to be unobtrusive and detached from the setting.
• Data collected through direct observation may include field notes, checklists and rating scales, documents, and photographs or video images.
• Direct observation is not necessarily an alternative to other types of field methods, such as participant observation or qualitative interviews. Rather, it may be an initial approach to understanding a setting, a group of individuals, or forms of behavior prior to interacting with members or developing interview protocols.
• Direct observation as a research method is most appropriate in open, public settings where anyone has a right to be or congregate. Conducting direct observation in private or closed settings -- without the knowledge or consent of members -- is more likely to raise ethical concerns.

Participant observation  is a field research method whereby the researcher develops an understanding of a group or setting by taking part in the everyday routines and rituals alongside its members. It was originally developed in the early 20th century by anthropologists researching native societies in developing countries. It is now the principal research method used by ethnographers -- specialists within the fields of anthropology and sociology who focus on recording the details of social life occurring in a setting, community, group, or society. The ethnographer, who often lives among the members for months or years, attempts to build trusting relationships so that he or she becomes part of the social setting. As the ethnographer gains the confidence and trust of the members, many will speak and behave in a natural manner in the presence of the ethnographer.

Data from participant observation studies can take several forms:

• Field notes are the primary type of data. The researcher takes notes of his/her observations and experiences and later develops them into detailed, formal field notes.
• Frequently, researchers keep a diary, which is often a more intimate, informal record of the happenings within the setting.
• The practice of participant observation, with its emphasis on developing relationships with members, often leads to both informal, conversational interviews and more formal, in-depth interviews. The data from these interviews can become part of field notes or may consist of separate interview transcripts.

There are a number of advantages and disadvantages to direct and participant observation studies. Here is a list of some of both. While the advantages and disadvantages apply to both types of studies, their impact and importance may not be the same across the two. For example, researchers engaged in both types of observation will develop a rich, deep understanding of the members of the group and the setting in which social interactions occur, but researchers engaged in participant observation research may gain an even deep understanding. And, participant observers have a greater chance of witnessing a wider range of behaviors and events than those engaged in direct observation.

Advantages of observation studies (observational research):

• Provide contextual data on settings, interactions, or individuals.
• A useful tool for generating hypotheses for further study.
• Source of data on events and phenomena that do not involve verbal interactions (e.g., mother-child nonverbal interactions and contact, physical settings where interactions occur).
• The researcher develops a rich, deep understanding of a setting and of the members within the setting.

Disadvantages of observation studies:

• Behaviors observed during direct observation may be unusual or atypical.
• Significant interactions and events may take place when observer is not present.
• Certain topics do not necessarily lend themselves to observation (e.g., attitudes, emotions, affection).
• Reliability of observations can be problematic, especially when multiple observers are involved.
• The researcher must devote a large amount of time (and resources).
• The researcher's objectivity may decline as he or she spends more time among the members of the group.
• The researcher may be faced with a dilemma of choosing between revealing and not revealing his or her identity as a researcher to the members of the group. If he or she introduces him/herself as a researcher, the members may behave differently than if they assume that he or she is just another participant. On the other hand, if the researcher does not, they may feel betrayed upon learning about the research.

Qualitative interviews  are a type of field research method that elicits information and data by directly asking questions of individuals. There are three primary types of qualitative interviews: informal (conversational), semi-structured, and standardized, open-ended. Each is described briefly below along with advantages and disadvantages.

Informal (Conversational) Interviews

• Frequently occur during participant observation or following direct observation.
• The researcher begins by conversing with a member of the group of interest. As the conversation unfolds, the researcher formulates specific questions, often spontaneously, and begins asking them informally.
• Appropriate when the researcher wants maximum flexibility to pursue topics and ideas as they emerge during the exchange

Advantages of informal interviewing:

• Allows the researcher to be responsive to individual differences and to capture emerging information.
• Information that is obtained is not constrained by a predetermined set of questions and/or response categories.
• Permits researcher to delve deeper into a topic and what key terms and constructs mean to study participants.

Disadvantages of informal interviewing:

• May generate less systematic data, which is difficult to classify and analyze.
• The researcher might not be able to capture everything that the interviewee is saying and therefore there is potential for important nuance or information to be lost. For example, the researcher might not have a tape recorder at that moment due to the spontaneous nature of these interviews.
• Quality of the information obtained depends on skills of the interviewer.

Semi-Structured Interviews

• Prior to the interview, a list of predetermined questions or probes, also known as an interview guide, is developed so that each interviewee will respond to a similar series of questions and topics.
• Questions are generally open-ended to elicit as much detail and meaning from the interviewee as possible.
• The researcher is free to pursue and probe other topics as they emerge during the interview.

Advantages of semi-structured interviewing:

• Systematically captures data across interviewees.
• The researcher is able to rephrase or explain questions to the interviewee to ensure that everyone understands the questions the same way and probe (follow-up) a response so that an individual's responses are fully explored.
• Interviewee is allowed the freedom to express his or her views in their own words.

Disadvantages of semi-structured interviewing:

• Does not offer as much flexibility to respond to new topics that unfold during the interview as the informal interview.
• Responses to questions that have been asked in slightly different ways can be more difficult to compare and analyze.
• Interviewer may unconsciously send signals about the types of answers that are expected.

Standardized, Open-Ended Interviews

• Similar to a survey since questions are carefully scripted and written prior to the interview, which serves to minimize variability in question wording and the way questions are asked.
• The researcher asks a uniform series of questions in the same order to each interviewee.
• The questions are open-ended to capture more details and individual differences across interviewees.
• Particularly appropriate for qualitative studies involving multiple interviewers.

Advantages of standardized interviewing:

• All questions are asked the same to each study participant. Data are comparable across interviewees.
• Reduces interviewer effects when several interviewers are used.
• Standardization helps to facilitate the processing and analysis of the data.

Disadvantages of standardized interviewing:

• Does not offer as much flexibility to respond to and probe new topics that unfold during the interview.
• Standardized wording of questions may limit the responses of those being interviewed.

Both standardized and semi-structured interviews involve formally recruiting participants and are typically tape-recorded. The researcher should begin with obtaining informed consent from the interviewee prior to starting the interview. Additionally, the researcher may write a separate field note to describe the interviewee's reactions to the interview, or events that occurred before or after the interview.

See the following for additional information about field research and qualitative research methods.

• Ethnography, Observational Research and Narrative Inquiry  (PDF)
• An Introduction to Qualitative Research  (PDF)

The content on this page was prepared by Jerry West. It was last updated March 2019.

A guide to field studies

Last updated

18 April 2023

Reviewed by

Cathy Heath

Short on time? Get an AI generated summary of this article instead

Field studies allow researchers to observe and collect data in real-world settings. Unlike laboratory-based or traditional research methods, field studies enable researchers to investigate complex phenomena within their environment, providing a deeper understanding of the research context.

Researchers can use field studies to investigate a wide range of subjects, from the behavior of animals to the practices of businesses or the experiences of individuals in a particular setting.

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• What is a field study?

A field study is a research method that involves conducting observations and collecting data in a natural setting. This method includes observing, interviewing, and interacting with participants in their environment, such as a workplace, community, or natural habitat.

Field studies can take many forms, from ethnographic studies involving extended periods of observation and using an anthropological lens to shorter-term studies focusing on specific behaviors or events. Regardless of its form, a successful field study requires careful planning, preparation, and execution to ensure the data collected is valid and reliable.

• How to plan a field study

Planning a field study is a critical first step in ensuring successful research. Here are some steps to follow when preparing your field study:

1. Define your research question

When developing a good research question , you should make it clear, concise, and specific. It should also be open-ended, allowing for various possible answers rather than a simple yes or no response. Your research question should also be relevant to the broader field of study and contribute new knowledge to the existing literature.

Once you have a defined research question, identify the key variables you need to study and the data you need to collect. It might involve developing a hypothesis or research framework outlining the relationships between different variables and how you’ll measure them in your study.

2. Identify your research site

A research site is a location where you’ll conduct your study and collect data. Here are the types of research sites to consider when planning a field study:

Natural habitats: For environmental or ecological research, you may need to conduct your study in a natural habitat, such as a forest, wetland, or coral reef.

Communities : If your research relates to social or cultural factors, you may need to study a particular community, such as a neighborhood, village, or city.

Organizations : For questions relating to organizational behavior or management, your location will be in a business environment, like a nonprofit or government agency.

Events : If your research question relates to a particular event, you may need to conduct your study at that event, such as, at a protest, festival, or natural disaster.

Ensure your research site represents the population you're studying. For example, if you're exploring cultural beliefs, ensure the community represents the larger population and you have access to a diverse group of participants.

3. Determine your data collection methods

Choosing a suitable method will depend on the research question, the type of data needed, and the characteristics of the participants. Here are some commonly used data collection methods in field studies:

Interviews : You can collect data on people's experiences, perspectives, and attitudes. In some instances, you can use phone or online interviews.

Observations : This method involves watching and recording behaviors and interactions in a specific setting. 

Surveys : By using a survey , you can easily standardize and tailor the questions to provide answers for your research. Respondents can complete the survey in person, by mail, or online.

Document analysis : Organizational reports, letters, diaries, public records, policies, or social media posts can be analyzed to gain context. 

When selecting data collection methods, consider factors such as the availability of participants, the ethical considerations involved, and the resources needed to carry out each method. For example, conducting interviews may require more time and resources than administering a survey.

4. Obtain necessary permissions

Depending on the research location and the nature of the study, you may require permission from local authorities, organizations, or individuals before conducting your research. 

This process is vital when working with human or animal subjects and conducting research in sensitive or protected environments.

Here are some steps you can take to obtain the necessary permissions:

Identify the relevant authorities , including local governments, regulatory bodies, research institutions, or private organizations, to obtain permission for your research.

Reach out to the relevant authorities to explain the nature of your study. Be ready to hand out detailed information about your research. 

If you're conducting research with human participants, you must have their consent . You'll also need to ensure the participants have the right to withdraw from the study at any time.

Obtain necessary permits from regulatory bodies or local authorities. For example, if you're conducting research in a protected area, you may need a research permit from the relevant government agency.

The process of obtaining permissions can be time-consuming, and failure to obtain the necessary permits can lead to legal and ethical issues.

• Examples of field research

Researchers can apply field research to a wide range of disciplines and phenomena. Here are some examples of field research in different fields:

Anthropology : Anthropologists use field research methods to study different communities' social and cultural practices. For instance, an anthropologist might conduct participant observation in a remote community to understand their customs, beliefs, and practices.

Ecology : Ecologists use field research methods to learn the behavior of organisms and their interactions with the environment. For example, an ecologist might conduct field research on the behavior of birds in their natural habitat to understand their feeding habits, nesting patterns, and migration.

Sociology : Sociologists may use field research methods to study social behavior and interactions. For instance, a sociologist might conduct participant observation in a workplace to understand organizational culture and communication dynamics.

Geography : Geographers use field research methods to study different regions’ physical and human contexts. For example, a geographer might conduct field research on the impact of climate change on a particular ecosystem, such as a forest or wetland.

Psychology : Psychologists use field research methods to study human behavior in natural settings. For instance, a psychologist might conduct field research on the effects of stress on students in a school setting.

Education : Researchers studying education may use field research methods to study teaching and learning in real-world settings. For example, you could use field research to test the effectiveness of a new teaching method in a classroom setting.

By using field research methods, researchers can gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of the natural world, human behavior, and social interaction theory and how they affect each other.

• Advantages of field research

Field research has several advantages over other research methods, including:

Authenticity : Field research conducted in natural settings allows researchers to observe and study real-life phenomena as it happens. This authenticity enhances the validity and accuracy of the data collected.

Flexibility : Field research methods are flexible and adaptable to different research contexts. Researchers can adjust their strategies to meet the specific needs of their research questions and participants and uncover new insights as the research unfolds.

Rich data : Field research provides rich and detailed data, often including contextual information that’s difficult to capture through other research methods. This depth of knowledge allows for a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the research topic.

Novel insights : Field research can lead to discoveries that may not be possible with other research methods. Observing and studying phenomena in natural settings can provide unique perspectives and new understandings of complex issues.

Field research methods can enhance the quality and validity of research findings and lead to new insights and discoveries that may not be possible with other research methods.

• Disadvantages of field research

While field research has several advantages, there are also some disadvantages that researchers need to consider, including:

Time-consuming : Researchers need to spend time in the field, possibly weeks or months, which can be challenging, especially if the research site is remote or requires travel.

Cost : Conducting field research can be costly, especially if the research site is remote or requires specialized equipment or materials.

Reliance on participants : It may be challenging to recruit participants, and various factors, such as personal circumstances, attitudes, and beliefs, may influence their participation.

Ethical considerations : Field research may raise ethical concerns, mainly if the research involves vulnerable populations or sensitive topics. 

Causality: Researchers may have little control over the environmental or contextual variables they are studying. This can make it difficult to establish causality and then generalize their results with previous research. 

Researchers must carefully weigh the advantages and disadvantages of field research and select the most appropriate research method based on their research question, participants, and context.

What is another name for field study?

Field study is also known as field research or fieldwork. These terms are often used interchangeably and refer to research methods that involve observing and collecting data in natural settings.

What is the difference between a field study and a case study?

Why is field study important.

Field study is critical because it allows researchers to study real-world phenomena in natural settings. This study can also lead to novel insights that may not be possible with other research methods.

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Chapter 12: Field Research: A Qualitative Research Technique

12.1 Field Research: What Is It?

Field research is a qualitative method of data collection aimed at understanding, observing, and interacting with people in their natural settings. In the context of research, observation is more than just looking. It involves looking in a planned and strategic way with a purpose (Palys & Atchison, 2014, p. 189). As such, when social scientists talk about being in “the field,” they are talking about being out in the real world and involved in the everyday lives of the people they are studying. Sometimes researchers use the terms ethnography or participant observation to refer to this method of data collection; the former is most commonly used in anthropology, while the latter is used commonly in sociology. For our purposes, we will use two main terms: field research and participant observation . You might think of field research as an umbrella term that includes the myriad activities that field researchers engage in when they collect data: they participate; they observe; they usually interview some of the people they observe; and they typically analyze documents or artifacts created by the people they observe.

Researchers conducting participant observation vary in the extent to which they participate or observe. Palys and Atchison (2014, p. 198) refer to this as the “participant-observer continuum,” ranging from complete participant to complete observer. This continuum is demonstrated in Figure 12.1. However, these researchers, as to do other researchers, question whether a researcher can be at the “complete observer” end of the continuum. Rather, they contend, it is increasingly acknowledged that, even as an observer, the researcher is participating in what is being studied and therefore cannot really be a complete observer.

Indeed, it is important to acknowledge that there are pros and cons associated with both aspects of the participant/observer’s role. For example, depending upon how fully researchers observer their subjects (as opposed to participating), they may miss important aspects of group interaction and may not have the opportunity to fully grasp what life is like for the people they observe. At the same time, sitting back and observing may grant researchers opportunities to see interactions that they would miss, were they more involved.

Ethnography is not to be confused with ethnomethodology. Ethnomethodology will be defined and described in Chapter 13

Participation has the benefit of allowing researchers a real taste of life in the group that they study. Some argue that participation is the only way to understand what it is that is being investigated. On the other hand, fully immersed participants may find themselves in situations that they would rather not face but from which cannot excuse themselves because they have adopted the role of a fully immersed participant. Further, participants who do not reveal themselves as researchers must face the ethical quandary of possibly deceiving their subjects. In reality, much field research lies somewhere near the middle of the observer/participant continuum. Field researchers typically participate to at least some extent in their field sites, but there are also times when they may strictly observe.

Research Methods for the Social Sciences: An Introduction Copyright © 2020 by Valerie Sheppard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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What is Field Research? Definition, Types, Methods, Examples

Appinio Research · 05.04.2024 · 30min read

Have you ever wondered how researchers gather data about real-life situations, behaviors, and interactions? Field research holds the answer. Field research is like stepping into the world around us to study things as they naturally happen. It's about going beyond the confines of a lab or a controlled environment to observe, interact with, and collect data from people, communities, or natural settings. Whether it's understanding how people make decisions, studying the behavior of animals in their habitats, or exploring cultural practices in different societies, field research offers a window into the complexities of our world. It's a hands-on approach that allows you to immerse yourself in the context you're studying, gaining firsthand insights and uncovering patterns that might not be apparent in artificial settings. From interviewing participants to conducting observations and surveys, field researchers employ a variety of techniques to capture the richness and diversity of human experiences and natural phenomena. In this guide, we'll explore the ins and outs of field research, from its importance and applications to practical tips for planning, conducting, and analyzing field studies.

What is Field Research?

Field research is a qualitative data collection method that involves studying phenomena in their natural settings. Unlike laboratory experiments or simulations, field research takes place in real-world environments, allowing you to observe, interact with, and gather data from participants or phenomena as they naturally occur. This approach enables researchers to gain firsthand insights into complex social, behavioral, or environmental dynamics, providing rich and contextually embedded data for analysis and interpretation.

Importance of Field Research

Field research plays a crucial role in various disciplines and industries, serving as a cornerstone for generating new knowledge, understanding real-world phenomena, and informing decision-making and practice.

Here is why field research is important:

• Contextual Understanding:  Field research allows researchers to study phenomena in their natural contexts, providing a nuanced understanding of the social, cultural, and environmental factors that shape behavior, attitudes, and experiences. By immersing themselves in the field, you can capture the intricacies and complexities of real-life situations that may not be apparent in controlled laboratory settings.
• Insights into Human Behavior:  Field research provides valuable insights into human behavior, interactions, and relationships in diverse contexts. By observing and interacting with participants in their natural environments, researchers can uncover patterns, motivations, and social dynamics that influence individual and group behaviors. This understanding is essential for addressing societal challenges, designing interventions, and improving policy and practice.
• Generating Grounded Theory:  Field research often serves as the foundation for grounded theory development, where theoretical frameworks and hypotheses emerge from empirical observations and data analysis. By systematically collecting and analyzing data from the field, you can generate new theories, concepts, or models that are grounded in real-world phenomena and have practical relevance and applicability.
• Validating and Supplementing Existing Knowledge:  Field research provides an opportunity to validate or supplement existing knowledge derived from laboratory studies, surveys, or secondary data sources. By corroborating findings across different methods and contexts, you can enhance the credibility and robustness of their conclusions and contribute to the accumulation of knowledge in their respective fields.
• Informing Policy and Practice:  Field research findings have direct implications for policy development, program planning, and practice in various sectors such as healthcare, education, social services, and environmental management . By generating evidence-based insights and recommendations, field research can inform decision-making processes, guide resource allocation, and improve the effectiveness and relevance of interventions and policies.

Field research offers a unique opportunity to explore, understand, and address real-world phenomena in their natural contexts. By embracing the complexities and nuances of the field, researchers can generate valuable insights, advance theoretical understanding, and make meaningful contributions to scholarship, practice, and society at large.

How to Prepare for Field Research?

Laying the groundwork for your research journey is crucial before diving into the field. This involves a series of preparatory steps aimed at ensuring clarity, focus, and feasibility in your approach.

1. Define Research Objectives

Your research objectives serve as the guiding light throughout your field research endeavor. They delineate the purpose of your study and provide a clear direction for your investigative efforts. When defining your objectives, consider the overarching goals you aim to achieve and the specific outcomes you hope to attain through your research. Whether it's understanding a particular phenomenon, exploring a societal issue, or testing a theoretical proposition, articulate your objectives with precision and clarity.

2. Choose a Research Topic

Selecting the right research topic is paramount to the success of your field research project. Your topic should be aligned with your interests, expertise, and the broader context of your field of study. Consider the relevance, novelty, and significance of potential topics, and choose one that resonates with your intellectual curiosity and research goals. Additionally, ensure that your chosen topic is feasible within the constraints of time, resources, and access to data or participants.

3. Develop Research Questions

Research questions serve as the compass that guides your inquiry and shapes the trajectory of your research journey. These questions should be framed in a way that allows for systematic investigation and exploration of the phenomenon under study. When developing your research questions, strive for clarity, specificity, and relevance to your chosen topic. Consider the scope of inquiry, the level of detail required, and the potential implications of your questions for theory, practice, or policy.

4. Formulate Hypotheses

Hypotheses provide a framework for hypothesis-driven research, allowing you to make predictions about the relationships or patterns you expect to observe in your data. If your research is hypothesis-driven, formulate clear and testable hypotheses that articulate the expected outcomes or associations based on existing theory or empirical evidence. Ensure your hypotheses are falsifiable, meaning they can be rigorously tested and potentially disproven through empirical investigation.

5. Review Existing Literature

Before venturing into the field, take the time to immerse yourself in the existing literature relevant to your research topic. A comprehensive literature review not only provides valuable insights into the current state of knowledge but also helps you identify gaps, contradictions, or areas needing further exploration. Synthesize and critically evaluate the findings, theories, and methodologies presented in the literature, and use this knowledge to inform your own research design , questions, and hypotheses.

6. Secure Necessary Permissions and Resources

Obtaining the requisite permissions and resources is essential for the smooth execution of your field research project. Depending on the nature of your study, you may need to seek ethical approval from institutional review boards or obtain permits for conducting research in specific locations or with certain populations.

Additionally, ensure you have access to the necessary resources, such as funding, equipment, transportation, and logistical support, to carry out your research effectively. Be proactive in addressing potential challenges or barriers that may arise during the planning phase, and seek guidance or assistance as needed to navigate the regulatory and logistical requirements of your research endeavor.

How to Plan Field Research?

As you transition from the preparatory phase to the implementation stage, meticulous planning becomes essential to ensure the success and efficiency of your field research endeavors. Let's delve into the key components of planning field research, from selecting appropriate methodologies to anticipating and mitigating potential challenges.

1. Select Suitable Research Methods

Choosing the proper research methods is pivotal to the success of your field research project. Your research objectives, questions, and the nature of the phenomenon under investigation should guide the selection process. Consider the strengths and limitations of various research methodologies, such as qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods approaches, and choose the one that best aligns with your research goals. Factors to consider include:

• The level of depth and detail required.
• The type of data you aim to collect.
• The accessibility of research participants or sites.

Be prepared to adapt and refine your chosen methods as you gain insights and experience in the field.

2. Design Research Instruments

Once you've identified your research methods, the next step is to design the instruments or tools you'll use to collect data. Whether it's interview guides, survey questionnaires , observation protocols, or experimental materials , your research instruments should be meticulously crafted to elicit relevant and reliable information from your participants.

Pay attention to the clarity, comprehensiveness, and validity of your instruments, ensuring that they align with your research objectives and are appropriate for your target population or context. Pilot testing your instruments with a small sample of participants can help identify and address any ambiguities or issues before full-scale implementation.

3. Determine Sampling Techniques

Sampling is a critical aspect of field research, influencing the representativeness and generalizability of your findings. There are various sampling techniques available, each suited to different research designs and objectives. Consider factors such as the size and diversity of your target population, the accessibility of potential participants, and the level of precision required for your study.

Standard sampling techniques include probability sampling methods like simple random sampling, stratified sampling , or cluster sampling , as well as non-probability sampling methods like convenience sampling, purposive sampling, or snowball sampling. Choose the sampling technique that best balances practical considerations with the need for valid and reliable data.

4. Create a Research Schedule

Developing a well-structured research schedule is essential for keeping your field research project on track and ensuring you meet your deadlines and milestones. Start by breaking down your research activities into manageable tasks and allocating timeframes for each stage of the process, from pre-fieldwork preparation to data analysis and reporting.

• Be realistic in your estimations and build in buffer time for unexpected delays or challenges that may arise during fieldwork.
• Consider factors such as seasonal variations, logistical constraints, and the availability of participants when scheduling your research activities.
• Regularly review and update your schedule as needed to accommodate changes or revisions to your plans.

5. Identify Potential Challenges and Mitigation Strategies

Field research is inherently unpredictable, and you're likely to encounter various challenges and obstacles along the way. Anticipating these challenges proactively and developing mitigation strategies can help minimize their impact on your research outcomes. Common challenges in field research include logistical issues, recruitment difficulties, ethical dilemmas, and interpersonal conflicts.

Take the time to identify potential risks and vulnerabilities inherent in your research design and context, and develop contingency plans or alternative courses of action to address them. Collaborate with peers, mentors, or experienced researchers to brainstorm solutions and draw on their insights and expertise. By being prepared and adaptable, you can navigate the complexities of field research with confidence and resilience.

How to Conduct Field Research?

Now that you've laid the groundwork and meticulously planned your field research project, it's time to roll up your sleeves and immerse yourself in the field.

Data Collection Techniques

Data collection is the heart of field research, enabling you to gather firsthand insights and observations from the field. You can employ several techniques to collect data, depending on your research objectives, context, and the nature of your study.

• Observational Methods:  Direct observation involves systematically observing and documenting behaviors, interactions, or phenomena in natural settings without interfering or influencing the subjects. This method is particularly useful for studying social interactions, environmental dynamics, or animal behavior.
• Interviewing:   Interviews allow researchers to engage in structured, semi-structured, or unstructured conversations with participants to gather in-depth insights, perspectives, or experiences related to the research topic. Depending on logistical constraints and participant preferences, interviews can be conducted face-to-face, over the phone, or via digital platforms.
• Surveys and Questionnaires :  Surveys involve administering standardized questionnaires or surveys to a sample of respondents to collect quantitative data on their attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, or demographics. Surveys can be distributed in person, via mail, email, or online platforms, depending on the target population and accessibility.
• Focus Groups :  Focus groups bring together a small group of participants to engage in facilitated discussions or brainstorming sessions around specific topics or issues. This method allows you to explore group dynamics, consensus, or dissent among participants and generate rich qualitative data through interaction and dialogue.

Choose the data collection techniques that best align with your research objectives, methodology, and participants' preferences. Be mindful of ethical considerations, informed consent procedures, and the need to maintain confidentiality and privacy during data collection.

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Fieldwork Logistics

Effective management of fieldwork logistics is essential for the smooth execution of your research project and the well-being of both researchers and participants. This entails careful planning, coordination, and organization of various logistical aspects, including participant recruitment, site selection, equipment management, and safety protocols.

• Recruiting Participants:  Identify and recruit eligible participants using appropriate sampling techniques and recruitment strategies. Clearly communicate the purpose and expectations of the study, obtain informed consent, and address any concerns or questions raised by participants.
• Establishing Field Sites:  Select and secure suitable field sites or locations where data collection will take place. Consider factors such as accessibility, safety, privacy, and the relevance of the site to your research objectives. Obtain any necessary permits or permissions required for conducting research in specific locations.
• Managing Equipment and Supplies:  Ensure that you have all the necessary equipment, materials, and resources required for data collection, recording, and storage. This may include audio or video recording devices, notebooks, pens, measuring instruments, or digital devices for data entry.
• Ensuring Research Ethics and Safety:  Adhere to ethical principles and guidelines governing research with human subjects, animals, or sensitive environments. Prioritize participant welfare and safety by implementing appropriate risk management measures, emergency procedures, and protocols for handling sensitive or confidential information.

Regularly assess and reassess the logistical needs and challenges encountered during fieldwork, and be prepared to adapt and improvise as needed to overcome obstacles and ensure the successful completion of your research objectives.

Data Recording and Management

Accurate and systematic data recording is crucial for maintaining the integrity and reliability of your research findings. Establish clear protocols and procedures for recording, organizing, and managing your data throughout the fieldwork process.

• Data Recording:  Document observations, interviews, survey responses, or other forms of data systematically and consistently. Use standardized formats, codes, or identifiers to ensure uniformity and ease of analysis. Consider using digital tools or software for data collection and recording to streamline the process and minimize errors.
• Data Storage and Backup:  Store your data securely and responsibly to prevent loss, theft, or unauthorized access. Back up your data regularly using reliable storage devices or cloud-based platforms to safeguard against data loss or corruption. Implement encryption, password protection, or other security measures to protect sensitive or confidential information.
• Data Validation and Quality Control:  Conduct periodic checks and validations to ensure the accuracy, completeness, and validity of your data. Double-check entries, reconcile discrepancies, and address any outliers or inconsistencies identified during the data collection process. Maintain detailed documentation of any revisions or corrections made to the dataset.

By implementing robust data recording and management practices, you can enhance the reliability, transparency, and reproducibility of your research outcomes and facilitate the analysis and interpretation of your findings.

Field Research Examples

Field research plays a pivotal role in helping businesses understand their customers, market dynamics, and competitive landscape. Here are some examples of how field research can be applied in real-world scenarios.

Customer Observation and Ethnography

Imagine a retail company seeking to improve its store layout and enhance customers' shopping experience. By conducting field research through customer observation and ethnographic studies , researchers can immerse themselves in the retail environment, observing how customers navigate the store, interact with products , and make purchasing decisions.

Through careful observation and note-taking, you can uncover valuable insights into customer preferences, behaviors, and pain points, informing strategic decisions around product placement, signage, and store design.

In-Depth Interviews and Focus Groups

A tech startup developing a new mobile app wants to gather feedback from potential users to refine its features and user interface. Through in-depth interviews and focus groups conducted in the field, researchers can engage directly with target users, exploring their needs, preferences , and usage patterns.

Asking probing questions and facilitating group discussions can elicit rich qualitative insights into user experiences, pain points, and desired functionalities. This firsthand feedback can guide the iterative development process, ensuring that the app meets the needs and expectations of its intended audience.

Market Research and Competitive Analysis

A multinational corporation launching a new product in a foreign market conducts field research to assess market demand and understand local competitors. Researchers may conduct surveys, interviews, and market observations to gather data on consumer preferences, buying behavior, and competitor offerings.

By analyzing this data, the company can identify market opportunities, refine its marketing strategy, and tailor its product offerings to meet the specific needs and preferences of the target market . Field research also provides valuable insights into competitive positioning, allowing the company to differentiate itself and capitalize on its unique strengths.

User Testing and Usability Studies

A software development company wants to ensure that its website is user-friendly and intuitive for visitors. Through field research methods such as user testing and usability studies , researchers can observe real users interacting with the website in a naturalistic setting.

By monitoring users' actions, navigation patterns, and feedback, you can identify usability issues, areas of confusion, and opportunities for improvement. This iterative process of testing and refinement helps optimize the website's design and functionality, ultimately enhancing the user experience and driving customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Employee Feedback and Organizational Culture

A large corporation embarks on a field research initiative to better understand employee satisfaction, engagement, and organizational culture. Through surveys, focus groups, and participatory observation, researchers gather feedback from employees across different departments and hierarchical levels.

By exploring topics such as work-life balance, communication channels, and leadership effectiveness, you can identify areas of strength and areas for improvement within the organization. This insights-driven approach enables the company to implement targeted interventions, policies, and initiatives to foster a positive and inclusive work environment, ultimately enhancing employee morale, productivity, and retention.

In each of these examples, field research serves as a valuable tool for generating actionable insights, informing strategic decision-making, and driving business success. By embracing a hands-on, experiential approach to research, businesses can gain a competitive edge in today's dynamic and rapidly evolving marketplace.

How to Analyze Field Research Data?

Once you've collected data in the field, the next critical step is to analyze it to derive meaningful insights and draw conclusions.

1. Clean and Organize Data

Before delving into the analysis, it's essential to clean and organize your data to ensure its quality and integrity. Data cleaning involves identifying and rectifying errors, inconsistencies, or missing values in your dataset. Data cleaning tasks include:

• Removing Outliers:  Identify and remove any extreme or erroneous data points that may skew your analysis or distort your findings.
• Handling Missing Data:  Address missing values by imputing them using appropriate techniques such as mean imputation, regression imputation, or multiple imputation.
• Standardizing Variables:  Ensure consistency in measurement units, scales, or formats across variables to facilitate comparison and analysis.
• Checking for Data Entry Errors:  Review data entries for typos, duplicates, or other inaccuracies that may arise during data collection or recording.

Once the data cleaning process is complete, organize your dataset in a structured and systematic manner to facilitate analysis. Create variables, labels, or categories as needed, and document any transformations or manipulations applied to the data for transparency and reproducibility.

2. Apply Analytical Techniques

With a clean and organized dataset in hand, you can now apply analytical techniques to uncover patterns, relationships, or trends within the data. The choice of analytical techniques will depend on your research questions, objectives, and the nature of your data.

Analytical methods used in field research include:

• Descriptive Statistics :  Calculate measures of central tendency, variability, and distribution to summarize and describe your data.
• Inferential Statistics :  Use statistical tests such as t-tests , chi-square tests , regression analysis , or analysis of variance (ANOVA) to test hypotheses, compare groups, or examine relationships between variables.
• Qualitative Analysis:  Employ qualitative data analysis techniques such as thematic analysis , content analysis, or grounded theory to explore themes, patterns, or meanings embedded within textual or narrative data.
• Mixed Methods Analysis:  Integrate quantitative and qualitative data to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the research phenomenon through triangulation or data transformation techniques.

Chi-Square Calculator :

t-Test Calculator :

One-way ANOVA Calculator :

Select analytical techniques appropriate for your research design, data type, and research questions. Ensure your analyses are conducted rigorously and transparently, adhering to established standards and guidelines in your field.

3. Interpret Findings

Once the analysis is complete, it's time to interpret the findings and draw meaningful conclusions from your data. Interpretation involves making sense of the results in the context of your research objectives, theoretical framework, and empirical evidence.

• Contextualizing Results:  Situate your findings within the broader context of existing literature, theoretical perspectives, or real-world phenomena to provide meaningful insights and interpretations.
• Identifying Patterns and Trends:  Highlight recurring patterns, trends, or relationships observed in the data and discuss their implications for theory, practice, or policy.
• Exploring Alternative Explanations:  Consider alternative explanations or interpretations of the findings and discuss their potential implications for the validity and reliability of your conclusions.
• Addressing Unexpected Findings:  Acknowledge and address any unexpected or counterintuitive findings that may challenge existing assumptions or theories and offer plausible explanations or avenues for further exploration.

Communicate your interpretations clearly and concisely, using evidence from your data to support your claims and conclusions. Be transparent about the limitations and uncertainties inherent in your findings, and discuss their implications for future research or practice.

4. Address Limitations and Bias

No research study is without limitations or biases, and it's essential to acknowledge and address these shortcomings transparently. To address limitations and bias in your field research:

• Methodological Limitations:  Discuss any limitations or constraints inherent in your research design, sampling methods, or data collection techniques that may have influenced the validity or generalizability of your findings.
• Selection Bias :  Be mindful of selection bias, where certain groups or individuals are overrepresented or underrepresented in your sample, and consider its potential impact on the reliability and validity of your results.
• Social Desirability Bias:  Recognize the influence of social desirability bias, where participants may provide responses that are perceived as socially acceptable rather than truthful, and consider strategies to mitigate its effects.
• Researcher Bias:  Reflect on your own biases, assumptions, or preconceptions that may have influenced the research process or interpretation of findings, and strive for objectivity and reflexivity in your analysis and reporting.

By acknowledging and addressing limitations and biases transparently, you demonstrate intellectual honesty and integrity, and contribute to the credibility and robustness of your research outcomes.

How to Report Field Research Results?

Communicating your research findings effectively is essential for sharing your insights with the academic community, policymakers, practitioners, and other stakeholders. Here are some strategies for reporting and presenting your results:

• Structuring the Research Report:  Organize your research report in a clear and logical manner, following the conventions of academic writing. Include sections such as introduction, literature review, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusions. Each section should flow cohesively, guiding the reader through the research process from inception to conclusion.
• Writing Techniques and Guidelines:  Use clear, concise, and jargon-free language to convey your findings to a diverse audience. Structure your sentences and paragraphs logically, and use headings, subheadings, and bullet points to enhance readability. Pay attention to grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and adhere to the formatting style prescribed by your discipline or publication venue.
• Creating Visual Representations: Enhance your research report or presentation with visual representations such as tables, charts, graphs, heatmaps , or diagrams. Choose visual formats that effectively illustrate key findings or trends in your data. Ensure that your visuals are clear, accurate, and appropriately labeled, and provide a brief caption or explanation to contextualize the information presented.
• Preparing Presentations:  Design engaging and informative presentations highlighting your research's main findings and implications. Use slides, visuals, and storytelling techniques to capture your audience's attention and convey your message effectively. Structure your presentation logically, with a clear introduction, main body, and conclusion, and allow time for questions and discussion.
• Sharing Findings with Stakeholders:  Share your research findings with relevant stakeholders, including academic peers, policymakers, practitioners, or community members. Tailor your communication approach to the needs and preferences of your audience, and choose appropriate dissemination channels such as conferences, seminars, publications, or social media platforms. Invite feedback or collaboration whenever possible, and be open to engaging in dialogue and knowledge exchange with your audience.

Effective reporting and presentation of research results not only showcase the significance and impact of your work but also contribute to knowledge dissemination, collaboration, and informed decision-making in your field. Strive for clarity, coherence, and engagement in your communication efforts, and consider your audience's diverse needs and interests when crafting your messages.

Conclusion for Field Research

Field research is a powerful tool for gaining a deeper understanding of the world around us. By venturing into real-life settings, you can uncover valuable insights into human behavior, societal dynamics, and natural phenomena. Whether studying the behavior of animals in their natural habitats or exploring the intricacies of human interactions, field research offers a unique perspective that complements other research methods. By embracing the complexities and nuances of the field, researchers can generate knowledge that is grounded in real-world experiences and has practical implications for addressing pressing societal challenges. Furthermore, field research isn't just about collecting data—it's about making a difference. The i nsights gained from field studies can inform policy decisions, shape interventions, and drive positive change in communities and organizations . By sharing their findings with stakeholders, you can contribute to evidence-based decision-making and foster collaboration between academia, government, and civil society.

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Article Contents

Introduction, what is fieldwork, purpose of fieldwork, physical safety, mental wellbeing and affect, ethical considerations, remote fieldwork, concluding thoughts, acknowledgments, funder information.

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Field Research: A Graduate Student's Guide

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Ezgi Irgil, Anne-Kathrin Kreft, Myunghee Lee, Charmaine N Willis, Kelebogile Zvobgo, Field Research: A Graduate Student's Guide, International Studies Review , Volume 23, Issue 4, December 2021, Pages 1495–1517, https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viab023

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What is field research? Is it just for qualitative scholars? Must it be done in a foreign country? How much time in the field is “enough”? A lack of disciplinary consensus on what constitutes “field research” or “fieldwork” has left graduate students in political science underinformed and thus underequipped to leverage site-intensive research to address issues of interest and urgency across the subfields. Uneven training in Ph.D. programs has also left early-career researchers underprepared for the logistics of fieldwork, from developing networks and effective sampling strategies to building respondents’ trust, and related issues of funding, physical safety, mental health, research ethics, and crisis response. Based on the experience of five junior scholars, this paper offers answers to questions that graduate students puzzle over, often without the benefit of others’ “lessons learned.” This practical guide engages theory and praxis, in support of an epistemologically and methodologically pluralistic discipline.

¿Qué es la investigación de campo? ¿Es solo para académicos cualitativos? ¿Debe realizarse en un país extranjero? ¿Cuánto tiempo en el terreno es “suficiente”? La falta de consenso disciplinario con respecto a qué constituye la “investigación de campo” o el “trabajo de campo” ha causado que los estudiantes de posgrado en ciencias políticas estén poco informados y, por lo tanto, capacitados de manera insuficiente para aprovechar la investigación exhaustiva en el sitio con el objetivo de abordar los asuntos urgentes y de interés en los subcampos. La capacitación desigual en los programas de doctorado también ha provocado que los investigadores en las primeras etapas de su carrera estén poco preparados para la logística del trabajo de campo, desde desarrollar redes y estrategias de muestreo efectivas hasta generar la confianza de las personas que facilitan la información, y las cuestiones relacionadas con la financiación, la seguridad física, la salud mental, la ética de la investigación y la respuesta a las situaciones de crisis. Con base en la experiencia de cinco académicos novatos, este artículo ofrece respuestas a las preguntas que desconciertan a los estudiantes de posgrado, a menudo, sin el beneficio de las “lecciones aprendidas” de otras personas. Esta guía práctica incluye teoría y praxis, en apoyo de una disciplina pluralista desde el punto de vista epistemológico y metodológico.

En quoi consiste la recherche de terain ? Est-elle uniquement réservée aux chercheurs qualitatifs ? Doit-elle être effectuée dans un pays étranger ? Combien de temps faut-il passer sur le terrain pour que ce soit « suffisant » ? Le manque de consensus disciplinaire sur ce qui constitue une « recherche de terrain » ou un « travail de terrain » a laissé les étudiants diplômés en sciences politiques sous-informés et donc sous-équipés pour tirer parti des recherches de terrain intensives afin d'aborder les questions d'intérêt et d'urgence dans les sous-domaines. L'inégalité de formation des programmes de doctorat a mené à une préparation insuffisante des chercheurs en début de carrière à la logistique du travail de terrain, qu'il s'agisse du développement de réseaux et de stratégies d’échantillonnage efficaces, de l'acquisition de la confiance des personnes interrogées ou des questions de financement, de sécurité physique, de santé mentale, d’éthique de recherche et de réponse aux crises qui y sont associées. Cet article s'appuie sur l'expérience de cinq jeunes chercheurs pour proposer des réponses aux questions que les étudiants diplômés se posent, souvent sans bénéficier des « enseignements tirés » par les autres. Ce guide pratique engage théorie et pratique en soutien à une discipline épistémologiquement et méthodologiquement pluraliste.

Days before embarking on her first field research trip, a Ph.D. student worries about whether she will be able to collect the qualitative data that she needs for her dissertation. Despite sending dozens of emails, she has received only a handful of responses to her interview requests. She wonders if she will be able to gain more traction in-country. Meanwhile, in the midst of drafting her thesis proposal, an M.A. student speculates about the feasibility of his project, given a modest budget. Thousands of miles away from home, a postdoc is concerned about their safety, as protests erupt outside their window and state security forces descend into the streets.

These anecdotes provide a small glimpse into the concerns of early-career researchers undertaking significant projects with a field research component. Many of these fieldwork-related concerns arise from an unfortunate shortage in curricular offerings for qualitative and mixed-method research in political science graduate programs ( Emmons and Moravcsik 2020 ), 1 as well as the scarcity of instructional materials for qualitative and mixed-method research, relative to those available for quantitative research ( Elman, Kapiszewski, and Kirilova 2015 ; Kapiszewski, MacLean, and Read 2015 ; Mosley 2013 ). A recent survey among the leading United States Political Science programs in Comparative Politics and International Relations found that among graduate students who have carried out international fieldwork, 62 percent had not received any formal fieldwork training and only 20 percent felt very or mostly prepared for their fieldwork ( Schwartz and Cronin-Furman 2020 , 7–8). This shortfall in training and instruction means that many young researchers are underprepared for the logistics of fieldwork, from developing networks and effective sampling strategies to building respondents’ trust. In addition, there is a notable lack of preparation around issues of funding, physical safety, mental health, research ethics, and crisis response. This is troubling, as field research is highly valued and, in some parts of the field, it is all but expected, for instance in comparative politics.

Beyond subfield-specific expectations, research that leverages multiple types of data and methods, including fieldwork, is one of the ways that scholars throughout the discipline can more fully answer questions of interest and urgency. Indeed, multimethod work, a critical means by which scholars can parse and evaluate causal pathways, is on the rise ( Weller and Barnes 2016 ). The growing appearance of multimethod research in leading journals and university presses makes adequate training and preparation all the more significant ( Seawright 2016 ; Nexon 2019 ).

We are five political scientists interested in providing graduate students and other early-career researchers helpful resources for field research that we lacked when we first began our work. Each of us has recently completed or will soon complete a Ph.D. at a United States or Swedish university, though we come from many different national backgrounds. We have conducted field research in our home countries and abroad. From Colombia and Guatemala to the United States, from Europe to Turkey, and throughout East and Southeast Asia, we have spanned the globe to investigate civil society activism and transitional justice in post-violence societies, conflict-related sexual violence, social movements, authoritarianism and contentious politics, and the everyday politics and interactions between refugees and host-country citizens.

While some of us have studied in departments that offer strong training in field research methods, most of us have had to self-teach, learning through trial and error. Some of us have also been fortunate to participate in short courses and workshops hosted by universities such as the Consortium for Qualitative Research Methods and interdisciplinary institutions such as the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Recognizing that these opportunities are not available to or feasible for all, and hoping to ease the concerns of our more junior colleagues, we decided to compile our experiences and recommendations for first-time field researchers.

Our experiences in the field differ in several key respects, from the time we spent in the field to the locations we visited, and how we conducted our research. The diversity of our experiences, we hope, will help us reach and assist the broadest possible swath of graduate students interested in field research. Some of us have spent as little as ten days in a given country or as much as several months, in some instances visiting a given field site location just once and in other instances returning several times. At times, we have been able to plan weeks and months in advance. Other times, we have quickly arranged focus groups and impromptu interviews. Other times still, we have completed interviews virtually, when research participants were in remote locations or when we ourselves were unable to travel, of note during the coronavirus pandemic. We have worked in countries where we are fluent or have professional proficiency in the language, and in countries where we have relied on interpreters. We have worked in settings with precarious security as well as in locations that feel as comfortable as home. Our guide is not intended to be prescriptive or exhaustive. What we offer is a set of experience-based suggestions to be implemented as deemed relevant and appropriate by the researcher and their advisor(s).

In terms of the types of research and data sources and collection, we have conducted archival research, interviews, focus groups, and ethnographies with diplomats, bureaucrats, military personnel, ex-combatants, civil society advocates, survivors of political violence, refugees, and ordinary citizens. We have grappled with ethical dilemmas, chief among them how to get useful data for our research projects in ways that exceed the minimal standards of human subjects’ research evaluation panels. Relatedly, we have contemplated how to use our platforms to give back to the individuals and communities who have so generously lent us their time and knowledge, and shared with us their personal and sometimes harrowing stories.

Our target audience is first and foremost graduate students and early-career researchers who are interested in possibly conducting fieldwork but who either (1) do not know the full potential or value of fieldwork, (2) know the potential and value of fieldwork but think that it is excessively cost-prohibitive or otherwise infeasible, or (3) who have the interest, the will, and the means but not necessarily the know-how. We also hope that this resource will be of value to graduate programs, as they endeavor to better support students interested in or already conducting field research. Further, we target instructional faculty and graduate advisors (and other institutional gatekeepers like journal and book reviewers), to show that fieldwork does not have to be year-long, to give just one example. Instead, the length of time spent in the field is a function of the aims and scope of a given project. We also seek to formalize and normalize the idea of remote field research, whether conducted because of security concerns in conflict zones, for instance, or because of health and safety concerns, like the Covid-19 pandemic. Accordingly, researchers in the field for shorter stints or who conduct fieldwork remotely should not be penalized.

We note that several excellent resources on fieldwork such as the bibliography compiled by Advancing Conflict Research (2020) catalogue an impressive list of articles addressing questions such as ethics, safety, mental health, reflexivity, and methods. Further resources can be found about the positionality of the researcher in the field while engaging vulnerable communities, such as in the research field of migration ( Jacobsen and Landau 2003 ; Carling, Bivand Erdal, and Ezzati 2014 ; Nowicka and Cieslik 2014 ; Zapata-Barrero and Yalaz 2019 ). However, little has been written beyond conflict-affected contexts, fragile settings, and vulnerable communities. Moreover, as we consulted different texts and resources, we found no comprehensive guide to fieldwork explicitly written with graduate students in mind. It is this gap that we aim to fill.

In this paper, we address five general categories of questions that graduate students puzzle over, often without the benefit of others’ “lessons learned.” First, What is field research? Is it just for qualitative scholars? Must it be conducted in a foreign country? How much time in the field is “enough”? Second, What is the purpose of fieldwork? When does it make sense to travel to a field site to collect data? How can fieldwork data be used? Third, What are the nuts and bolts? How does one get ready and how can one optimize limited time and financial resources? Fourth, How does one conduct fieldwork safely? What should a researcher do to keep themselves, research assistants, and research subjects safe? What measures should they take to protect their mental health? Fifth, How does one conduct ethical, beneficent field research?

Finally, the Covid-19 pandemic has impressed upon the discipline the volatility of research projects centered around in-person fieldwork. Lockdowns and closed borders left researchers sequestered at home and unable to travel, forced others to cut short any trips already begun, and unexpectedly confined others still to their fieldwork sites. Other factors that may necessitate a (spontaneous) readjustment of planned field research include natural disasters, a deteriorating security situation in the field site, researcher illness, and unexpected changes in personal circumstances. We, therefore, conclude with a section on the promise and potential pitfalls of remote (or virtual) fieldwork. Throughout this guide, we engage theory and praxis to support an epistemologically and methodologically pluralistic discipline.

The concept of “fieldwork” is not well defined in political science. While several symposia discuss the “nuts and bolts” of conducting research in the field within the pages of political science journals, few ever define it ( Ortbals and Rincker 2009 ; Hsueh, Jensenius, and Newsome 2014 ). Defining the concept of fieldwork is important because assumptions about what it is and what it is not underpin any suggestions for conducting it. A lack of disciplinary consensus about what constitutes “fieldwork,” we believe, explains the lack of a unified definition. Below, we discuss three areas of current disagreement about what “fieldwork” is, including the purpose of fieldwork, where it occurs, and how long it should be. We follow this by offering our definition of fieldwork.

First, we find that many in the discipline view fieldwork as squarely in the domain of qualitative research, whether interpretivist or positivist. However, field research can also serve quantitative projects—for example, by providing crucial context, supporting triangulation, or illustrating causal mechanisms. For instance, Kreft (2019) elaborated her theory of women's civil society mobilization in response to conflict-related sexual violence based on interviews she carried out in Colombia. She then examined cross-national patterns through statistical analysis. Conversely, Willis's research on the United States military in East Asia began with quantitative data collection and analysis of protest events before turning to fieldwork to understand why protests occurred in some instances but not others. Researchers can also find quantifiable data in the field that is otherwise unavailable to them at home ( Read 2006 ; Chambers-Ju 2014 ; Jensenius 2014 ). Accordingly, fieldwork is not in the domain of any particular epistemology or methodology as its purpose is to acquire data for further information.

Second, comparative politics and international relations scholars often opine that fieldwork requires leaving the country in which one's institution is based. Instead, we propose that what matters most is the nature of the research project, not the locale. For instance, some of us in the international relations subfield have interviewed representatives of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), whose headquarters are generally located in Global North countries. For someone pursuing a Ph.D. in the United States and writing on transnational advocacy networks, interviews with INGO representatives in New York certainly count as fieldwork ( Zvobgo 2020 ). Similarly, a graduate student who returns to her home country to interview refugees and native citizens is conducting a field study as much as a researcher for whom the context is wholly foreign. Such interviews can provide necessary insights and information that would not have been gained otherwise—one of the key reasons researchers conduct fieldwork in the first place. In other instances, conducting any in-person research is simply not possible, due to financial constraints, safety concerns, or other reasons. For example, the Covid-19 pandemic has forced many researchers to shift their face-to-face research plans to remote data collection, either over the phone or virtually ( Howlett 2021 , 2). For some research projects, gathering data through remote methods may yield the same if not similar information than in-person research ( Howlett 2021 , 3–4). As Howlett (2021 , 11) notes, digital platforms may offer researchers the ability to “embed ourselves in other contexts from a distance” and glimpse into our subjects’ lives in ways similar to in-person research. By adopting a broader definition of fieldwork, researchers can be more flexible in getting access to data sources and interacting with research subjects.

Third, there is a tendency, especially among comparativists, to only count fieldwork that spans the better part of a year; even “surgical strike” field research entails one to three months, according to some scholars ( Ortbals and Rincker 2009 ; Weiss, Hicken, and Kuhonta 2017 ). The emphasis on spending as much time as possible in the field is likely due to ethnographic research traditions, reflected in classics such as James Scott's Weapons of the Weak , which entail year-long stints of research. However, we suggest that the appropriate amount of time in the field should be assessed on a project-by-project basis. Some studies require the researcher to be in the field for long periods; others do not. For example, Willis's research on the discourse around the United States’ military presence in overseas host communities has required months in the field. By contrast, Kreft only needed ten days in New York to carry out interviews with diplomats and United Nations staff, in a context with which she already had some familiarity from a prior internship. Likewise, Zvobgo spent a couple of weeks in her field research sites, conducting interviews with directors and managers of prominent human rights nongovernmental organizations. This population is not so large as to require a whole month or even a few months. This has also been the case for Irgil, as she had spent one month in the field site conducting interviews with ordinary citizens. The goal of the project was to acquire information on citizens’ perceptions of refugees. As we discuss in the next section, when deciding how long to spend in the field, scholars must consider the information their project requires and consider the practicalities of fieldwork, notably cost.

Thus, we highlight three essential points in fieldwork and offer a definition accordingly: fieldwork involves acquiring information, using any set of appropriate data collection techniques, for qualitative, quantitative, or experimental analysis through embedded research whose location and duration is dependent on the project. We argue that adopting such a definition of “fieldwork” is necessary to include the multitude of forms fieldwork can take, including remote methods, whose value and challenges the Covid-19 pandemic has impressed upon the discipline.

When does a researcher need to conduct fieldwork? Fieldwork can be effective for (1) data collection, (2) theory building, and (3) theory testing. First, when a researcher is interested in a research topic, yet they could not find an available and/or reliable data source for the topic, fieldwork could provide the researcher with plenty of options. Some research agendas can require researchers to visit archives to review historical documents. For example, Greitens (2016) visited national archives in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States to find historical documents about the development of coercive institutions in past authoritarian governments for her book, Dictators and Their Secret Police . Also, newly declassified archival documents can open new possibilities for researchers to examine restricted topics. To illustrate, thanks to the newly released archival records of the Chinese Communist Party's communications, and exchange of visits with the European communist world, Sarotte (2012) was able to study the Party's decision to crack down on Tiananmen protesters, which had previously been deemed as an unstudiable topic due to the limited data.

Other research agendas can require researchers to conduct (semistructured) in-depth interviews to understand human behavior or a situation more closely, for example, by revealing the meanings of concepts for people and showing how people perceive the world. For example, O'Brien and Li (2005) conducted in-depth interviews with activists, elites, and villagers to understand how these actors interact with each other and what are the outcomes of the interaction in contentious movements in rural China. Through research, they revealed that protests have deeply influenced all these actors’ minds, a fact not directly observable without in-depth interviews.

Finally, data collection through fieldwork should not be confined to qualitative data ( Jensenius 2014 ). While some quantitative datasets can be easily compiled or accessed through use of the internet or contact with data-collection agencies, other datasets can only be built or obtained through relationships with “gatekeepers” such as government officials, and thus require researchers to visit the field ( Jensenius 2014 ). Researchers can even collect their own quantitative datasets by launching surveys or quantifying data contained in archives. In a nutshell, fieldwork will allow researchers to use different techniques to collect and access original/primary data sources, whether these are qualitative, quantitative, or experimental in nature, and regardless of the intended method of analysis. 2

But fieldwork is not just for data collection as such. Researchers can accomplish two other fundamental elements of the research process: theory building and theory testing. When a researcher finds a case where existing theories about a phenomenon do not provide plausible explanations, they can build a theory through fieldwork ( Geddes 2003 ). Lee's experience provides a good example. When studying the rise of a protest movement in South Korea for her dissertation, Lee applied commonly discussed social movement theories, grievances, political opportunity, resource mobilization, and repression, to explain the movement's eruption and found that these theories do not offer a convincing explanation for the protest movement. She then moved on to fieldwork and conducted interviews with the movement participants to understand their motivations. Finally, through those interviews, she offered an alternative theory that the protest participants’ collective identity shaped during the authoritarian past played a unifying factor and eventually led them to participate in the movement. Her example shows that theorization can take place through careful review and rigorous inference during fieldwork.

Moreover, researchers can test their theory through fieldwork. Quantitative observational data has limitations in revealing causal mechanisms ( Esarey 2017 ). Therefore, many political scientists turn their attention to conducting field experiments or lab-in-the-field experiments to reveal causality ( Druckman et al. 2006 ; Beath, Christia, and Enikolopov 2013 ; Finseraas and Kotsadam 2017 ), or to leveraging in-depth insights or historical records gained through qualitative or archival research in process-tracing ( Collier 2011 ; Ricks and Liu 2018 ). Surveys and survey experiments may also be useful tools to substantiate a theoretical story or test a theory ( Marston 2020 ). Of course, for most Ph.D. students, especially those not affiliated with more extensive research projects, some of these options will be financially prohibitive.

A central concern for graduate students, especially those working with a small budget and limited time, is optimizing time in the field and integrating remote work. We offer three pieces of advice: have a plan, build in flexibility, and be strategic, focusing on collecting data that are unavailable at home. We also discuss working with local translators or research assistants. Before we turn to these more practical issues arising during fieldwork, we address a no less important issue: funding.

The challenge of securing funds is often overlooked in discussions of what constitutes field research. Months- or year-long in-person research can be cost-prohibitive, something academic gatekeepers must consider when evaluating “what counts” and “what is enough.” Unlike their predecessors, many graduate students today have a significant amount of debt and little savings. 3 Additionally, if researchers are not able to procure funding, they have to pay out of pocket and possibly take on more debt. Not only is in-person fieldwork costly, but researchers may also have to forego working while they are in the field, making long stretches in the field infeasible for some.

For researchers whose fieldwork involves travelling to another location, procuring funding via grants, fellowships, or other sources is a necessity, regardless of how long one plans to be in the field. A good mantra for applying for research funding is “apply early and often” ( Kelsky 2015 , 110). Funding applications take a considerable amount of time to prepare, from writing research statements to requesting letters of recommendation. Even adapting one's materials for different applications takes time. Not only is the application process itself time-consuming, but the time between applying for and receiving funds, if successful, can be quite long, from several months to a year. For example, after defending her prospectus in May 2019, Willis began applying to funding sources for her dissertation, all of which had deadlines between June and September. She received notifications between November and January; however, funds from her successful applications were not available until March and April, almost a year later. 4 Accordingly, we recommend applying for funding as early as possible; this not only increases one's chances of hitting the ground running in the field, but the application process can also help clarify the goals and parameters of one's research.

Graduate students should also apply often for funding opportunities. There are different types of funding for fieldwork: some are larger, more competitive grants such as the National Science Foundation Political Science Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant in the United States, others, including sources through one's own institution, are smaller. Some countries, like Sweden, boast a plethora of smaller funding agencies that disburse grants of 20,000–30,0000 Swedish Kronor (approx. 2,500–3,500 U.S. dollars) to Ph.D. students in the social sciences. Listings of potential funding sources are often found on various websites including those belonging to universities, professional organizations (such as the American Political Science Association or the European Consortium for Political Research), and governmental institutions dealing with foreign affairs. Once you have identified fellowships and grants for which you and your project are a good match, we highly recommend soliciting information and advice from colleagues who have successfully applied for them. This can include asking them to share their applications with you, and if possible, to have them, another colleague or set of colleagues read through your project description and research plan (especially for bigger awards) to ensure that you have made the best possible case for why you should be selected. While both large and small pots of funding are worth applying for, many researchers end up funding their fieldwork through several small grants or fellowships. One small award may not be sufficient to fund the entirety of one's fieldwork, but several may. For example, Willis's fieldwork in Japan and South Korea was supported through fellowships within each country. Similarly, Irgil was able to conduct her fieldwork abroad through two different and relatively smaller grants by applying to them each year.

Of course, situations vary in different countries with respect to what kinds of grants from what kinds of funders are available. An essential part of preparing for fieldwork is researching the funding landscape well in advance, even as early as the start of the Ph.D. We encourage first-time field researchers to be aware that universities and departments may themselves not be aware of the full range of possible funds available, so it is always a good idea to do your own research and watch research-related social media channels. The amount of funding needed thereby depends on the nature of one's project and how long one intends to be in the field. As we elaborate in the next section, scholars should think carefully about their project goals, the data required to meet those goals, and the requisite time to attain them. For some projects, even a couple of weeks in the field is sufficient to get the needed information.

Preparing to Enter “the field”

It is important to prepare for the field as much as possible. What kind of preparations do researchers need? For someone conducting interviews with NGO representatives, this might involve identifying the largest possible pool of potential respondents, securing their contact information, sending them study invitation letters, finding a mutually agreeable time to meet, and pulling together short biographies for each interviewee in order to use your time together most effectively. If you plan to travel to conduct interviews, you should reach out to potential respondents roughly four to six weeks prior to your arrival. For individuals who do not respond, you can follow up one to two weeks before you arrive and, if needed, once more when you are there. This is still no guarantee for success, of course. For Kreft, contacting potential interviewees in Colombia initially proved more challenging than anticipated, as many of the people she targeted did not respond to her emails. It turned out that many Colombians have a preference for communicating via phone or, in particular, WhatsApp. Some of those who responded to her emails sent in advance of her field trip asked her to simply be in touch once she was in the country, to set up appointments on short notice. This made planning and arranging her interview schedule more complicated. Therefore, a general piece of advice is to research your target population's preferred communication channels and mediums in the field site if email requests yield no or few responses.

In general, we note for the reader that contacting potential research participants should come after one has designed an interview questionnaire (plus an informed consent protocol) and sought and received, where applicable, approval from institutional review boards (IRBs) or other ethical review procedures in place (both at one's home institution/in the country of the home institution as well as in the country where one plans to conduct research if travelling abroad). The most obvious advantage of having the interview questionnaire in place and having secured all necessary institutional approvals before you start contacting potential interviewees is that you have a clearer idea of the universe of individuals you would like to interview, and for what purpose. Therefore, it is better to start sooner rather than later and be mindful of “high seasons,” when institutional and ethical review boards are receiving, processing, and making decisions on numerous proposals. It may take a few months for them to issue approvals.

On the subject of ethics and review panels, we encourage you to consider talking openly and honestly with your supervisors and/or funders about the situations where a written consent form may not be suitable and might need to be replaced with “verbal consent.” For instance, doing fieldwork in politically unstable contexts, highly scrutinized environments, or vulnerable communities, like refugees, might create obstacles for the interviewees as well as the researcher. The literature discusses the dilemma in offering the interviewees anonymity and requesting signed written consent in addition to the emphasis on total confidentiality ( Jacobsen and Landau 2003 ; Mackenzie, McDowell, and Pittaway 2007 ; Saunders, Kitzinger, and Kitzinger 2015 ). Therefore, in those situations, the researcher might need to take the initiative on how to act while doing the interviews as rigorously as possible. In her fieldwork, Irgil faced this situation as the political context of Turkey did not guarantee that there would not be any adverse consequences for interviewees on both sides of her story: citizens of Turkey and Syrian refugees. Consequently, she took hand-written notes and asked interviewees for their verbal consent in a safe interview atmosphere. This is something respondents greatly appreciated ( Irgil 2020 ).

Ethical considerations, of course, also affect the research design itself, with ramifications for fieldwork. When Kreft began developing her Ph.D. proposal to study women's political and civil society mobilization in response to conflict-related sexual violence, she initially aimed to recruit interviewees from the universe of victims of this violence, to examine variation among those who did and those who did not mobilize politically. As a result of deeper engagement with the literature on researching conflict-related sexual violence, conversations with senior colleagues who had interviewed victims, and critical self-reflection of her status as a researcher (with no background in psychology or social work), she decided to change focus and shift toward representatives of civil society organizations and victims’ associations. This constituted a major reconfiguration of her research design, from one geared toward identifying the factors that drive mobilization of victims toward using insights from interviews to understand better how those mobilize perceive and “make sense” of conflict-related sexual violence. Needless to say, this required alterations to research strategies and interview guides, including reassessing her planned fieldwork. Kreft's primary consideration was not to cause harm to her research participants, particularly in the form of re-traumatization. She opted to speak only with those women who on account of their work are used to speaking about conflict-related sexual violence. In no instance did she inquire about interviewees’ personal experiences with sexual violence, although several brought this up on their own during the interviews.

Finally, if you are conducting research in another country where you have less-than-professional fluency in the language, pre-fieldwork planning should include hiring a translator or research assistant, for example, through an online hiring platform like Upwork, or a local university. Your national embassy or consulate is another option; many diplomatic offices have lists of individuals who they have previously contracted. More generally, establishing contact with a local university can be beneficial, either in the form of a visiting researcher arrangement, which grants access to research groups and facilities like libraries or informally contacting individual researchers. The latter may have valuable insights into the local context, contacts to potential research participants, and they may even be able to recommend translators or research assistants. Kreft, for example, hired local research assistants recommended by researchers at a Bogotá-based university and remunerated them equivalent to the salary they would have received as graduate research assistants at the university, while also covering necessary travel expenses. Irgil, on the other hand, established contacts with native citizens and Syrian gatekeepers, who are shop owners in the area where she conducted her research because she had the opportunity to visit the fieldwork site multiple times.

Depending on the research agenda, researchers may visit national archives, local government offices, etc. Before visiting, researchers should contact these facilities and make sure the materials that they need are accessible. For example, Lee visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Archives to find the United States’ strategic evaluations on South Korea's dictator in the 1980s. Before her visit, she contacted librarians in the archives, telling them her visit plans and her research purpose. Librarians made suggestions on which categories she should start to review based on her research goal, and thus she was able to make a list of categories of the materials she needed, saving her a lot of her time.

Accessibility of and access to certain facilities/libraries can differ depending on locations/countries and types of facilities. Facilities in authoritarian countries might not be easily accessible to foreign researchers. Within democratic countries, some facilities are more restrictive than others. Situations like the pandemic or national holidays can also restrict accessibility. Therefore, researchers are well advised to do preliminary research on whether a certain facility opens during the time they visit and is accessible to researchers regardless of their citizenship status. Moreover, researchers must contact the staff of facilities to know whether identity verification is needed and if so, what kind of documents (photo I.D. or passport) should be exhibited.

Adapting to the Reality of the Field

Researchers need to be flexible because you may meet people you did not make appointments with, come across opportunities you did not expect, or stumble upon new ideas about collecting data in the field. These happenings will enrich your field experience and will ultimately be beneficial for your research. Similarly, researchers should not be discouraged by interviews that do not go according to plan; they present an opportunity to pursue relevant people who can provide an alternative path to your work. Note that planning ahead does not preclude fortuitous encounters or epiphanies. Rather, it provides a structure for them to happen.

If your fieldwork entails travelling abroad, you will also be able to recruit more interviewees once you arrive at your research site. In fact, you may have greater success in-country; not everyone is willing to respond to a cold email from an unknown researcher in a foreign country. In Irgil's fieldwork, she contacted store owners that are known in the area and who know the community. This eased her process of introduction into the community and recruiting interviewees. For Zvobgo, she had fewer than a dozen interviews scheduled when she travelled to Guatemala to study civil society activism and transitional justice since the internal armed conflict. But she was able to recruit additional participants in-country. Interviewees with whom she built a rapport connected her to other NGOs, government offices, and the United Nations country office, sometimes even making the call and scheduling interviews for her. Through snowball sampling, she was able to triple the number of participants. Likewise, snowball sampling was central to Kreft's recruitment of interview partners. Several of her interviewees connected her to highly relevant individuals she would never have been able to identify and contact based on web searches alone.

While in the field, you may nonetheless encounter obstacles that necessitate adjustments to your original plans. Once Kreft had arrived in Colombia, for example, it transpired quickly that carrying out in-person interviews in more remote/rural areas was near impossible given her means, as these were not easily accessible by bus/coach, further complicated by a complex security situation. Instead, she adjusted her research design and shifted her focus to the big cities, where most of the major civil society organizations are based. She complemented the in-person interviews carried out there with a smaller number of phone interviews with civil society activists in rural areas, and she was also able to meet a few activists operating in rural or otherwise inaccessible areas as they were visiting the major cities. The resulting focus on urban settings changed the kinds of generalizations she was able to make based on her fieldwork data and produced a somewhat different study than initially anticipated.

This also has been the case for Irgil, despite her prior arrangements with the Syrian gatekeepers, which required adjustments as in the case of Kreft. Irgil acquired research clearance one year before, during the interviews with native citizens, conducting the interviews with Syrian refugees. She also had her questionnaire ready based on the previously collected data and the media search she had conducted for over a year before travelling to the field site. As she was able to visit the field site multiple times, two months before conducting interviews with Syrian refugees, she developed a schedule with the Syrian gatekeepers and informants. Yet, once she was in the field, influenced by Turkey's recent political events and the policy of increasing control over Syrian refugees, half of the previously agreed informants changed their minds or did not want to participate in interviews. As Irgil was following the policies and the news related to Syrian refugees in Turkey closely, this did not come as that big of a surprise but challenged the previously developed strategy to recruit interviewees. Thus, she changed the strategy of finding interviewees in the field site, such as asking people, almost one by one, whether they would like to participate in the interview. Eventually, she could not find willing Syrian women refugees as she had planned, which resulted in a male-dominant sample. As researchers encounter such situations, it is essential to remind oneself that not everything can go according to plan, that “different” does not equate to “worse,” but that it is important to consider what changes to fieldwork data collection and sampling imply for the study's overall findings and the contribution it makes to the literature.

We should note that conducting interviews is very taxing—especially when opportunities multiply, as in Zvobgo's case. Depending on the project, each interview can take an hour, if not two or more. Hence, you should make a reasonable schedule: we recommend no more than two interviews per day. You do not want to have to cut off an interview because you need to rush to another one, whether the interviews are in-person or remote. And you do not want to be too exhausted to have a robust engagement with your respondent who is generously lending you their time. Limiting the number of interviews per day is also important to ensure that you can write comprehensive and meaningful fieldnotes, which becomes even more essential where it is not possible to audio-record your interviews. Also, be sure to remember to eat, stay hydrated, and try to get enough sleep.

Finally, whether to provide gifts or payments to the subject also requires adapting to the reality of the field. You must think about payments beforehand when you apply for IRB approval (or whatever other ethical review processes may be in place) since these applications usually contain questions about payments. Obviously, the first step is to carefully evaluate whether the gifts and payments provided can harm the subject or are likely to unduly affect the responses they will give in response to your questions. If that is not the case, you have to make payment decisions based on your budget, field situation, and difficulties in recruitment. Usually, payment of respondents is more common in survey research, whereas it is less common in interviews and focus groups.

Nevertheless, payment practices vary depending on the field and the target group. In some cases, it may become a custom to provide small gifts or payments when interviewing a certain group. In other cases, interviewees might be offended if they are provided with money. Therefore, knowing past practices and field situations is important. For example, Lee provided small coffee gift cards to one group while she did not to the other based on previous practices of other researchers. That is, for a particular group, it has become a custom for interviewers to pay interviewees. Sometimes, you may want to reimburse your subject's interview costs such as travel expenses and provide beverages and snacks during the conduct of research, as Kreft did when conducting focus groups in Colombia. To express your gratitude to your respondents, you can prepare small gifts such as your university memorabilia (e.g., notebooks and pens). Since past practices about payments can affect your interactions and interviews with a target group, you want to seek advice from your colleagues and other researchers who had experiences interacting with the target group. If you cannot find researchers who have this knowledge, you can search for published works on the target population to find if the authors share their interview experiences. You may also consider contacting the authors for advice before your interviews.

Researching Strategically

Distinguishing between things that can only be done in person at a particular site and things that can be accomplished later at home is vital. Prioritize the former over the latter. Lee's fieldwork experience serves as a good example. She studied a conservative protest movement called the Taegeukgi Rally in South Korea. She planned to conduct interviews with the rally participants to examine their motivations for participating. But she only had one month in South Korea. So, she focused on things that could only be done in the field: she went to the rally sites, she observed how protests proceeded, which tactics and chants were used, and she met participants and had some casual conversations with them. Then, she used the contacts she made while attending the rallies to create a social network to solicit interviews from ordinary protesters, her target population. She was able to recruit twenty-five interviewees through good rapport with the people she met. The actual interviews proceeded via phone after she returned to the United States. In a nutshell, we advise you not to be obsessed with finishing interviews in the field. Sometimes, it is more beneficial to use your time in the field to build relationships and networks.

Working With Assistants and Translators

A final consideration on logistics is working with research assistants or translators; it affects how you can carry out interviews, focus groups, etc. To what extent constant back-and-forth translation is necessary or advisable depends on the researcher's skills in the interview language and considerations about time and efficiency. For example, Kreft soon realized that she was generally able to follow along quite well during her interviews in Colombia. In order to avoid precious time being lost to translation, she had her research assistant follow the interview guide Kreft had developed, and interjected follow-up questions in Spanish or English (then to be translated) as they arose.

Irgil's and Zvobgo's interviews went a little differently. Irgil's Syrian refugee interviewees in Turkey were native Arabic speakers, and Zvobgo's interviewees in Guatemala were native Spanish speakers. Both Irgil and Zvobgo worked with research assistants. In Irgil's case, her assistant was a Syrian man, who was outside of the area. Meanwhile, Zvobgo's assistant was an undergraduate from her home institution with a Spanish language background. Irgil and Zvobgo began preparing their assistants a couple of months before entering the field, over Skype for Irgil and in-person for Zvobgo. They offered their assistants readings and other resources to provide them with the necessary background to work well. Both Irgil and Zvobgo's research assistants joined them in the interviews and actually did most of the speaking, introducing the principal investigator, explaining the research, and then asking the questions. In Zvobgo's case, interviewee responses were relayed via a professional interpreter whom she had also hired. After every interview, Irgil and Zvobgo and their respective assistants discussed the answers of the interviewees, potential improvements in phrasing, and elaborated on their hand-written interview notes. As a backup, Zvobgo, with the consent of her respondents, had accompanying audio recordings.

Researchers may carry out fieldwork in a country that is considerably less safe than what they are used to, a setting affected by conflict violence or high crime rates, for instance. Feelings of insecurity can be compounded by linguistic barriers, cultural particularities, and being far away from friends and family. Insecurity is also often gendered, differentially affecting women and raising the specter of unwanted sexual advances, street harassment, or even sexual assault ( Gifford and Hall-Clifford 2008 ; Mügge 2013 ). In a recent survey of Political Science graduate students in the United States, about half of those who had done fieldwork internationally reported having encountered safety issues in the field, (54 percent female, 47 percent male), and only 21 percent agreed that their Ph.D. programs had prepared them to carry out their fieldwork safely ( Schwartz and Cronin-Furman 2020 , 8–9).

Preventative measures scholars may adopt in an unsafe context may involve, at their most fundamental, adjustments to everyday routines and habits, restricting one's movements temporally and spatially. Reliance on gatekeepers may also necessitate adopting new strategies, such as a less vehement and cold rejection of unwanted sexual advances than one ordinarily would exhibit, as Mügge (2013) illustratively discusses. At the same time, a competitive academic job market, imperatives to collect novel and useful data, and harmful discourses surrounding dangerous fieldwork also, problematically, shape incentives for junior researchers to relax their own standards of what constitutes acceptable risk ( Gallien 2021 ).

Others have carefully collected a range of safety precautions that field researchers in fragile or conflict-affected settings may take before and during fieldwork ( Hilhorst et al. 2016 ). Therefore, we are more concise in our discussion of recommendations, focusing on the specific situations of graduate students. Apart from ensuring that supervisors and university administrators have the researcher's contact information in the field (and possibly also that of a local contact person), researchers can register with their country's embassy or foreign office and any crisis monitoring and prevention systems it has in place. That way, they will be informed of any possible unfolding emergencies and the authorities have a record of them being in the country.

It may also be advisable to set up more individualized safety protocols with one or two trusted individuals, such as friends, supervisors, or colleagues at home or in the fieldwork setting itself. The latter option makes sense in particular if one has an official affiliation with a local institution for the duration of the fieldwork, which is often advisable. Still, we would also recommend establishing relationships with local researchers in the absence of a formal affiliation. To keep others informed of her whereabouts, Kreft, for instance, made arrangements with her supervisors to be in touch via email at regular intervals to report on progress and wellbeing. This kept her supervisors in the loop, while an interruption in communication would have alerted them early if something were wrong. In addition, she announced planned trips to other parts of the country and granted her supervisors and a colleague at her home institution emergency reading access to her digital calendar. To most of her interviews, she was moreover accompanied by her local research assistant/translator. If the nature of the research, ethical considerations, and the safety situation allow, it might also be possible to bring a local friend along to interviews as an “assistant,” purely for safety reasons. This option needs to be carefully considered already in the planning stage and should, particularly in settings of fragility or if carrying out research on politically exposed individuals, be noted in any ethical and institutional review processes where these are required. Adequate compensation for such an assistant should be ensured. It may also be advisable to put in place an emergency plan, that is, choose emergency contacts back home and “in the field,” know whom to contact if something happens, and know how to get to the nearest hospital or clinic.

We would be remiss if we did not mention that, when in an unfamiliar context, one's safety radar may be misguided, so it is essential to listen to people who know the context. For example, locals can give advice on which means of transport are safe and which are not, a question that is of the utmost importance when traveling to appointments. For example, Kreft was warned that in Colombia regular taxis are often unsafe, especially if waved down in the streets, and that to get to her interviews safely, she should rely on a ride-share service. In one instance, a Colombian friend suggested that when there was no alternative to a regular taxi, Kreft should book through the app and share the order details, including the taxi registration number or license plate, with a friend. Likewise, sharing one's cell phone location with a trusted friend while traveling or when one feels unsafe may be a viable option. Finally, it is prudent to heed the safety recommendations and travel advisories provided by state authorities and embassies to determine when and where it is safe to travel. Especially if researchers have a responsibility not only for themselves but also for research assistants and research participants, safety must be a top priority.

This does not mean that a researcher should be careless in a context they know either. Of course, conducting fieldwork in a context that is known to the researcher offers many advantages. However, one should be prepared to encounter unwanted events too. For instance, Irgil has conducted fieldwork in her country of origin in a city she knows very well. Therefore, access to the site, moving around the site, and blending in has not been a problem; she also has the advantage of speaking the native language. Yet, she took notes of the streets she walked in, as she often returned from the field site after dark and thought she might get confused after a tiring day. She also established a closer relationship with two or three store owners in different parts of the field site if she needed something urgent, like running out of battery. Above all, one should always be aware of one's surroundings and use common sense. If something feels unsafe, chances are it is.

Fieldwork may negatively affect the researcher's mental health and mental wellbeing regardless of where one's “field” is, whether related to concerns about crime and insecurity, linguistic barriers, social isolation, or the practicalities of identifying, contacting and interviewing research participants. Coping with these different sources of stress can be both mentally and physically exhausting. Then there are the things you may hear, see and learn during the research itself, such as gruesome accounts of violence and suffering conveyed in interviews or archival documents one peruses. Kreft and Zvobgo have spoken with women victims of conflict-related sexual violence, who sometimes displayed strong emotions of pain and anger during the interviews. Likewise, Irgil and Willis have spoken with members of other vulnerable populations such as refugees and former sex workers ( Willis 2020 ).

Prior accounts ( Wood 2006 ; Loyle and Simoni 2017 ; Skjelsbæk 2018 ; Hummel and El Kurd 2020 ; Williamson et al. 2020 ; Schulz and Kreft 2021 ) show that it is natural for sensitive research and fieldwork challenges to affect or even (vicariously) traumatize the researcher. By removing researchers from their regular routines and support networks, fieldwork may also exacerbate existing mental health conditions ( Hummel and El Kurd 2020 ). Nonetheless, mental wellbeing is rarely incorporated into fieldwork courses and guidelines, where these exist at all. But even if you know to anticipate some sort of reaction, you rarely know what that reaction will be until you experience it. When researching sensitive or difficult topics, for example, reactions can include sadness, frustration, anger, fear, helplessness, and flashbacks to personal experiences of violence ( Williamson et al. 2020 ). For example, Kreft responded with episodic feelings of depression and both mental and physical exhaustion. But curiously, these reactions emerged most strongly after she had returned from fieldwork and in particular as she spent extended periods analyzing her interview data, reliving some of the more emotional scenes during the interviews and being confronted with accounts of (sexual) violence against women in a concentrated fashion. This is a crucial reminder that fieldwork does not end when one returns home; the after-effects may linger. Likewise, Zvobgo was physically and mentally drained upon her return from the field. Both Kreft and Zvobgo were unable to concentrate for long periods of time and experienced lower-than-normal levels of productivity for weeks afterward, patterns that formal and informal conversations with other scholars confirm to be common ( Schulz and Kreft 2021 ). Furthermore, the boundaries between “field” and “home” are blurred when conducting remote fieldwork ( Howlett 2021 , 11).

Nor are these adverse reactions limited to cases where the researcher has carried out the interviews themselves. Accounts of violence, pain, and suffering transported in reports, secondary literature, or other sources can evoke similar emotional stress, as Kreft experienced when engaging in a concentrated fashion with additional accounts of conflict-related sexual violence in Colombia and with the feminist literature on sexual and gender-based violence in the comfort of her Swedish office. This could also be applicable to Irgil's fieldwork as she interviewed refugees whose traumas have come out during the interviews or recall specific events triggered by the questions. Likewise, Lee has reviewed primary and secondary materials on North Korean defectors in the national archives and these materials contain violent, intense, emotional narratives.

Fortunately, there are several strategies to cope with and manage such adverse consequences. In a candid and insightful piece, other researchers have discussed the usefulness of distractions, sharing with colleagues, counseling, exercise, and, probably less advisable in the long term, comfort eating and drinking ( Williamson et al. 2020 ; see also Loyle and Simoni 2017 ; Hummel and El Kurd 2020 ). Our experiences largely tally with their observations. In this section, we explore some of these in more detail.

First, in the face of adverse consequences on your mental wellbeing, whether in the field or after your return, it is essential to be patient and generous with yourself. Negative effects on the researcher's mental wellbeing can hit in unexpected ways and at unexpected times. Even if you think that certain reactions are disproportionate or unwarranted at that specific moment, they may simply have been building up over a long time. They are legitimate. Second, the importance of taking breaks and finding distractions, whether that is exercise, socializing with friends, reading a good book, or watching a new series, cannot be overstated. It is easy to fall into a mode of thinking that you constantly have to be productive while you are “in the field,” to maximize your time. But as with all other areas in life, balance is key and rest is necessary. Taking your mind off your research and the research questions you puzzle over is also a good way to more fully soak up and appreciate the context in which you find yourself, in the case of in-person fieldwork, and about which you ultimately write.

Third, we cannot stress enough the importance of investing in social relations. Before going on fieldwork, researchers may want to consult others who have done it before them. Try to find (junior) scholars who have done fieldwork on similar kinds of topics or in the same country or countries you are planning to visit. Utilizing colleagues’ contacts and forging connections using social media are valuable strategies to expand your networks (in fact, this very paper is the result of a social media conversation and several of the authors have never met in person). Having been in the same situation before, most field researchers are, in our experience, generous with their time and advice. Before embarking on her first trip to Colombia, Kreft contacted other researchers in her immediate and extended network and received useful advice on questions such as how to move around Bogotá, whom to speak to, and how to find a research assistant. After completing her fieldwork, she has passed on her experiences to others who contacted her before their first fieldwork trip. Informal networks are, in the absence of more formalized fieldwork preparation, your best friend.

In the field, seeking the company of locals and of other researchers who are also doing fieldwork alleviates anxiety and makes fieldwork more enjoyable. Exchanging experiences, advice and potential interviewee contacts with peers can be extremely beneficial and make the many challenges inherent in fieldwork (on difficult topics) seem more manageable. While researchers conducting remote fieldwork may be physically isolated from other researchers, even connecting with others doing remote fieldwork may be comforting. And even when there are no precise solutions to be found, it is heartening or even cathartic to meet others who are in the same boat and with whom you can talk through your experiences. When Kreft shared some of her fieldwork-related struggles with another researcher she had just met in Bogotá and realized that they were encountering very similar challenges, it was like a weight was lifted off her shoulders. Similarly, peer support can help with readjustment after the fieldwork trip, even if it serves only to reassure you that a post-fieldwork dip in productivity and mental wellbeing is entirely natural. Bear in mind that certain challenges are part of the fieldwork experience and that they do not result from inadequacy on the part of the researcher.

Finally, we would like to stress a point made by Inger Skjelsbæk (2018 , 509) and which has not received sufficient attention: as a discipline, we need to take the question of researcher mental wellbeing more seriously—not only in graduate education, fieldwork preparation, and at conferences, but also in reflecting on how it affects the research process itself: “When strong emotions arise, through reading about, coding, or talking to people who have been impacted by [conflict-related sexual violence] (as victims or perpetrators), it may create a feeling of being unprofessional, nonscientific, and too subjective.”

We contend that this is a challenge not only for research on sensitive issues but also for fieldwork more generally. To what extent is it possible, and desirable, to uphold the image of the objective researcher during fieldwork, when we are at our foundation human beings? And going even further, how do the (anticipated) effects of our research on our wellbeing, and the safety precautions we take ( Gifford and Hall-Clifford 2008 ), affect the kinds of questions we ask, the kinds of places we visit and with whom we speak? How do they affect the methods we use and how we interpret our findings? An honest discussion of affective responses to our research in methods sections seems utopian, as emotionality in the research process continues to be silenced and relegated to the personal, often in gendered ways, which in turn is considered unconnected to the objective and scientific research process ( Jamar and Chappuis 2016 ). But as Gifford and Hall-Clifford (2008 , 26) aptly put it: “Graduate education should acknowledge the reality that fieldwork is scholarly but also intimately personal,” and we contend that the two shape each other. Therefore, we encourage political science as a discipline to reflect on researcher wellbeing and affective responses to fieldwork more carefully, and we see the need for methods courses that embrace a more holistic notion of the subjectivity of the researcher.

Interacting with people in the field is one of the most challenging yet rewarding parts of the work that we do, especially in comparison to impersonal, often tedious wrangling and analysis of quantitative data. Field researchers often make personal connections with their interviewees. Consequently, maintaining boundaries can be a bit tricky. Here, we recommend being honest with everyone with whom you interact without overstating the abilities of a researcher. This appears as a challenge in the field, particularly when you empathize with people and when they share profound parts of their lives with you for your research in addition to being “human subjects” ( Fujii 2012 ). For instance, when Irgil interviewed native citizens about the changes in their neighborhood following the arrival of Syrian refugees, many interviewees questioned what she would offer them in return for their participation. Irgil responded that her primary contribution would be her published work. She also noted, however, that academic papers can take a year, sometimes longer, to go through the peer-reviewed process and, once published, many studies have a limited audience. The Syrian refugees posed similar questions. Irgil responded not only with honesty but also, given this population's vulnerable status, she provided them contact information for NGOs with which they could connect if they needed help or answers to specific questions.

For her part, Zvobgo was very upfront with her interviewees about her role as a researcher: she recognized that she is not someone who is on the frontlines of the fight for human rights and transitional justice like they are. All she could/can do is use her platform to amplify their stories, bringing attention to their vital work through her future peer-reviewed publications. She also committed to sending them copies of the work, as electronic journal articles are often inaccessible due to paywalls and university press books are very expensive, especially for nonprofits. Interviewees were very receptive; some were even moved by the degree of self-awareness and the commitment to do right by them. In some cases, this prompted them to share even more, because they knew that the researcher was really there to listen and learn. This is something that junior scholars, and all scholars really, should always remember. We enter the field to be taught. Likewise, Kreft circulated among her interviewees Spanish-language versions of an academic article and a policy brief based on the fieldwork she had carried out in Colombia.

As researchers from the Global North, we recognize a possible power differential between us and our research subjects, and certainly an imbalance in power between the countries where we have been trained and some of the countries where we have done and continue to do field research, particularly in politically dynamic contexts ( Knott 2019 ). This is why we are so concerned with being open and transparent with everyone with whom we come into contact in the field and why we are committed to giving back to those who so generously lend us their time and knowledge. Knott (2019 , 148) summarizes this as “Reflexive openness is a form of transparency that is methodologically and ethically superior to providing access to data in its raw form, at least for qualitative data.”

We also recognize that academics, including in the social sciences and especially those hailing from countries in the Global North, have a long and troubled history of exploiting their power over others for the sake of their research—including failing to be upfront about their research goals, misrepresenting the on-the-ground realities of their field research sites (including remote fieldwork), and publishing essentializing, paternalistic, and damaging views and analyses of the people there. No one should build their career on the backs of others, least of all in a field concerned with the possession and exercise of power. Thus, it is highly crucial to acknowledge the power hierarchies between the researcher and the interviewees, and to reflect on them both in the field and beyond the field upon return.

A major challenge to conducting fieldwork is when researchers’ carefully planned designs do not go as planned due to unforeseen events outside of our control, such as pandemics, natural disasters, deteriorating security situations in the field, or even the researcher falling ill. As the Covid-19 pandemic has made painfully clear, researchers may face situations where in-person research is simply not possible. In some cases, researchers may be barred entry to their fieldwork site; in others, the ethical implications of entering the field greatly outweigh the importance of fieldwork. Such barriers to conducting in-person research require us to reconsider conventional notions of what constitutes fieldwork. Researchers may need to shift their data collection methods, for example, conducting interviews remotely instead of in person. Even while researchers are in the field, they may still need to carry out part of their interviews or surveys virtually or by phone. For example, Kreft (2020) carried out a small number of interviews remotely while she was based in Bogotá, because some of the women's civil society activists with whom she intended to speak were based in parts of the country that were difficult and/or dangerous to access.

Remote field research, which we define as the collection of data over the internet or over the phone where in-person fieldwork is not possible due to security, health or other risks, comes with its own sets of challenges. For one, there may be certain populations that researchers cannot reach remotely due to a lack of internet connectivity or technology such as cellphones and computers. In such instances, there will be a sampling bias toward individuals and groups that do have these resources, a point worth noting when scholars interpret their research findings. In the case of virtual research, the risk of online surveillance, hacking, or wiretapping may also produce reluctance on the part of interviewees to discuss sensitive issues that may compromise their safety. Researchers need to carefully consider how the use of digital technology may increase the risk to research participants and what changes to the research design and any interview guides this necessitates. In general, it is imperative that researchers reflect on how they can ethically use digital technology in their fieldwork ( Van Baalen 2018 ). Remote interviews may also be challenging to arrange for researchers who have not made connections in person with people in their community of interest.

Some of the serendipitous happenings we discussed earlier may also be less likely and snowball sampling more difficult. For example, in phone or virtual interviews, it is harder to build good rapport and trust with interviewees as compared to face-to-face interviews. Accordingly, researchers should be more careful in communicating with interviewees and creating a comfortable interview environment. Especially when dealing with sensitive topics, researchers may have to make several phone calls and sometimes have to open themselves to establishing trust with interviewees. Also, researchers must be careful in protecting interviewees in phone or virtual interviews when they deal with sensitive topics of countries interviewees reside in.

The inability to physically visit one's community of interest may also encourage scholars to critically reflect on how much time in the field is essential to completing their research and to consider creative, alternative means for accessing information to complete their projects. While data collection techniques such as face-to-face interviews and archival work in the field may be ideal in normal times, there exist other data sources that can provide comparably useful information. For example, in her research on the role of framing in the United States base politics, Willis found that social media accounts and websites yielded information useful to her project. Many archives across the world have also been digitized. Researchers may also consider crowdsourcing data from the field among their networks, as fellow academics tend to collect much more data in the field than they ever use in their published works. They may also elect to hire someone, perhaps a graduate student, in a city or a country where they cannot travel and have the individual access, scan, and send archival materials. This final suggestion may prove generally useful to researchers with limited time and financial resources.

Remote qualitative data collection techniques, while they will likely never be “the gold-standard,” also pose several advantages. These techniques may help researchers avoid some of the issues mentioned previously. Remote interviews, for example, are less time-consuming in terms of travel to the interview site ( Archibald et al. 2019 ). The implication is that researchers may have less fatigue from conducting interviews and/or may be able to conduct more interviews. For example, while Willis had little energy to do anything else after an in-person interview (or two) in a given day, she had much more energy after completing remote interviews. Second, remote fieldwork also helps researchers avoid potentially dangerous situations in the field mentioned previously. Lastly, remote fieldwork generally presents fewer financial barriers than in-person research ( Archibald et al. 2019 ). In that sense, considering remote qualitative data collection, a type of “fieldwork” may make fieldwork more accessible to a greater number of scholars.

Many of the substantive, methodological and practical challenges that arise during fieldwork can be anticipated. Proper preparation can help you hit the ground running once you enter your fieldwork destination, whether in-person or virtually. Nonetheless, there is no such thing as being perfectly prepared for the field. Some things will simply be beyond your control, and especially as a newcomer to field research, and you should be prepared for things to not go as planned. New questions will arise, interview participants may cancel appointments, and you might not get the answers you expected. Be ready to make adjustments to research plans, interview guides, or questionnaires. And, be mindful of your affective reactions to the overall fieldwork situation and be gentle with yourself.

We recommend approaching fieldwork as a learning experience as much as, or perhaps even more than, a data collection effort. This also applies to your research topic. While it is prudent always to exercise a healthy amount of skepticism about what people tell you and why, the participants in your research will likely have unique perspectives and knowledge that will challenge yours. Be an attentive listener and remember that they are experts of their own experiences.

We encourage more institutions to offer courses that cover field research preparation and planning, practical advice on safety and wellbeing, and discussion of ethics. Specifically, we align with Schwartz and Cronin-Furman's (2020 , 3) contention “that treating fieldwork preparation as the methodology will improve individual scholars’ experiences and research.” In this article, we outline a set of issue areas in which we think formal preparation is necessary, but we note that our discussion is by no means exhaustive. Formal fieldwork preparation should also extend beyond what we have covered in this article, such as issues of data security and preparing for nonqualitative fieldwork methods. We also note that field research is one area that has yet to be comprehensively addressed in conversations on diversity and equity in the political science discipline and the broader academic profession. In a recent article, Brielle Harbin (2021) begins to fill this gap by sharing her experiences conducting in-person election surveys as a Black woman in a conservative and predominantly white region of the United States and the challenges that she encountered. Beyond race and gender, citizenship, immigration status, one's Ph.D. institution and distance to the field also affect who is able to do what type of field research, where, and for how long. Future research should explore these and related questions in greater detail because limits on who is able to conduct field research constrict the sociological imagination of our field.

While Emmons and Moravcsik (2020) focus on leading Political Science Ph.D. programs in the United States, these trends likely obtain, both in lower ranked institutions in the broader United States as well as in graduate education throughout North America and Europe.

As all the authors have carried out qualitative fieldwork, this is the primary focus of this guide. This does not, however, mean that we exclude quantitative or experimental data collection from our definition of fieldwork.

There is great variation in graduate students’ financial situations, even in the Global North. For example, while higher education is tax-funded in most countries in Europe and Ph.D. students in countries such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland receive a comparatively generous full-time salary, healthcare and contributions to pension schemes, Ph.D. programs in other contexts like the United States and the United Kingdom have (high) enrollment fees and rely on scholarships, stipends, or departmental duties like teaching to (partially) offset these, while again others, such as Germany, are commonly financed by part-time (50 percent) employment at the university with tasks substantively unrelated to the dissertation. These different preconditions leave many Ph.D. students struggling financially and even incurring debt, while others are in a more comfortable financial position. Likewise, Ph.D. programs around the globe differ in structure, such as required coursework, duration and supervision relationships. Naturally, all of these factors have a bearing on the extent to which fieldwork is feasible. We acknowledge unequal preconditions across institutions and contexts, and trust that those Ph.D. students interested in pursuing fieldwork are best able to assess the structural and institutional context in which they operate and what this implies for how, when, and how long to carry out fieldwork.

In our experience, this is not only the general cycle for graduate students in North America, but also in Europe and likely elsewhere.

For helpful advice and feedback on earlier drafts, we wish to thank the editors and reviewers at International Studies Review , and Cassandra Emmons. We are also grateful to our interlocuters in Argentina, Canada, Colombia, Germany, Guatemala, Japan, Kenya, Norway, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States, without whom this reflection on fieldwork would not have been possible. All authors contributed equally to this manuscript.

This material is based upon work supported by the Forskraftstiftelsen Theodor Adelswärds Minne, Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation(KAW 2013.0178), National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program(DGE-1418060), Southeast Asia Research Group (Pre-Dissertation Fellowship), University at Albany (Initiatives for Women and the Benevolent Association), University of Missouri (John D. Bies International Travel Award Program and Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy), University of Southern California (Provost Fellowship in the Social Sciences), Vetenskapsrådet(Diarienummer 2019-06298), Wilhelm och Martina Lundgrens Vetenskapsfond(2016-1102; 2018-2272), and William & Mary (Global Research Institute Pre-doctoral Fellowship).

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Field Research explained

Field research: this article explains the concept of field research in a practical way. The article starts with the definition of this term, followed by a general explanation and some practical examples of field research. You will also find an explanation of the various methods and a step-by-step plan for conducting field research. Enjoy reading!

What is field research?

Field research, also known as fieldwork, is a method of collecting raw data outside of the lab, library, or usual workplace.

It involves observing and interacting with people, animals or phenomena in their natural environment to gain a deeper understanding of their behavior, social interactions and the dynamics of their environment. Read more about experimental research .

Field research methods vary by field. For example, biologists observe animals in their natural habitats, and social scientists conduct interviews and observations to study human societies.

The definition of Field research

Field research is a qualitative research method that focuses on observing and understanding individuals, groups, communities or society as a whole.

It aims to capture authentic and contextual data by immersing researchers in the environments they study.

Through direct observation and interaction with subjects, field researchers gain firsthand insight into their behaviour, beliefs, cultural practices and social structures.

It encompasses a wide variety of well-defined methods, including:

• Formal interviews
• Informal interviews

Direct observation

Participating observation.

• Collective discussions
• Analysis of personal documents
• Self-analysis
• Offline and online activities

Although this type of research is mainly qualitative, it can also contain quantitative aspects, depending on the research goals and methodologies applied.

History and the origin of Field research

Field research has a long history, especially within cultural anthropology . Anthropologists have made extensive use of field research to study different cultures, often focusing on so-called primitive cultures or cultural differences based on factors such as class.

The term “field” refers to defined areas of research, such as education, industrial environments or Amazon rainforests, where social research is conducted.

Influential figures in the early development of this type of research include Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and Bronisław Malinowski, who laid the foundations for future work in anthropology.

Field research versus laboratory research

Field research and laboratory research differ in their approach to data collection.

Field research takes place in natural environments, where researchers make direct observations and interact. It provides contextual data and insight into complex processes, but may be limited in establishing causal relationships.

On the other hand, laboratory research takes place in controlled environments, where variables are manipulated and repeatability is ensured.

It is well suited for testing hypotheses and obtaining accurate measurements, but may lack the complexity of natural environments.

Both approaches complement each other and the choice depends on the research questions and available resources .

Research Methods For Business Students Course A-Z guide to writing a rockstar Research Paper with a bulletproof Research Methodology!   More information

Methods for field research

Field research involves the use of various methods to collect valuable data and gain insight into the phenomena under investigation.

Here are some common methods applied in field research:

This method involves carefully observing people, animals, or events in their natural environment. By watching closely, researchers can study behaviors, interactions, and responses to specific situations without actively participating.

In this method, the researcher actively participates in the group, community, or environment under study. By participating in activities, having conversations and being involved in daily routines, researchers can develop a deep understanding of the social structures, norms and values, and the meaning attached to certain actions.

Qualitative interviews

This includes conducting interviews with individuals or groups to find out their perspectives, experiences and opinions. By asking open-ended questions and delving deeper into topics, researchers can gain insight into participants’ thoughts and feelings.

Data analysis of documents

In this method, documents, such as letters, diaries, reports, or other written materials, are analyzed to obtain information and insights. These documents can provide valuable context and provide a historical perspective on the issues examined.

Informal conversations

Sometimes having informal conversations with people in the research environment can yield useful information. These can be casual chats during breaks or informal gatherings where people talk freely about their experiences and perspectives.

The use of these different methods allows researchers to collect a wide range of data and develop an in-depth understanding of the social, cultural and behavioral aspects of the phenomena under study.

Case studies

Case studies are a useful approach in field research to gain in-depth insights into specific situations, groups or phenomena.

Step-by-step plan for conducting field research

Follow the steps below to get started conducting field research yourself.

Step 1: define your research goal

Determine the specific goal of your research. What do you want to discover, understand or observe? Clearly formulate your research question(s) and objective(s).

Step 2: design your research plan

Consider which methods and approaches are best suited to your research question. Consider the location, participants/population, data collection methods and time frame.

Step 3: Get permission

If necessary, obtain permission from relevant agencies, organizations or individuals to access the study site and collect data. Make sure you follow ethical guidelines and procedures.

Step 4: collect data

Go to the research site and start collecting data according to your research plan. This may include direct observation, interviews, surveys, participant observation or collection of documentation.

Step 5: Analyze and interpret your data

Evaluate and analyze the collected data . Identify patterns, themes or trends relevant to your research question. Interpretation of the data should be based on accurate and systematic analysis.

Step 6: draw conclusions and formulate results

Based on your analysis and interpretation, you come to conclusions that answer your research question . Formulate clear results and present them in a structured way .

Step 7: Report and share your findings

Write a research report describing the methodology, findings and conclusions. Share your results with the scientific community, stakeholders or the wider public through publications, presentations or other appropriate channels.

Step 8: Reflect and Evaluate your field research

Take the time to evaluate your research experience . What were the strengths and challenges of your research? What would you do differently in the future? Reflect on possible improvements and learning points for subsequent studies.

Examples of known field studies

Numerous interesting discoveries have been made while conducting research. Here are three examples of discoveries made while conducting this type of research:

New animal species

Field research has led to the discovery of several new animal species. For example, in 2018, during a field research expedition in the rainforests of Ecuador, researchers discovered a new species of tree frog.

This discovery highlighted the importance of field research in identifying biodiversity and understanding the ecological systems in which these species live.

Ecological changes

Field research has also helped identify ecological changes and understand their causes.

For example, by studying coral reefs in different parts of the world, scientists have found that coral bleaching, a consequence of climate change, is having a devastating effect on coral reef health.

It’s Your Turn

What do you think? Do you recognize the explanation about field research? Have you ever heard of this type of research before? Have you ever conducted this yourself? What do you think are the advantages compared to, for example, research in a laboratory? Do you have tips or other comments?

Share your experience and knowledge in the comments box below.

More information

• Barick, R. (2021). Research Methods For Business Students . Retrieved 02/16/2024 from Udemy.
• Burgess, R. G. (Ed.). (2003). Field Research: A sourcebook and field manual (Vol. 4) . Routledge.
• Burgess, R. G. (2002). In the field: An introduction to Field Research (Vol. 8) . Routledge.
• Edmondson, A. C., & McManus, S. E. (2007). Methodological fit in management Field Research . Academy of management review, 32(4), 1246-1264.
• McKinnon, J. (1988). Reliability and validity in Field Research: some strategies and tactics . Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 1(1), 34-54

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• > Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology
• > Field Research Methods

Book contents

• Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology
• Copyright page
• Contributors
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Introduction to the First Edition
• Chapter one Scratch an Itch with a Brick
• Part one Design and Inference Considerations
• Chapter two Research Design and Issues of Validity
• Chapter three Research Design
• Chapter four Causal Inference and Generalization in Field Settings
• Chapter five Field Research Methods
• Part two Procedural Possibilities
• Part three Data Analytic Strategies
• Author Index
• Subject Index

Chapter five - Field Research Methods

from Part one - Design and Inference Considerations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

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• Field Research Methods
• By Elizabeth Levy Paluck , Robert B. Cialdini
• Edited by Harry T. Reis , University of Rochester, New York , Charles M. Judd , University of Colorado Boulder
• Book: Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology
• Online publication: 05 June 2014
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511996481.008

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Methods and Aspects of Field Research

• Open Access
• First Online: 10 December 2020

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• Francis Müller   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0705-6846 3  

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Anthropology ((BRIEFSANTHRO))

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This chapter lays out the history of ethnography, which began with travel narratives in antiquity and came to be used as a method in anthropology and urban sociology in the early twentieth century. Discussed, among other things, are the researcher’s role in the field and ethical considerations, as well as methods such as observation, interviews, digital, visual, and participatory ethnography, and the question of the documentation of design ethnography research. These are dealt with here within the specific context of design ethnography, which is usually significantly shorter in duration than the typical ethnographies in anthropology and cultural sociology and may seek not only to investigate a situation but also potentially to alter it.

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• Participatory action research
• Defamiliarization
• Digital ethnography
• Ethnographic interview
• Ethnographic observation
• Visual research

The term ethnography can be traced back to the ancient Greek éthnos (foreign people) and graphé (writing). A description of a foreign society presupposes two things: First, people who are engaged in ethnography must be mobile in order to have come into contact with foreign societies to begin with. Second, they require media such as writing, drawing, images, etc., in order to record their observations. The oldest ethnographies are travelogues, some of which had already been composed in ancient Greece: The geographer Skylax, the merchant Pytheas von Massalia, and the historian Herodotus reported on their journeys to the Near East. In the fourteenth century, the Muslim scholar Ibn Battûta wrote about his travels to Mekka, India, and China. Marco Polo’s reports of his travels in China—the authenticity of which, by the way, was doubted at the time because there were too few marvelous creatures described in them—are of course well known. Equally disputed was the travelogue of the German adventurer Hand Staden, who journeyed to Brazil in the sixteenth century with Portuguese conquerors and was supposedly held captive there by cannibals.

Later, ethnographic reports were written by missionaries, who explored indigenous societies in order to Christianize them. It was not until the nineteenth century that such investigations would be liberated from missionary ambitions, thus clearing a path for actual anthropological research. In the late nineteenth century, ethnography became a sociological and anthropological method. The American anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing, who spent many years during the 1880s with the indigenous Zuni tribes in New Mexico, was one of the first to write ethnographic reports in the social scientific sense ( 1988 ). The actual foundation of the method as such is ascribed to the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who conducted long-term field work on the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea in the 1910s ( 1932 ).

5.1 The Foreign Worlds Next Door and Defamiliarization

The ethnographic method was also developed around the same time, in the early twentieth century, by the Chicago School of sociology—although here the encounter with the foreign took place not on the far-off Trobriand Islands but just next door (Deegan 2009 , pp. 11–25, 119–164). Robert E. Park, on of the founders of the Chicago School, said to his students:

You have been told to go grubbing in the library, thereby accumulating a mass of notes and liberal coating of grime. You have been told to choose problems wherever you can find musty stacks of routine records based on trivial schedules prepared by tired bureaucrats and filled out by reluctant applicants for aid or fussy do-gooders or indifferent clerks. This is called “getting your hands dirty in real social research.” Those who counsel you are wise and honorable; the reasons they offer are of great value. But one more thing is needful; first hand observation. Go and sit in the lounges of luxury hotels and on the doorsteps of the flophouses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and the slum shakedowns; sit in the orchestra hall and in the Star and Garter burlesque. In short, gentlemen, go to get the seat of your pants dirty in real social research. (Park, cited in Prus 1996 , p. 119)

It is not by chance that Park calls on his students to go out to the luxury hotels and to the emergency shelters in the slums. In the late nineteenth century, migration led to a great degree of urbanization and pluralization of society, particularly in the northeast of the USA, but also in other major centers. Cities like Chicago and New York developed into gigantic metropolises in the span of a few decades. But it was not only the quantitative dimension of these urbanization processes that was new. The influx of immigrants also altered society qualitatively. It undermined the cultural dominance of the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) in the northeast. The predominantly Protestant society was now confronted with Jews from Ukraine, Catholics from Ireland and Italy, and Germans, who were thought to be beer-guzzling atheists. To this day, the China Towns and Little Italies in Chicago, New York, and other major cities bear witness to the exoticization of society from within that was just beginning then. The next side street could lead to another world.

The emerging Penny Press showed interest in this social pluralization. It “discovered what was close at hand, but at the same time deviant and curious, as newsworthy material” (Lindner 2007 , p. 19). Reporters began to investigate mortuaries, bordellos, factories, and slaughterhouses. Jacob A. Riis (Harper 2012 , p. 24 ff.), who emigrated to New York from Denmark, exemplifies this development. The police reporter, who is regarded as the founder of social photojournalism, took pictures of subcultural lifeworlds in Lower Manhattan in the 1880s, which first appeared as illustrations in newspaper and were later published in the photography book How the Other Half Lives ( 1997 ). Riis shows social realities that are geographically close but culturally far away. His work consists of ethnographic lifeworld analyses , mapped spaces and photographic portraits of street boys, Chinese opium smokers, bohemians, and Jews. Riis was however not only an ethnographer, but also a social reformer. His aim was to point out social grievances.

Even more radical were the “girl stunt reporters” who published social reportage in major American daily newspapers in the late 1880s. On commission from the papers, they went undercover to the prisons, factories, and poorhouses of large cities and reported on the abuses there. Elisabeth Cochrane, writing under the pseudonym Nellie Bly, was the most famous representative of this women’s movement. In 1887, she had herself admitted to a New York psychiatric clinic. Her report, Ten Days in a Mad-House (Bly 2009 )—which revealed inhumane conditions and triggered a political scandal—helped develop the participatory, covert practice of undercover research. Lindner points out the reciprocal influence of urban reportage and ethnography ( 2007 , p. 115): Both thematize the foreignness that is found next door; both are explorative and based on experience. This development was anticipated by reporters in the nineteenth century and not taken up by the social sciences until some decades later.

Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess of the Chicago School of sociology understood the metropolis as a laboratory in which human behavior could be investigated (Park and Burgess 1967 , p. 1). Within the Chicago School milieu, the primary concern of study was societal marginality: thieves (Sutherland 1989 ), migrant workers (Anderson 1998 ), ghettos (Wirth 1998 ), slums (Zorbaugh 1929 ), vice (Reckless 1969 ), ethnically mixed marriages (Adams 1975 ), or the Italian quarter in Boston (Whyte 1981 ). Just as in investigative journalism, research was conducted by going undercover. Frances R. Donovan, for instance, worked as a sales girl in a department store for 2 months and wrote a report about it ( 1988 ). This tradition was continued by others, such as James P. Spradley, who wrote—among other things—about urban itinerants and alcoholics ( 1999 ), the deaf (Spradley and Spradley 1985 ) and barmaids (Spradley and Mann 1975 ). The immersive approach was also followed by Loïc Wacquant, who spent several years training at a boxing gym on the South Side of Chicago ( 2006 ).

Ethnography aimed to map the processes through which people created their world (Dellwing and Prus 2012 , p. 53). The main focus of ethnography is: “What people do, what people know, and the things people make and use” (Spradley 1980 , p. 5). Fundamentally, ethnography is an empirical process that involves linguistic, mental, visual, sensory, and corporeal aspects (Pink 2015 , p. 26 ff.). To investigate ethnographically means collecting data by exposing oneself—that is, one’s own body—to the unpredictable influences of another lifeworld (Coffey 1999 , p. 59 ff.; Goffman 1989 , p. 125). In contrast to ethnographic field work in anthropology, design ethnography usually takes place in the context of one’s “own” society. We do not have to travel like Malinowsky to the Trobriand Islands in order to experience the foreign. A “journey” to a nursing home, or a Thai boxing club, or a hole-in-the-wall bar will lead us to an adventure around the corner.

In this context, George E. Marcus poses the question of whether lifeworlds can still be conceived of as closed, microscopic entities at all, as in Malinowski’s work. Marcus proposes a multi-sited ethnography , which follows ensembles of people, things, metaphors, scripts, biographies, and conflicts that circulate globally ( 1995 , p. 106 ff.). This may be illustrated with reference to a research project I conducted together with the designer Bitten Stetten on landmine victims, disability, and creative practices in Angola (Müller 2016 ). The energetic Kuduro music produced, sung, and danced in the musseque Footnote 1 —the slums in Luanda—is a mixture of western Techno and Angolese Kilapanga and Semba. The long fingernails, rhinestone earrings, and knee socks with flip-flops that we observed on young Kudoro dancers in Sambizanga (a musseque in Luanda) (Stetter 2016 , p. 90) are not an isolated phenomenon, but can be read in a global context. Here, elements of a global pop culture are mixed with Angolan culture. Many young people in Angola have a smartphone and a Facebook profile. They know the football stars from Madrid and Barcelona. They are connected with students in Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon. Because socialization still continues to occur in microsocial contexts, however, societies still develop differently as before. This is why a globally uniform culture has not emerged (Tilley 2009 , p. 267). Consumer goods and global brands are inculturated, adapted, and imbued with new meanings. For this reason, globalization leads not to uniformity but rather to transformation.

In her understanding of ethnography, Sarah Pink links knowledge gained from field work with individual experience. She defines ethnography “as a process of creating and representing knowledge or ways of knowing that are based on ethnographers’ own experiences and the ways these intersect with the persons, places and things encountered during that process” (Pink 2013 , p. 35). When we are familiar with a lifeworld, it is all the more challenging not to classify things prematurely and instead to observe the familiar with a phenomenological gaze, which is also referred to as “defamiliarization” (Bell et al. 2006 ).

5.2 Focused Ethnographies and Design Anthropology

A fundamental distinction may be drawn between classical and focused ethnography (Knoblauch 2006 ). Classical ethnography in the tradition of the Chicago School is characterized by long-term immersion in the field, openness, and description of impressions and experiences. Focused ethnographies are practiced in applied fields such as architecture (Cranz 2016 ), business and marketing (Salvador et al. 1999 ), Human Computer-Interaction (HCI) (Bannon and Bødker 1991 ; Nardi 1993 ; Suchman 1987 ) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) (Crabtree et al. 2009 ; Hughes et al. 1994 , 1995 ; Shapiro 1994 ). In contrast to the knowledge-oriented classical ethnographies, the goal of focused ethnography consists in the implementation of a new technology, a system design, and artifact, a building, etc. While classical ethnographies are intensive in terms of time and experience , focused ethnographies are data-intensive. Technical recording devices are used to gather detailed data from specific lifeworlds within a relatively brief period of time (Knoblauch 2001 , p. 130). Accordingly, these data-intensive approaches are also known as “wired ethnography” (Knoblauch 2001 , p. 127). In business contexts—for instance, innovation management—ethnographic investigation can take as little as a single or even half a day (Salvador et al. 1999 , p. 36).

In the 1980s, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in California produced Workplace Studies : Lucy A. Suchman intertwined cultural anthropology with engineering in her dissertation, Plans and Situated Actions: The problem of human-machine communication ( 1987 ), in which she argued that human behavior cannot be determined by machines but that it arises in situ. Suchman introduced into technological discourse the ethno-methodological concept of situated action , which posits that actions deviate from plans. One of the findings is that human action does not conform to what the engineers conceived but rather follows from specific situations.

In the 1980s, there were some collaborations between anthropologists from the USA and design researchers from Scandinavia (Bloomberg and Karasti 2013 , p. 87), where participatory design research had already developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as visionary social models and new technologies began to receive more attention (Bjerknes et al. 1987 ; Kensing and Greenbaum 2013 , p. 27 ff.; Mareis et al. 2013 ). Alison J. Clarke notes that starting as early as 1968, anthropological approaches had already entered into design discourses, which had previously been oriented strongly on industrial productivity ( 2016 , p. 71). This is the environment in which participatory Action Research arose (Blomberg and Karasti 2013 ; Reason 2004 ; Reason and Bradbury 2008 ). At that time, designers were conducting workshops with users, testing new technologies, developing mock-ups, and constructing future scenarios. Design ethnography established itself in the 1990s in this rather technology- and market-driven environment (Nova 2014 , p. 29 ff.). In the article “Ethnographic Field Methods and Their Relation to Design” Jeanette Blomberg et al. identifies the central reason why ethnography is important when it comes to the implementation of new technologies in workplaces (Blomberg et al. 1993 , p. 141 f.): because designers create artifacts for workplace contexts about which they know very little—and will therefore pursue their own needs and conceptions.

This accords with the notion of User-Centered Design , which became a topic of discussion in the 1980s (Gould and Lewis 1985 ): the center is, so to speak, the lifeworld of the user and the “member’s point of view,” which the researcher closes in on through methods such as on-site observation, informal interviews, and video recording (Blomberg et al. 1993 , p. 127 ff.). Hughes et al. described four types of ethnographic approaches ( 1994 , p. 432 ff.) Footnote 2 applied in CSCW that also have potential for design ethnography:

Concurrent ethnography : A technical system or a “rapid prototype” is introduced into praxis at the same time as it is observed ethnographically, whereby iterative loops, such as field research—debriefing—design of a prototype—field research, are played through several times. The observations are focused on the human-object or human-interface interactions. This type of research usually lasts a year or a little longer.

Quick and dirty ethnography : This refers primarily to quick forays into the field. Such ethnographies are “dirty” because they are not very detailed. This process can provide an overview of an area that has been defined in advance. Length: 2–3 weeks.

Evaluative ethnography : This ethnography is performed after the implementation of a new technology or system. It is focused. Various forms of interview are utilized as the main method. Length: 2–4 weeks.

Re-examination of previous studies : This refers to analyses of earlier ethnographic studies. It is therefore purely desk research with no visit to the field.

Yana Milev criticizes the kind of applied design research that serves to generate prospering branches of industry and multiple labels as “design governance” ( 2015 , p. 144). In contrast, the design anthropology she proposes places “the complex habitat of cultures as well as the anthropological techniques of constructing meaning and survival at the center of the theory and practice of design” ( 2015 , p. 145).

Keith M. Murphy and George E. Marcus have mapped out the similarities between design and ethnography in social research, which they describe as follows (Murphy and Marcus 2013 , p. 257 ff.): (1) Design and ethnography exist as product and process , (2) Design and ethnography are focused on research , (3) Design and ethnography are people-centered , (4) Design and ethnography are at the service of more than the thing itself , and (5) Design and ethnography are reflexive . At the same time, differences come into play that are related to the fact that design is characterized by being future oriented , interventionist , and collaborative (Otto and Smith 2013 , p. 3 f.).

Ethnography in the social sciences is primarily interested in observing the “naturalistic backdrops of foreign groups” (Dellwing and Prus 2012 , p. 54 ff.) and deriving theories from this. This is why structured interviews, which are “artificial” situations, are perceived as a problem and “conversations” are preferred (Dellwing and Prus 2012 , p. 117). Design intervenes and orients itself on the future, which to some extent it itself creates (Yelavich and Adams 2014 ). Future, in this context, should be understood less as a linear exploration of the present than as a multitude of ideas, critiques, and possibilities that is embedded in the narrative, objects, and practices of our everyday world (Kjærsgaard et al. 2016 , p. 1). In design ethnography, situations are disrupted, data is interpreted more quickly, and the processes are iterative. Moreover, fieldwork, analysis, and the transfer to design cannot always be sharply distinguished (Bratteteig et al. 2013 , p. 134 f.). In this context, Crabtree et al. posit:

Fieldwork is not about going out and looking at what people do, gathering some “data,” and then analyzing it when you get back to the ranch. Analysis is part and parcel of fieldwork. It permeates fieldwork. When you go into a field—into a setting—you should be doing analysis. (Crabtree et al. 2012 , p. 130)

In the context of design ethnography, iterative processes continually produce hypotheses, out of which prototypes, workshops, mock-ups, future scenarios, etc., are developed. Murphy and Marcus postulate that it is not just that design can learn from ethnography, but that enrichment also flows in the other direction: ethnography can also learn from design—for instance, from its iterative, less linear and more playful approach to the field and the data ( 2013 , p. 253 ff.).

The design researcher Nicola Nova provides a descriptive treatment of ethnography in his book Beyond Design Ethnography. How Designers practice Ethnographic Research ( 2014 ). Nova interviews designers about how they apply the methods in practice. To distinguish design ethnography as compared to ethnography in the social sciences, Nova lists the following characteristics:

The time spent in the field is shorter, the focus is more narrow, the analysis of the material is closely linked to the design practices with the production of intermediary objects […], the field data are widely heterogenous, the ways that ‘results’ are presented are so distinct from anthropology that it’s sometimes difficult to draw a clear line between “field results” and “design work”. (Nova 2014 , p. 117)

Design ethnography is not about a fixation on methods, but rather about immersion in social lifeworlds. Curiosity and a fundamentally open attitude toward people and social lifeworlds is paramount. It is about a radical attentiveness to social realities, whereby the methods for achieving this are only a means and not an end in themselves (Charmaz and Mitchell 2009 , p. 161). Crabtree et al. even maintain that methods should be eschewed completely ( 2012 , p. 67), which on a philosophical level accords with the epistemological anarchism of Paul Feyerabend ( 2010 ). Salvador et al. plead for using methods creatively, by always developing them specifically for an individual field context ( 1999 , p. 41). Nonetheless, there are certain aspects—such as for instance access to the field or the researcher’s role in the field—that are relevant to any field research and which will therefore be discussed in more detail in the next sections.

5.3 Access to the Field

To explore a particular lifeworld, it is best to simply go where it is located (this could be a digital as well as a physical space). This, however, might turn out to be a considerable challenge, depending on the place. While there are some lifeworlds that one can simply enter spontaneously, for others—such as for instance “total institutions” (Goffman 1961 ) such as prisons or mental hospitals—a formal permit would be needed. While certain groups are very accessible, other react to foreign visitors with hostility or even aggression. Robert Prus proposes four ways of accessing the field: (a) utilizing our own experiences , (b) accessing mutual settings , (c) finding sponsors , and (d) making “ cold calls ” ( 1997 , p. 216 ff.).

In each of these cases, it is important to have a gatekeeper—that is, a person who knows the field and is trusted there in ways that can carry over to the ethnographer. The impression one makes when entering the field is also critical. In certain areas, to enter the field without a gatekeeper is dangerous or nearly impossible. For our fieldwork in Angola, we made use of the contacts of a half-Angolese architect with whom I have long been personally acquainted. This man accompanied us during our first 3 days in Luanda and introduced us to important people to whom he had previously reached out—such as leaders of an NGO that assists victims of war and people with disabilities. Together with these officials, we could go into the field and conduct interviews within the local lifeworlds with those who were affected (Müller 2016 , p. 69 ff.). In the case of Larissa Holaschke, who investigated the subversive strategies of women in Iran in her master’s thesis, couch surfing turned out to be a successful mode of entry into the field. In this manner, Holaschke came into direct contact with people from the liberal-minded milieus that were the focus of her research ( 2016 ). She gained direct insight into the lifeworlds and limited spaces of freedom that were found behind closed doors.

The situations looks different when it comes to experiments, focus groups, and interventionist methods such as cultural probes. In those cases, test subjects must be identified in advance. This raises the question—particularly with qualitative methods, which are used with small groups—of what criteria should be used to select them. Nicholas Nova asked designers what process they used to form their test groups and encountered the following methods of selection (Nova 2014 , p. 48 f.):

Random : Arbitrary people chosen from the population

Homogenous : A focus group of people with common characteristics

Comparative method : Various groups for comparison

Extreme cases : People and groups with patterns of behavior or characteristics that deviate sharply from the norm

According to reputation : Recruiting test subjects based on recommendation

Beyond-users : non-users or abstainers as a focus group

Analog situations : Focusing on situations similar to what is characteristic for the field being investigated

When selecting test subjects, it is important to consider what is motivating them to participate. In some field work, there may be little understanding for a research project. People in certain environments might not even understand that there is something like a specific research interest in them. If they are willing to collaborate, then, this mainly has to do with a liking for the researcher. Or they may see possible economic advantages in participation, which should be openly discussed and negotiated.

5.4 Researcher’s Role in the Field

The researcher’s role in the field has been variously handled in anthropology, and there has been no lack of self-critical and occasionally ironic judgment. The anthropologist John van Maanen describes ethnographers as “dull visitors,” “meddlesome busybodies,” “hopeless dummies,” “social creeps,” “anthropofoologists,” “management spies,” and “government dupes” ( 2011 , p. 2). In some societal milieus, anthropology is a foreign concept—and consequently, the presence of researchers in the field can be alienating. The situation in the field thus ceases to be “natural,” as the researcher in fact wants it to be. Their presence alters the field.

It is rather rare for designers to conduct fieldwork in Angola or the south of Mexico. Mostly, they operate in environments that are not entirely remote from them. But even those who deal with the milieus of computer games, rock climbing, dementia, or insect eaters are challenged to engage with the genuinely specific aspects of the corresponding lifeworlds and realms of consumption. And if they are no strangers to these worlds—for instance, if they themselves are active gamers—they will attempt to distance themselves artificially.

When I was conducting fieldwork in a Ghanian and a Swiss evangelical community in the greater Zurich area (Müller 2015 ), I was received openly by both. On my first visit to the Ghanian Sunday service, I was asked to come to the front and introduce myself to the attendees. In the course of my visits, I was able to convince the pastor of the relevance of my research and could move about freely throughout the spaces. However, not everyone was aware of my role as an ethnographer. My attempts to maintain distance at ceremonies such as healings and exorcisms were often ignored by the faithful because they saw me as a potential convert and encouraged me to participate. One day, when I was attending a baptism, a pastor wanted to baptize me alongside. She said I had been there long enough after all and knew enough about the faith. As an agnostic who personally has no use whatsoever for evangelicalism, I of course declined.

Distance and proximity, among other things, are thematized in the sociology of religion in connection with methodological agnosticism. This refers to an attitude that brackets the content of religion as ontological truth. For example, whether religious testimonials—such as conversion narratives—are “true” cannot be determined by the sociologist of religion, but only within the limited social lifeworld of religious practice. There—in the field—is where the “truth” that is of interest to the researcher will be intersubjectively negotiated. For “[…] the task of the ethnographer is not to determine ‘the truth’ but to reveal the multiple truths apparent in others’ lives” (Emerson et al. 1995 , p. 3).

Dellwing and Prus note that ethnography has “hot” phases of participation, during which one is passionately involved and contrasting “cooler” phases, in which one is calmer and more distanced ( 2012 , p. 69). Goffman advocates for an immersive approach:

The sights and sounds around you should get to be normal. You should be able to even play with the people, and make jokes back and forth […]. The members of the opposite sex should become attractive to you. You should be able to engage in the same body rhythms, rate of movement, tapping your feet, that sort of thing, as the people around you. (Goffman 1989 , p. 129)

This leads to a temporary immersion in specific lifeworld contexts. Ethnographers adapt to situations. They are chameleons. Fieldwork alters them. It is important to set aside one’s own values, at least temporarily, and conform to the field. Within intercultural constellations, in particular, one’s own convictions and ideologies could become obstacles. For instance, Marimar Sanz Abbul and Mariam Bujalil reported at the MX Design Conference in Mexico City:

When a group of students from Mexico City visited an indigenous community in the mountains and did not touch the food because it had meat and many of them were vegetarians, the target community’s trust toward the class immediately broke down and the project had to be prematurely terminated. (cited in Sierach 2016 , p. 57)

Ethnographers should be open, curious, empathetic, adaptable, and ready to revise their opinions, preconceptions, and values—at least to a certain extent. Anne Honer advocates taking people in the field seriously and not overwriting them with one’s own moral ideals ( 2011 , p. 87). Those who only judge and are not prepared to reconsider their own opinions are rather unsuitable for ethnographic fieldwork. Salvador et al. therefore write about design ethnography: “We will study people. It’s their voice, their story, not our own […]” ( 1999 , p. 41).

5.5 Observation

Observations are always intentional. We cannot see everything. Our biological make-up does not allow us to see the world in 360°. Even within our field of vision, we only see a portion in sharp focus and the rest is unclear. Maturana and Varela have called attention to the epistemological consequences of this biological structure. They speak of a blind spot : “We do not see that we do not see” ( 2003 , p. 8). The gaze is singular, given that it originates in the consciousness of a biological individual whose body is situated in a particular place. Ethnographic observation is always based on selection (Katz 2019 ).

What do these epistemological considerations mean for ethnographic observation, which Roland Girtler calls the “queen of fieldwork methods” ( 2001 , p. 147)? For one thing, they relativize the faith in objectivity. Objectivity is based on reduction. I can, for instance, count the number of people in a certain space. This number is objective. But this objectivity obscures a universe of other attributes—for example, the gender, age, ethnicity, etc., of the people in the room, the clothes they are wearing, their behavior, whether they are meditating, sitting on chairs, boxing, working at computers, dancing, etc. Obviously, I can operationalize each of these individual attributes in turn. I can quantify the gender, ethnicity, age, etc. and capture these statistically, but this does not overcome the basic problem that objectivity is attained only through reductionism. Seeing is thus always a form of classification. Seeing is based on prior knowledge:

We, people of today, directly see a railroad station, a form that a primitive man would be unable to see. He would look at the mass of ironwork in tangled “laths” fixed to the ground, at houses on wheels, at a hard-breathing monster exhaling fire and smoke, and he would probably see his own forms: the dragon, the devil, perhaps many other things, but not our good old railway. (Fleck 1986 , p. 137)

When we observe ethnographically, then, we should attempt to set aside such acquired knowledge, at least partially. In this process, the familiar is particularly problematic because it is classified all too rapidly. That is why Manfred Lueger calls for the familiar and the mundane to be transformed into an unfamiliar state “by decomposing it, treating it as something new, looking for conceivable connections of meaning” (Lueger 2000 , p. 111).

5.6 Dimensions of Observation

On epistemological grounds, then, we cannot see everything and therefore always define a focus. Lueger distinguishes three possible areas of focus in observation ( 2000 , p. 107 ff.): (1) actors , (2) events and actions , (3) objects and products. These three dimensions can be used to describe any social situation, since they are found in all of them. There are people involved who are carrying out actions (even if they are passively meditating, that is an action) and there are always objects—for instance clothing—on hand. Even in places where people are naked—doctor’s offices, swinger clubs, and nude beaches—there are culturally specific objects present. James P. Spradley descries ethnographic observation as follows: “We observe what people do (cultural behavior); we observe things people make and use such as clothes and tools (cultural artifacts); and we listen to what people say (speech messages)” (Spradley 1980 , p. 10).

Spradley differentiates between grand tour observations and mini-tour observations ( 1980 , p. 77 ff.). He compares grand tour observations with a tour of a house, a school, or a business, in which someone is shown the basic structure of the building. If one then goes into the individual rooms and examines them, to stick with the building metaphor, then those are mini-tour observations. Spradley emphasizes that the observations are actually made in an identical manner, but the main difference is that the focus is on units of a different scale. He distinguishes between nine dimensions of observation ( 1980 , p. 78):

Space : the physical place

Actor : the people involved

Activity : a set of various actions

Object : the physical things

Act : individual acts carried out by the people

Event : a set of activities carried out by the people

Time : the chronological sequence

Goal : the aims people wish to accomplish

Feeling : the emotions that are expressed

Spradley is interested in the interactions between the nine dimensions, which he presents in his descriptive question matrix ( 1980 , pp. 82–83), which results in 81 fields (Table 5.1 ).

These 81 fields create a grid that is an effective way of bringing to light the complexity in a social situation on the one hand and reducing it analytically on the other. Along the diagonal line of the matrix, where the same two categories meet, is where the detailed description of that category takes place—which Spradley calls the “grand tour questions” ( 1980 , p. 81). Next to this, in the fields in which the interdependencies between the various dimensions are investigated, are the “mini-tour questions” (Spradley 1980 , p. 81). Such a matrix can be helpful in looking for certain dimensions. It could be used to more closely examine a relevant focus—for instance, time, objects, or emotions. This focus might arise during the fieldwork, or it could already be determined in advance. If the design project consists in creating a new object, it makes most sense to intensively investigate all the questions that are related to objects.

5.7 Front and Back Regions

Goffman called attention to some other dimensions relevant for observation: A setting has what he called a front and a back stage (Goffman 1956 , p. 66 ff.), which should be understood as relational and not substantive entities. The classic example is in the theater. While on the front region of the stage, the actors play a specific role and are exposed to a great degree of scrutiny, backstage they act more relaxed, make jokes, or rest. This is similar in expensive restaurants: there, the servers behave toward the guests in accordance with particular rules, while back in the kitchen the interaction is gruff. The servers alter their behavior depending on the space in which they find themselves. The speak a different language, use different words, carry themselves differently, etc. In short, place determines social identity.

These categories are, as mentioned, relational. If we define the church service as the front stage, then the bible study group can be defined as back stage. At the front stage, normative identities are constituted through sermons, while in the bible group, as a back stage, communication can be personal and intimate (Müller 2015 , p. 146 ff.). Within the bible group itself there are also front and back stages. The front stage, for instance, can be the entire space in which interaction happens among the group. The back stage could be the kitchen, where snacks are being prepared, or the office where the bible group is organized. The theatrical metaphor suggests that the identity on the front stage should be seen as “played” while the one back stage is “authentic.” But in American Pragmatism and symbolic interaction theory there is no such thing as “authentic” identity. Identity is always produced through naming and classification (Strauss 2017 , p. 17 ff.)—and is therefore contingent.

A situation will not necessarily be conclusively understood through observation alone, which is why ambiguities might be cleared up through interviews (Honer 2011 , p. 31).That observation can have its limits is something I would like to illustrate by an example from my own fieldwork, which involved a visit to the Sunday service at a Ghanian evangelical church in Zurich (Müller 2015 , p. 122). It was Pentecost, and the mood of the worshippers was excited from the start. The pastor invoked the Holy Spirit. He called on everyone—including me—to come up front, where we all stood close together in a semicircle. He went from one to another and put his hand on their brow. One woman at the start fell to the ground and began to speak in tongues. Other women followed. The mood was ecstatic. Then a young woman walked quite calmly up to the front. She seemed completely untouched by the ecstatic mood. She did not fall to ground after the pastor laid hands on her, but rather lay down gently and slowly. Finally, she lay motionless on her stomach while another woman put a white cloth on her back. I could describe these actions, but the meaning was not conclusive. Why were there such obviously different reactions to the workings of the Holy Spirit? Why did it have an ecstatic effect on most, while this young woman was contemplative in behavior? At a later point, I asked the pastor about this situation. He explained to me that the Holy Spirit manifests in different ways. If a person twitches sharply after the laying on of hands, as most women did, then this indicates a conflict taking place inside them between evil spirits and the Holy Spirit. The young woman who lay down calmly did not have any evil spirits inside her—and accordingly, the Holy Spirit manifested itself gently. The Holy Spirit could even be at work while someone was deeply asleep. Only now did another observation that I had made repeatedly for some time finally become conclusive. I had seen people sleeping in the service. That this sleep had religious connotation would not have become evident from pure observation alone.

5.8 Interviews and Conversations

When situations do not become conclusive on the basis of observation, interviews and conversations are then warranted for clarification. I use the two terms consciously, since they refer to two different types of face-to-face communication. The interview arose during the nineteenth century in the context of American journalism. Crime beat reporters working on human interest stories began to orient themselves on police interrogation and incorporated quotations from them into their texts. Interviewing as a method of social science became established only later.

Question-answer situations are based on the assumption that there are disparities in knowledge (if this were not that case, there would be no reason to ask the questions). Furthermore, social science interviews are artificial situations that do not exist in everyday communication—similar to confession, psychoanalytic talk therapy, or police interrogation. These settings are subject to certain framings and power dynamics that are more (police interrogation) or less (psychoanalysis) explicit, raising various questions: What does the interviewee hope for? What are their goals and motivations for participating in the interview? Does the interviewee understand the role in which they are being addressed in the interview? Has the interviewee agreed to audio recording of the interview?

In principle, interviews in the social sciences are divided into qualitative and quantitative , open and structured types, in which soft and hard and open and closed questions can be asked. In the context of ethnographic interviews, it is important to ask open rather than closed questions—that is, the questions should be able to open up new horizons and not simply be answered with a yes or no (Liebold and Trinczek 2009 , p. 38).

In the qualitative context, there are focused interviews (Flick 2014 , p. 211 ff.; Merton 1987 ), semi-structured interviews (Flick 2014 , p. 217 ff.), problem-centered Interviews (Flick 2014 , p. 223 ff.) and expert interviews (Flick 2014 , p. 227 ff.), which require extensive preparation and are therefore described by Michaela Pfadenhauer as a “conversation between an expert and a quasi-expert” ( 2002 ). Further, there are narrative (Schütze 1983 ) and ethnographic interviews (Spradley 1979 ), which will be discussed later. Another distinction concerns classic and idealist approaches to interviews, where subjects present their real lifeworlds and experiences in the former, and their wishes in the latter (Byrne 2012 , p. 208).

Video recording of interviews is generally discouraged because this can negatively impact that atmosphere of the conversation. Whenever possible, interviews should be documented through audio recording, since no one can take notes and conduct a conversation at the same time. Of course, recording is not always possible, and especially with informal conversations, a recorder can be disturbing to the interlocutor. Turning on the recording mode on a smart phone can equally lead to a break—from that point on, conversations often become suddenly formal and “artificial,” although this feeling may dissipate after a short time. I have often had the experience in interviews that after the recording device is turned off—that is, as soon as the formal part is over—this is when the interviewee really begins to tell the story. Such situations demonstrate how strongly the technology impacts our behavior.

In any case, the interviewer needs the competence “ to understand roles , to grasp ‘as who’ he himself is seen and ‘as who’ his interlocutor acts and speaks” (Hermanns 2008 , p. 364). Harry Hermanns describes the interview as a drama that is substantially shaped by the interviewer. He offers the following stage directions ( 2008 , p. 367):

The framework and objectives of the interview should be made transparent to the interviewee through a briefing.

A pleasant atmosphere should be created during the interview.

The interviewee should be given space to show several aspects of themselves. If the interviewer is embarrassed by anything, they should make clear that they will not avoid the content and subject.

The drama must be allowed to develop. This is facilitated by posing brief and easily understandable questions about the lifeworld of the interviewee. Jargon should not be used.

The conversation should not explore any theoretical concepts but rather focus on the lifeworld of the interviewee. This also means that the interviewer should ask follow-up questions if something is unclear and allow the interviewee to explain situations with precision.

5.9 Narrative Interview

The narrative interview was developed by the German sociologist Fritz Schütze. This type of interview deals primarily with autobiographical aspects and themes (Svasek and Domencka 2012 ). In the narrative interview process, the initial question is particularly significant: it should induce the freest possible narrative flow, upon which the interviewer should step back so as not to disturb it. The narrative interview is divided into three phases (Schütze 1983 , p. 285):

Narrative prompt : The prompt can refer to the entire biography or can be focused on a specific phase of life—for instance, a religious conversion, an illness, or a period of unemployment. This initial question should be formulated openly and not be suggestive. The interviewee marks the end of this sequence with phrases such as “so, that was it.”

Immanent follow-up questions : Here the interviewer takes up certain statements from the initial narrative and probes them with deeper questions. It is important that these follow up questions, too, are open and evoke new narrative flows.

Exmanent follow-up questions : Here, the interviewer will introduce their own topics of interest into the interview that have not yet been discussed. These questions may relate to other interviews or theoretical knowledge.

A narrative interview lasts at least an hour. Whether the initial question will actually be sufficient to set the narrative flow in motion depends on a number of factors—the mutual sympathy between the two interlocutors (narrative interviews should be conducted in private, since people open up significantly more to just one listener); the interviewee’s trust in the interviewer; the situation and place where the interview is conducted; the negotiated timeframe; the agreed-upon conditions of anonymity; and cultural influences. It should be noted in this context that interviews do not represent realities but rather reconstruct them narratively. Thus, they are not mirror reflections of events and experiences (Hahn 1995 , p. 140).

5.10 Ethnographic Interviews

Roland Girtler criticizes the narrative interview because in his view the researcher’s initial question puts the interviewee on the spot. Moreover, interviews are designed to elicit specific information as quickly and pointedly as possible, which also puts pressure on the interviewee ( 2001 , p. 147 f.). Girtler instead suggests the ero-epic dialogue , “in which the point is narratives and stories that might refer to pretty much anything within a culture or group” (Girtler 2001 , p. 147). Anne Honer, in turn, speaks of the explorative interview , which is intended to open up “the widest possible, ‘unknown’ and latent areas of the interviewee’s knowledge” ( 2011 , p. 41). These approaches resemble the ethnographic interview (Maeder 1995 , p. 66 f.; Spradley 1979 ). This type of interview is characterized by the idea “that the researcher must first learn from their informants what the right questions to pose even are” (Maeder 1995 , p. 66). Ethnographic interviews begin as open interviews and become increasingly more closed. In this way, hypotheses are developed during an interview through an abductive process that are then woven into new questions. Spradley emphasizes that ethnographic interviews are quite similar to “friendly conversations”: “It is best to think of ethnographic interviews as a series of friendly conversations into which the researcher slowly introduces new elements to assist informants to respond as informants” (Spradley 1979 , p. 58).

The place where a conversation or interview takes place is important. Is it happening within the lifeworld being investigated or is it in a “laboratory setting”—for instance, in a seminar room at a university? The proponents of the laboratory setting argue that this “neutral” environment helps to clarify connections more precisely. This however begs the question of how “neutral” a laboratory—such as a seminar room—actually is. Most likely, “there are no decontextualized, that is, ‘pure,’ interview situations” (Liebold and Trinczek 2009 , p. 40). One does not go into an interview as a neutral quantity; rather, one has a habitus, a biographical background, a gender, etc. Clothes, hairstyles, and habitus also convey symbolic information that influence the course of the interview.

Conversations situated within the lifeworld under investigation enable direct reference to the things on hand. Daniel Miller has demonstrated this with his study of objects in one hundred apartments in a London street and their biographical significance for the inhabitants ( 2008 ). Because there are certain things present in the context of every lifeworld, one can refer to them in a conversation. At the same time, however, there may be other people present as well, who may influence the interviewee’s portrayals. It is possible that the respondent may not articulate certain sentiments when people from their personal milieu are there within earshot. During our fieldwork in Angola it was quite disconcerting for us to speak with disabled people while their friends and family were around. It contradicted our conception of the private sphere.

A meeting within the lifeworld context of the interviewee develops an entirely different atmosphere. The conversation develops quite differently when one is drinking or eating together. Even the question of whether one sits together at a table or stays on the move—for instance, while taking a tour of a building or a home or taking a walk—produces a different kind of conversation. A walk with a person on their own familiar territory shows how people adapt to spaces (Holliday 2007 , p. 256; Kusenbach 2008 ; Lee and Ingold 2006 ; Pink 2007b , p. 240 ff.). This provides information about the “native’s view point” (Geertz 1999 ), which refers not to the subjective individual consciousness, but rather to the cultural grammar with which people access their world.

5.11 The Senses

In western societies, it is assumed that we have five senses: seeing, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. This classification, however—which goes back to Aristotle—is not in fact universal. In her research with the Ewe in Ghana, Kathryn Lin Geurts found terms that denote perceptions that are at once psychological and physical, suggesting that the duality of mind and body that shapes western thought does not exist there ( 2002 , p. 197). If there are cultural differences in how other societies classify the senses, then this has consequences for perception (Pink 2015 , p. 59 ff.). This draws attention to a problem inherent to any engagement with questions of sensory perception: We experience the world sensorially, but are not able to express these personal perceptions through language because in doing so we always operate with reference to an already given language and cultural classification. Neither can sensory perception be measured (Pink 2015 , p. 136). One can merely attempt to describe it, which is a genuinely interpretive process.

Quite likely, it is these epistemological difficulties of dealing with the sensorily perceptible world that have contributed to making an “Anthropology of the Senses” (Howes 1991 ) a marginal phenomenon for a long time. The idea has however received more attention recently. Footnote 3 Different places have specific olfactory and sound environments. A hospital, a Catholic church, a used book shop, a boxing gym, an Irish pub, a Mexican taqueria—they all have their own specific smell. Objects have scents too—not just food, but also books, furniture, laundry, the interiors of cars. Things have their own haptics, which we experience through touch (Classen 2005 ), and their own acoustics (Vokes 2007 ). Smells, scents, and stench are everyday experiences that help us ascribe things to categories such as dirty and clean, which are anthropological ordering schemes (Douglas 1966 ). In this respect, a description of subjective sensory perceptions in the context of an ethnographic study must be understood less as a representation of an experience and rather more as part of a cultural classification system, in which the researcher themself is embedded. The assumption is that the relevant classifications are a fundamental part of the culture. To research such “sensory categories” (Pink 2015 , p. 148 ff.) interactive and participatory processes in which the researcher themself plays a part are most suitable.

In this regard, Sarah Pink speaks of a “multisensory approach” ( 2011 ), “digital-visual-sensory-design anthropology” ( 2014 ), and “sensory ethnography” ( 2015 ). Arantes and Rieger also speak of sensory ethnography ( 2014 ). Footnote 4 Pink calls attention to the fact that subjective as well as intersubjective sensibility have their relevance ( 2015 , p. 62). Subjective sensibility refers to the personal perception of the researcher. Intersubjective signifies that this experience of the researcher is embedded within a cultural context and within social relationships. Since the “translation” of sensory experience into text entails the aforementioned difficulties, Pink proposes to carry out interventions ( 2007a , 2015 , p. 7). By this, she means events such as jointly producing a film, cooking a recipe, or singing a song with the participants: “The practice of eating food prepared by people with whom one is doing research (or preparing food with or for them) is an obvious way to participate in their everyday lives” (Pink 2015 , p. 108).

Harold Garfinkel’s “breaching experiments,” in which everyday norms were shaken, are worth recalling in this connection. Drawing on this tradition, Kelvin E. Y. Low conducted a study about gender and scent in which he sprayed himself with women’s perfume and questioned his social milieu about it ( 2005 , p. 407). At the methodological level, Inga Reimers proposes three approaches to investigating sensory experience ( 2014 , p. 85 ff.):

Ethno-mimesis : Developed by Maggie O’Neill and Phil Hubbard, Ethno - Mimesis ( 2010 ) aims to produce sensory knowledge through creative means. O’Neill und Hubbard have implemented this approach with asylum seekers, with whom they walked together on city streets and spoken with immediately afterward about their experiences.

Experimental procedures : Researchers plan and realize specific settings together. This might, for instance, be a meal in which eating practices are investigated, where feelings are articulated and exchanged. This open-ended and experimental process helps make internalized classification patterns explicit.

Situational group discussions : Researchers create multi-sensory settings—such as a meal—and involve specific groups of test subjects with whom group discussions are then held afterward. The hierarchies between the researchers and the subjects should be as flat as possible.

5.12 Things and Material Culture

Whether we are in a library, a laboratory, a department store, or a museum—we are surrounded by man-made, designed objects. We have internalized implicit knowledge of how to deal with these things and our handling of them is complex and variable: We buy them, use them, consume them, repair them, alter them, throw them away, destroy them. The things in question can be very simple or highly technologically complex. Flatware, for instance, is technically simple—from a cultural perspective, however, even a technically simple fork can turn out to be very complex: “Once a more or less consistent functional core develops and, importantly, becomes historically stable, then forks begin to vary with cultural standards” (Böhme 2012 , p. 102). The fact that even something like a mechanical toaster is complex has been demonstrated by Thomas Thwaites in his “Toaster Project” ( 2011 ). He obtained and processed his own raw materials and used them to build a replica of a mass-produced toaster by hand. In this way he made visible the complexity of mass-produced objects. What is already a very time-consuming process in the case of a toaster would be completely impossible with a smartphone. In under a decade, smartphones have fundamentally altered the way we communicate, interact, behave in private and public, indeed how we live (Bell and Kuipers 2018 ; Ictech 2019 ). Virtually no one who uses a smartphone knows how it actually functions technologically. Neither is this necessary, given that it fully suffices to just know how to use it in everyday life. It is only in a crisis—that is, when the smartphone stops working—that the complexity normally concealed by its smart interface is revealed (Berger and Luckmann 1967 , p. 24; Latour 2002 , p. 223; Schön 1983 , p. 59 ff.).

Every society has its own material culture, which is variously dealt with in anthropology (Appadurai 1986 ; Böhme 2012 ; Clarke 2017 ; Habermas 1999 ; Hahn 2014 , 2015 ; Hahn and Schmitz 2018 ; Lueger and Froschauer 2018 ; Miller 2008 , 2009a ; Müller 2019 ; Tilley 2009 ; Tilley et al. 2013 ). The microcosms of small social lifeworlds are filled with a variety of things: The things inside a Buddhist temple are different from the ones in a Catholic church or a mosque—even though all these places contain both holy and mundane objects. The things in a Kung Fu school are different from the ones in a boxing club. A lab contains different things than a law office. A Korean restaurant has different things than a Spanish one. Things in a bathroom are different from the kitchen. At the same time, there are objects that are present in all of these places: for instance, screws, lightbulbs, light switches, etc.

Things have certain material properties. They can be hard, soft, elastic, rough, smooth, matte, bright, light, heavy, etc. Their existence is conditional (Lueger and Froschauer 2018 , p. 65 ff.): They have been produced under specific circumstances and in specific contexts. They have functions and meanings, whereby the latter have less to do with their material properties but rather rest on social attributions. We own some things that have a particular meaning for us and others of which we take no notice. We do not pay the same degree of attention to all things—significantly more to a smartphone than to a screw, although screws are certainly fundamental. Some things—such as toothbrushes, towels, or sheets—are a part of our completely private sphere, and accordingly we do not like to share them with other people. Habermas describes these things as our “identity kit” ( 1999 , p. 122 f.). Living spaces contain collections of personal things that manifest a certain lifestyle and individuality. Hartmut Böhme describes them as “storehouse and performative organ of the self” ( 2012 , p. 99). We own things that have a special emotional significance because of their biographical connections—so-called “memory objects” (Hahn 2014 , p. 37 ff.). These include souvenirs, which embody an extraordinary experience and evoke a temporally or geographically distanced perspective (Habermas 1999 , p. 291 ff.). Family heirlooms transcend the here and now in a similar way. They “lend a social (family) identity, distinction, and belonging, as well as historical identity” (Habermas 1999 , p. 292). What we value emotionally is dependent not just on economic value, but also on the habitus and cultural milieu in which we move, our age, the historical era in which we live, etc. At the same time, our personal relationship to things cannot be explained by sociological factors alone, since the relationships that a person has with such things is highly individual.

Things are designed, produced, adapted, further developed, appropriated for different purposes—the latter known as “non-intentional design”: being used in a way that the designer did not intend. Such is the case, for instance, when I keep my pens and pencils in a beer glass. Furthermore, objects can also be used as markers to reserve personal space. Sun glasses and a tube of sun block signal someone’s claim to a lounge chair on the beach; a drink on the bar lays claim to the bar stool in front of it (Goffman 2010 , p. 41). The idea then is that all people practice design and therefore have design knowledge (Cross 2007 , p. 47).

5.13 Consumption Is Not Superficial

In the age of modern consumption, a critique of consumerism has also been established to shed some critical light on it. A central argument of this critique has to do with the distinction between (necessary) basic needs and (superfluous) luxury needs. According to this critique, which has gained strength in recent years in sufficiency discourses, we consume more than we truly need. Wasteful, excessive consumption must be disciplined. A further critique claims the objects of consumption are superficial, suggesting that there is a deep inner self that has been coopted by external, “superficial” things. The sociological Frankfurt School and French post-structuralism in particular have branded consumer culture as superficial in judgments dripping with the sort of morality one would sooner expect from puritanical lay preachers than from sociologists.

Daniel Miller rightly points out that the emergence of mass consumption has also greatly contributed to reducing poverty ( 2013 , p. 341). The distinction between things that are necessary and superfluous is not a universal one; rather, it goes back to puritanical Protestant values (Hahn 2014 , p. S78 ff.; Campbell 1998 , p. 238). It is in this context that Miller speaks of the Poverty of Morality ( 2011 ): Anyone who judges one lifestyle to be “wrong” implicitly considers another to be “right.” Positions critical of consumerism are less concerned with analyzing the facts of a situation than with branding consumption. As the ethnologist Hans Peter Hahn points out: “On the one hand, the line between luxury and need is subject to an emic, culturally dependent definition; on the other, the European concept of need is influenced by a very particular rhetoric […]” (Hahn 2014 , p. 81). This also contradicts Maslow’s pyramid of needs and the mechanistic conception of man associated with it, which posits that self-actualization becomes a goal only after material, rudimentary, and social needs have been met. In his essay “Why Clothing is not Superficial” ( 2009b ), Daniel Miller shows that everyday and consumer culture shapes identity to a great degree and is anything but trivial. Miller debunks the assumption—which is particularly wide-spread in the German-speaking world, that superficiality is a distraction from something deeper:

We possess what could be called a depth ontology . The assumption is that being —what we truly are—is located deep inside ourselves and is in direct opposition to the surface. A clothes shopper is shallow because a philosopher or a saint is deep. (Miller 2009b , p. 16)

Consumer goods do not simply satisfy needs; rather, they convey symbolic statements. Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood have fundamentally refuted the theory of consumption as the satisfaction of need, which is grounded in economics:

Instead of supposing that goods are primarily needed for subsistence plus competitive display, let us assume that they are needed for making visible and stable the categories of culture. It is standard ethnographic practice to assume that all material possessions carry social meanings and to concentrate a main part of cultural analysis upon their use as communicators. (Douglas and Isherwood 1978 , p. 62)

To define eating, drinking, clothing, etc. simply as the satisfaction of need assumes a mechanistic model of mankind and obscures symbolic categories. Douglas describes the manner in which we nourish ourselves as an information system (Douglas 2011 , p. 82 ff.). We define ourselves through eating: from veganism to from-nose-to-tail , whether one’s eating habits are ascetic and self-disciplined or hedonistic and pleasure-oriented makes a social statement. Clothing also significantly constructs a social identity, which is why it is also described as a “social skin” (Turner 1980 ). We are different people when we walk around town in scruffy jeans or in a suit. We make a different impression and experience the world differently. The things with which we surround ourselves form our identity. Accordingly, Habermas posits that clothing is experienced as a part of our person that defines our physical boundaries ( 1999 , p. 67). Mary Douglas describes our entire everyday world as meaningful and symbolically loaded: “we do not seize upon as theatrical props to dramatize the way we want to play our roles and the scene we are playing in” (Douglas 1966 , p. 101).

5.14 The Contingency of Things

Anselm Strauss write: “An object which looks so much like an orange—in fact which really is an orange—can also be a member of an infinite number of other classes” ( 2017 , p. 22). An orange can be the fruit of a citrus plant from the Rutaceae family. It can be a food source rich in vitamins. It can be sold as a product in a supermarket or an informal street market. It can be used as the subject of a still life at an art school. At the Basel Carneval it can serve as a projectile, while at the Día de los Muertos in Mexico, it is an offering for the dead. An orange can thus be an object of biology, nourishment, economics, religion, etc. Its identity is contingent, which contradicts the concept of identity that posits that a thing is one. The definitiveness of naming thus brings into the world the contingency that it seeks to overcome. At the same time, the orange has an undeniable materiality. As soon as we begin to describe this materiality in more detail, however, a field of ambiguity opens up again: Do we describe the orange only on the basis of its external appearance? Do we limit ourselves only to its size, color, and form? Do we cut it open, which again produces a different image? Do we squeeze the juice out of it? Do we describe only the isolated orange or do we consider that it grows on a tree that needs water, light, and air? The questions proliferate. This demonstrates that material culture is far more ambiguous than it appears to us in daily life. Or, as Böhme puts it: “Things are deeply familiar to us. When we want to know what they are, they become alien” ( 2012 , p. 35).

5.15 Field Notes

As previously discussed, observation is based on selection: We make decisions, in part conscious ones and in part intuitive. We make further decisions when we take notes. What do we note down? When do we take notes? Do we write notes using key words or complete sentences? What does it actually mean to “translate” an observation into a textual note? Is it a translation or a construction of something new? And why do we take notes at all when we can simply photograph or film the situations in the field with a smart phone?

To begin with, it is important to recognize that working with visual data is fundamentally different from taking notes. Which approach one chooses, or whether one combines several, depends on the research project, its context, and one’s personal preferences. It should be kept in mind that notes do not just describe actions—rather, the taking of notes is itself an action (Emerson et al. 1995 , p. 15).

Emerson et al. speak of “jottings,” which build the foundation for “full notes” ( 1995 , p. 51). Spradley calls these brief notations, which are composed of key words rather than fully composed sentences, “condensed accounts” ( 1980 , p. 69). He recommends composing “expanded accounts” immediately after the fieldwork and keeping a “fieldwork journal” in which not only observations but also feelings, associations, and impressions are articulated. The last step is writing up the “analyses and interpretation,” which is the final ethnographic report (Spradley 1980 , p. 69 ff.).

Taking notes can unsettle people in the field. When we take notes we are signaling that we consider a situation or a statement significant, which the people in the field may see differently. Goffman therefore recommends not writing notes down during the observation itself, because people would then know which actions were being documented (Goffman 1989 , p. 130). This raises the question of whether such evasive tactics are necessary. Ultimately, acceptance of note-taking naturally depends on the field itself and not least on the situations in which one finds oneself. For instance, if you are conducting participant observation of gang members, it will be difficult to take notes during a fight. I had more luck in my fieldwork in the Ghanaian evangelical church community in Zurich: there, many of the worshippers took notes on the pastor’s sermons during the Sunday service. In that context, my behavior conformed to the norm—to such an extent, indeed, that many of the attendees took me for a convert.

5.16 Sketches and Illustrations

Sketching is often done so automatically by designers that it is not even perceived as a method of fieldwork. In fact, sketching—called “graphic anthropology” (Tondeur 2016 )—is a highly useful approach in fieldwork, especially in situations where photography and video recording is not possible. The designer Franz James employed this method in an investigation of prisons in South Africa, where photography is not allowed ( 2016 , p. 163). Sketching has various advantages (Tondeur 2016 , p. 666). First, paper and pencil are cheap. Second—in marked contrast to electronic media—it leads to a more relaxed form of observation. Third, it is considerably less intrusive than photography or filming. And fourth, it often leads to conversations and new forms of encounter in the field. The anthropologist Michael Taussig made the sketches he produced over decades of fieldwork in Columbia into a springboard for the autoethnographic and literary reconstructions in his book I Swear I Saw This . Taussig writes: “[…] photography is a taking , the drawing a making […]” ( 2011 , p. 21). This active element of sketching leads to more sensitivity and openness in perception. Sketching and drawing can be made by the researcher themselves or—in a participatory approach—by the people within a certain field (Pink 2015 , p. 89 f.) Forgoing audiovisual technology leads to more contemplative observation in the field.

5.17 Photography and Video

With smartphones now omnipresent, an enormous amount of visual data is created every day, which is shared, evaluated, commented on, adapted, filtered, deleted, or archived. In 2017, 1.8 trillion photographs were produced, 85% of these with smartphones. Footnote 5 According to the German portal statistica , 3.26 billion people worldwide had a smartphone in 2019 and the number is projected to reach 3.76 billion in 2021. Footnote 6 With 5G technology, upload speeds will become massively faster again, which will significantly increase the production of visual data. But it is not just the quantity but also the quality that is fundamentally changing. Many companies that never had an infrastructure for traditional land-line communication are leaping directly from face-to-face oral interaction into the digital world. In the future, smartphones will be even cheaper and more widely distributed globally, which will further increase the production of photos and video. Ultimately, the smartphone alters not only our culture of interaction and communication, but also the presence and meaning of visuality in our everyday world (Eberle 2017b , p. 111).

This development lends a new relevance to the Iconic Turn (Boehm 1994 ). The new visual worlds require new methodological approaches. Social science journals such as Visual Ethnography Footnote 7 or Visual Studies , Footnote 8 which is published by the International Visual Sociology Association Footnote 9 (IVSA), deal with these visual approaches. Despite the flood of images, visual data in sociology continue to stand in the shadow of text. Aside from visual sociology (Harper 2012 ) and videography (Knoblauch 2006 ; Schnettler and Raab 2012 ; Tuma et al. 2013 ), visual data in sociology often have merely a documentary function: they supplement texts, which continue to stand at the center. Thomas S. Eberle attributes this to the dominance of positivism in the foundational ideas of sociology, which must be called into question by a turn to the image. He calls attention to the fact that

images have to be interpreted by recipients and due to their more open horizon of interpretive possibility as compared to verbal descriptions always produce a surfeit of meaning. Images can therefore never be fully represented or substituted by text. Conversely, due to their ambiguity and the need for them to be interpreted, images also cannot provide any definitive statement that can be verified intersubjectively. (Eberle 2017a , p. 20)

Anthropology is more open to images than sociology, and accordingly it has long since developed a visual tradition (Harper 2012 , p. 5). The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski took many photographs during his investigations on the Trobriand Islands ( 1932 ). Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead established a visual ethnography with their study of “Balinese Character” ( 1942 ). Harper advises sociology to “open the eyes of the discipline to a wider and infinitely more interesting perceptual world than a computer screen filled with numbers” ( 2012 , p. 4).

As advances in technological reproduction in the late nineteenth century allowed photography to enter into print media, this went along with a new faith in objectivity. At the time, the photograph was considered the reflection of reality—in contrast to text, in which an author “formed” the events through narrative. This assumption is now outdated—and not only because of the technical possibilities of image manipulation. Every image is made from a particular perspective, since it is people—and not cameras—who take the pictures. An arbitrary component is therefore always manifest (Ball and Smith 2009 , p. 305). Photos are “subjectively re-shaped by the photographer” (Baur and Budenz 2017 , p. 93). They are not objective representations. On Howard S. Becker’s account, the difference between journalistic and sociological photos consists entirely in their context ( 1995 , p. 12): The same photograph can appear in a social science journal or a newspaper. It can be situated within a sociological or a journalistic context. The context determines what sort of image we see.

Such theoretical considerations of images are as relevant for a photograph used in ethnography as for photojournalism. Take for instance the aforementioned crime beat reporter Jacob A. Riis ( 1997 ). In the late nineteenth century, he went around the streets of lower Manhattan, where immigration was giving rise to neighborhoods like Little Italy, China Town, and the Jewish Lower East Side. Riis was among the first to use the flash at night in order to show and shed light on the flip side of life—the life of the marginalized. He presented “night-time people in a surreal visual universe” (Harper 2012 , p. 24). His photos are hybrids of journalistic and ethnographic photography. The photographer and visual ethnographer Camilo Jose Vergara, who took documentary photos of ghettos in the USA, among other things, operated within a similar tradition ( 2014 ).

In the early twentieth century, film was increasingly employed in anthropological fieldwork (Tuma et al. 2013 , p. 24 ff.). A classic of ethnographic film released in the early 1920s is Nanook of the North by Robert J. Flaherty, who lived for several months with the Inuit and documented their everyday lives. The documentary film demonstrates that the genre is not without dramaturgical elements: The film produces a romanticized image of the Innuit lifeworld with stylistic means and music. Film and photos are—like texts—constructions and not reflections of reality. They are “transformations of lifeworld situations” (Schnettler and Knoblauch 2009 , p. 277) and the producers of the visual data are enmeshed in this process.

A person with a camera is not neutral. Their behavior is fundamentally determined by technology (Eberle 2017a , p. 28, 2017b , p. 100 ff.). Photography itself is a physical act, in which the photographer bends, kneels, lies down on the ground, or even climbs up to high places (Eberle 2017b , p. 108). And every shot with the camera is preceded by a selection. “Even the decision as to when the investigation is concluded and the camera unpacked represents a selection—just like the focus and duration of the shooting” (Tuma et al. 2013 , p. 12).

In the context of the contingent conditions of the production of visual data, it is also important to consider that people in the field will be conscious of the presence of the researcher’s camera and will react to it (Pink 2015 , p. 48; Tuma et al. 2013 , p. 13). The nature of this reaction depends substantially on how the camera is handled: whether it is mounted on a tripod in the field or whether filming is simply done with a smartphone produces not just a different type of reaction in the field, but also different kinds of aesthetic representations of the course of social activity in the field.

5.18 Factors that Influence Production of Visual Data

Photography can facilitate the first contact in the field: The question of whether one might be allowed to take photographs is—depending on the field—well-suited for establishing contact and possibly conducting a spontaneous interview. In our fieldwork with the disabled in Angola the visibility of the camera often led to the landmine victims posing for the picture. This proved to be fruitful during one excursion to a musseque where the designer Bitten Stetter and the photographer Flurina Rothenberger were also there gathering audiovisual material during a Kuduro production. This was later edited into a video clip, which then became part of the exhibition “Sometimes people in Luanda shine.” Footnote 10

Tuma et al. have identified three factors that influence the production of visual data (Tuma et al. 2013 , p. 37 ff.):

Research situation

This dimension relates to the aforementioned dichotomy between natural and artificial situations. Would the situation being filmed be taking place without the presence of the researchers? Do the people in the field know that they are being filmed? Are they reacting to the investigator’s camera?

Operation of the camera

How the camera is used is central. Will it be mounted in place to film a particular part of the space over some length of time? Is the researcher filming with a subjective, moving camera, such that the film represents their perspective? Or will film material be included that was produced by the people in the field independently of the investigation? In the last case, the aesthetics with which the people in the field produce their films would also be investigated, among other things.

Post-processing

Post-processing is relevant for visual data that have been produced independently of the investigation. Here, it is not only the filmed or photographed events, objects, and actions that play a role, but also how these have been edited afterward. This can include cuts, color filters, time-lapse, dubbing, etc. Such stylistic devices make visible the aesthetic specific to a milieu, a group, or a scene.

Tuma et al. define video ethnography as follows: “Researchers go ‘into the field’ and focus the video camera on everyday situations in which people are engaged in actions and analyze how they are doing it” (Tuma et al. 2013 , p. 10). This data—whether still photographs or film—serves primarily as documentation. While field notes are reconstructive, photos and video recordings are simultaneous technical recordings of a fluid moment or timespan. In contrast to notes, visual data—in particular moving images with sound—are highly complex and enable microscopic analysis of individual details and sequences of events, which would not be possible with classical reconstructive survey methods (Schnettler and Knoblauch 2009 , p. 276).

The production of film has become technologically easier and has a much lower threshold. Whereas entire film and photography crews once went into the field with tripods and technical equipment, operating there as a collective and colonizing the field, today a single researcher with a smartphone can produce video material. Such researchers are more agile—physically and mentally—and more empathetic and less disruptive of a situation, because smartphones are ubiquitous. At the same time, this can lead to the production of an enormous amount of video material, which can in turn make analysis more difficult. The ethnologist Barbara Keifenheim therefore sees something disciplined in working with 16-mm film: one knows that the recording time is limited and the processing costs high, which demands a focused eye when the camera is turned on ( 2008 , p. 278 f.).

5.19 Participant Produced Images

“Participant produced images” (Pink 2013 , p. 86 ff.) describes visual data created by the people in the field—for instance, for posting on social media. The resulting images and videos are then “liked,” evaluated, and commented on there. Such data are “natural”—produced in the field without the researcher actively eliciting them. These data can serve as the basis for in-depth interviews or discussions in focus groups. Of course, analog images can function similarly. For instance, in her ethnographic investigations of bullfighting, Sarah Pink has conducted interviews about photographs in clubs for bullfighting aficionados ( 2013 , p. 95 ff.).

Digital photography fundamentally changes image-making practices. In this regard, Nina Baur and Patrick Budenz list the following techniques ( 2017 , p. 77 ff.): staging and retouching , choice of framing , focal distance to the object, depth of field, and coloration. Eisewicht and Grenz describe digital photography as interpretative conservation and identify three levels ( 2017 , p. 121 f.):

Camera software for shooting : Tools to improve image quality, tools that preset certain picture modes, and tools with special trigger mechanisms

Camera software for editing existing images : Editing of existing image data, editing through addition of material and through rearrangement

Camera software for managing images : Sharing, sorting, and backing up photos

The various processing technologies give rise to new aesthetic dimensions that are particularly relevant when analyzing visual data that was produced by participants in the field.

5.20 Digital Ethnography

In the wake of digitization, a flood of new textual and above all visual data has been created. Not only has the quantity of data increased dramatically, but the quality has also fundamentally been altered, which manifests itself in new methods such as Online Ethnography (Boellstorff et al. 2012 ; Hine 2015 ), Netnography (Kozinets 2010 , 2019 ), Digital Ethnography (Pink et al. 2016 ) and Armchair Anthropology (Ge 2017 ), in which visuality must be methodologically taken into account (Gómez Cruz et al. 2017 ). Every special interest community exchanges experiences through social media. They communicate about diseases, addictions, extreme sports, politics, anxiety, and sexual practices. A distinction should however first be made between “online communities” and “communities online” (Kozinets 2010 , p. 63 ff.). Communities online are actually existing communities that have a supplemental platform on the internet. Online communities, on the other hand, are communities that have formed solely on the internet, whose members in most cases never see each other face-to-face.

Similarly to the way the emergence of the novel in the eighteenth century privileged subjectivity and individualization, the internet also gives rise to new forms of visual identity. Codes, symbols, and signs are used as resources in order to express subjective states or desired identities that orient themselves on existing patterns of identity. In this way, digital realities become a site where “expression and perception of the self are pre-structured in a specific way but are also malleable” (Muri 2010 , p. 87). Norms are negotiated through likes and comments (Müller 2018 ). Selfies exhibit a standardized pattern and they objectivize normative patterns of self-representation. These can pertain to the pose, the social constellation (selfies with friends), the facial expression (“duckface”), or even individual body parts (“belfies”). At the same time, however, these normative patterns are continually transformed subjectively. Style and aesthetics are worked out through filters, through which process however adaption and new interpretations repeatedly favor precisely the objectivization (Baur and Budenz 2017 , p. 93). In the context of selfies, Neumann-Braun speaks of photographer and feedbacks being “part of a glo c al peer review system” ( 2017 , p. 345). Pink notes:

Moreover, the rapid rise in popularity on the ‘selfie’ practice of photographing oneself with a smartphone, indicates the closeness that these technologies have to the ways people view and represent their own identities, thus suggesting that the personalization, closeness and affective qualities of the smartphones create potential to similarly create empathetic and corporal connections with audiences through sensory ethnography media. (Pink 2015 , p. 165)

Selfies are produced in certain contexts—such as in museums, in front of tourist attractions, at parties, at home in the bathroom, or in bed. The poses are rehearsed and normative. They display a generalized other (Mead 2015 , p. 152 ff.) and a social front region (Goffman 1956 , p. 67). A photo that deviates from the norm would not be published; it would damage the image of the depicted person. Which norm applies depends on the social environment. There is great differentiation in this regard. For instance, in the context of mental health, where teens and young adults negotiate psychological suffering and subjective mental sates in digital media, quite particular self-representations are practiced: Young people touch their faces with their hands or show themselves in vulnerable poses in bed, which becomes a symbolic Safe Space (Schmocker 2018 , p. 51 ff.).

Kozinets defines netnography ( 2010 ) as “participant-observational research based in online fieldwork. It uses computer-mediated communications as a source of data to arrive at the ethnographic understanding and representation of a cultural and communal phenomenon” ( 2010 , p. 50). The specific aspect of his netnography consists in the fact that—just as in ordinary ethnography—the interaction of the researcher with the participants occurs in the field ( 2010 , p. 50). This means that the researcher participates actively in forum discussions, posts images to generate comments, and responds to these: “Online interaction forces the learning of additional codes and norms, abbreviations, emoticons, sets of keystrokes and other technical skills in order to transfer the emotional information vital to social relations” (Kozinets 2010 , p. 69). The principle of active participatory observation is translated to digital reality. Further, Kozinets proposes a “blended ethnography,” in which online research is combined with research in real-world situations ( 2010 , p. 55 ff.). The process enables identification of the following:

Integration vs. Separation of Social Worlds : What constitutes the similarities and differences in the patterns of behavior in internet and face-to-face situations?

Observation vs. Verbalization of Relevant Data : What it the relationship between observing physical behavior and articulating its description? Are there deviations?

Identification vs. Performance of Members : How relevant are demographic characteristics such as age, ethnicity, gender, etc. of members of a particular community? Or do they distinguish themselves solely through certain contributions or actions?

With Mediated Sensory Ethnography (Pink 2015 , p. 117 ff.), the action is not reduced to virtual reality; the sensory dimension is also included. The focus is thus on visual, auditory, tactile, and other sensory experiences that occur with digital practices (Pink 2006 , p. 44 ff.). For digital technologies continue to appear object-like to us. There is (still) some physical interaction with a device—for instance, a touch screen, a keyboard, a microphone, etc.

5.21 Participatory Action Research

In a certain sense, ethnography is always participatory, since the researcher participates to a greater or lesser extent in the field. Most design processes also have participative elements, given that designers do not just tinker in a lab but rather develop their solutions interactively with particular groups. However, the concept would become diluted if every study and every design were described as participatory. The methods described as participatory in what follows, therefore, are specifically those in which researchers work together with the participants to produce ethnographic data and/or design solutions, or brief them about producing data and solutions themselves. The basic principle is: “Good research is research conducted with people rather than on people” (Heron and Reason 2006 , p. 179).

Participative research and design approaches emerged in Scandinavia in the late 1960s and 1970s (Bjerknes et al. 1987 ; Blomberg and Karasti 2013 , p. 87; Kensing and Greenbaum 2013 , p. 27 ff.). “Design Participation” was the theme of the annual conference of the Design Research Society in Manchester in 1971 (Robertson and Simonsen 2013 , p. 2). In terms of theoretical background, participatory approaches draw on a Marxist-oriented critique of society (Rahman 2008 , p. 49) and a critique of positivist sciences (Gergen and Gergen 2008 , p. 159). The Marxist idea posits that underprivileged people and societies can improve their situations in collaboration with researchers (Rahman 2008 , p. 49). A problem to be solved together serves as the starting point. Robertson and Simonsen define Participatory Design as

a process of investigating, understanding, reflecting upon, establishing, developing, and supporting mutual learning between multiple participants in collective ‘reflection-in-action.’ The participants typically undertake the two principal roles of users and designers where the designers strive to learn the realities of the users’ situation while the users strive to articulate their desired aims and learn appropriate technological means to obtain them. (Robertson and Simonsen 2013 , p. 2)

The participants thus are designers and users—and by articulating their concerns and aims they figure out how to achieve the latter. In this process, all the parties involved in the research project should benefit from it: Designers develop design approaches, anthropologists gain insights, and participants solve problems through collaboration. In practice, this means that privileged academics work together with underprivileged people, which requires ethical consideration. Castillo-Burguete et al. describe participation in local communities as a form of cultural capital , in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense, that must be incorporated and mobilized jointly ( 2009 , p. 532). This does not mean that the communities in question are to be colonized but rather that an exchange of ideas takes place.

5.22 Participatory Photography and Cultural Probes

Participative photography and video means handing out cameras and letting people in the field use them themselves. This approach was employed by Ruth Holliday, who called upon participants to produce “video diaries” ( 2000 ). Holliday also explored queer identities this way by asking 15 people from the queer scene to take pictures of their clothing practices at home, going out, and at work ( 2007 , p. 257 ff.). Eric Michaels and Francis Kelly ( 1984 ) proceeded similarly when they gave out cameras to Aborigines and had them produce images. In our project in Angola, we gave disposable cameras to students of rehabilitation medicine, who in turn passed these out to physically disabled people so they could take photographs from within their own lifeworlds. The response rate was relatively low, which was in part due to the fact that we did not give out the cameras directly but via a social node. This made the channels of communication significantly more challenging. It was much more productive when we actually included one of these students in the project. Domingos João Pedro Bernardo, who was himself a victim of polio, produced a poem (Bernardo 2016 , p. 35) and photos from his lifeworld that were incorporated in our publication (Müller 2016 ).

Even when researchers are physically absent during the production of the photographs, they are still part of the process through the briefings (Pfadenhauer 2017 , p. 136 f.). Such briefings might put the focus on various realms of the everyday world—for instance, things in one’s home that are considered beautiful, disruptive, clean, or dirty. The issue here is not just what people will film or consider relevant, but also how they will film: that is, how is the camera deployed and moved, what framing is chosen, etc. (Keifenheim 2008 , p. 282).

Giaccardi et al. suggest delegating the filming to things and employing them as “co-ethnographers” or “autographers” ( 2016 , p. 235 ff.). In their research project “Thing Tank” they attached small cameras that took photos automatically to three everyday objects—a kettle, a refrigerator, and a tea cup. These “autographers” uncover blind spots, such as the contact or interaction they have with other objects. “A thing perspective opens up possibilities for understanding the limits of human action on time and space and the ways in which non-human things are directly informing and creating the everyday realities in which people live” (Giaccardi et al. 2016 , p. 243).

Photovoice was developed by Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris ( 1997 ). In a study, Wang encouraged women in a rural area in China to take pictures relating to their health situation in their everyday work context. The impetus for the study was the hypothesis that health problems existed there. The procedure had three objectives: First, it aimed to motivate the women to empower themselves to represent and reflect upon their personal and shared strengths and worries. Second, the photos were intended to generate a dialogue about the personal and shared concerns. Third, it sought to reach the level of politics and engage it in dialogue. The method was grounded in the assumption that photos show how we live and how we define ourselves in relation to the world. The methodological approach is described as follows (Wang 1999 , p. 187 ff.):

Select and recruit a target audience and community leaders

Recruit a group of photovoice participants

Introduce the photovoice methodology to participants and facilitate a group discussion

Obtain informed content

Pose an initial theme for taking pictures

Distribute cameras to participants and review how to use them

Provide time for participants to take pictures

Meet to discuss photographs

Plan with participants a format to share photographs and stories with policy makers or community leaders

A different direction is taken by the method suggested by Sarah Pink—“Walking with Video” ( 2007b , 2015 , p. 111)—in which the researcher accompanies the participants on walks while simultaneously filming them. This method is based on the assumption that routes and paths do not simply connect start and end points in a functional way but also represent subjective sensory microcosms. By filming directly, the researcher can make reference to the things that are present and make them an immediate subject of the conversation: “Walking with video, I suggest, can generate a more involved approach to the question of how places and identities are constituted” (Pink 2007b , p. 250).

The cultural probes process developed by Bill Gaver in the late 1990s is an extension of the participatory approach (Gaver et al. 1999 , 2004 ; Brandes et al. 2009 , p. 168 ff.). The background for it was a study on the elderly in Oslo, Amsterdam, and an area near Pisa. Gaver et al. distributed sets of several postcards to the participants that posed questions about their wishes, everyday worlds, and objects. The sets also contained cards with poetic and sometimes direct questions, such as where participants prefer to meet people, where they are alone, or where they would most like to go but are can’t. The participants were given disposable cameras and were asked to photograph where they lived, something they wished for, and something boring. In addition, they received a photo album in which they were supposed to tell their life story in six to ten images. Finally, they were to keep a media diary in which they would record their media consumption—that is, which newspapers they read, which radio programs they heard, and what they watched on television (and with whom they did so) (Gaver et al. 1999 , p. 22 ff.). Cultural probes are conceived as an open method that lends itself easily to expansion, supplementation, and alteration (Gaver et al. 2004 ).

5.23 Photo Elicitation

In “photo elicitation” (Harper 2002 , 2012 , pp. 155 ff., 81 ff.; Pink 2015 , p. 92 ff.) pictures are not simply analyzed by researchers but also function as the basis for interviews with the participants in the field. This method was developed in the 1950s by John Collier ( 1957 , p. 846 ff., 1967 , p. 46 ff.). At the time, Collier was conducting interviews with and without photos for a 3-year study on the lifeworlds of workers in Canada. He came to the conclusion that in the interviews with photos, the responses were more precise because the images built a “language bridge” (Collier 1957 , p. 858).

The driving assumption here is that the meanings of photographs are not inherent but ascribed (Harper 2002 , p. 13; Pink 2013 , p. 92). Multiple perspectives on an image open up multiple schemes of interpretation. These interpretations should not be understood as purely subjective processes because categories of cultural signification impact these processes as well. Photo elicitation leads to a new definition of the sociological interview “because it centers an object in a photo that both parties are looking at and trying to make sense of” (Harper 2012 , p. 157). As Sarah Pink demonstrates in her empirical investigations of bullfighting in Spain, opponents and aficionados of the practice interpret images differently. In her study, Pink defines three groups that hold diverging positions on bullfighting and female bullfighters: First, bullfighting aficionados who favor female bullfighters; second, bullfighting aficionados who are opposed to female bullfighters; and third, opponents of bullfighting as such ( 2013 , p. 77). Pink conducted interviews focused on images of the bullfighter Cristina Sánchez with people from all three of these groups, which demonstrated that they ascribed varying meanings to the pictures. For instance, if a picture showed Christina Sánchez in a challenging situation, then for the proponents of female bullfighting it was proof that women are capable of mastering it. In contrast, the aficionados opposed to female bullfighters saw in the image a confirmation of their preconceived belief that women are unsuited for it, while the opponents of bullfighting as such saw the superiority of the bull. The interviews that are centered around images thus seek to pluralize perspectives:

Photo-elicitation relies on the idea of the photograph becoming a visual text through which the subjectivities of researcher and participant intersect. It can evoke memories, knowledge and more in the research participant, which might have otherwise been inaccessible, while simultaneously allowing the researcher to compare her or his subjective interpretation of the image with that of the research participant. (Pink 2015 , p. 88)

The image functions as a starting point for seeking out new contexts of meaning and new patterns of interpretation. This can take place in various settings. Researchers can ask participants to comment on photographs in writing. Photos can serve as the basis for face-to-face interviews, group discussions, and focus groups. In the context of a netnography, photos and videos could be posted online, where they can be commented on, evaluated, and/or altered.

Anna Brake points to several factors that play a relevant role in photo elicitation and are as pertinent to the production of visual materials as to the manner in which the interviews are conducted ( 2009 , p. 376 f.):

Photographic material : This material can come from either the researcher or from the people in the investigated field. There, in turn, it can be produced explicitly for the study or be pre-existing (for instance, family or travel photos, profile pictures from Facebook, Instagram, etc.).

Interviews : The photographic material can be employed quite differently in the interviews. With a structured approach, the sequence, time frame, and questions are defined in advance. With an open approach, respondents can choose the photographs and the duration of the commentary themselves

Social constellation : The inquiry can be conducted in different constellations—in pairs (an interviewer and a respondent) or in larger groups.

Media : The visual materials can be displayed in various media—as prints, on a screen, or projected onto a wall. The medium in which the material is produced can also vary—from photos, sketches, journals, or design tasks to film.

Text and visual analysis : The comments of the respondents are recorded and transcribed and the transcriptions and visual data are interpreted and analyzed, whereby the relative weight given to text and image-based data can vary.

5.24 Interventions

Ethnography in social science research is interested in the natural environment of foreign groups. As already noted, however, researchers also bring forth the world that they observe and identify. In contrast to descriptive ethnography, design intervenes in and alters situations. Design ethnography is based on iterative steps that cycle between description, interpretation, and intervention:

These include interventionist forms of fieldwork and design that work through iterative cycles of reflection and action, and employ methods and tools such as video feedbacks, scenarios, mock-ups, props, provo- and prototypes, tangible interactions, and various forms of games, performances and enactment. (Otto and Smith 2013 , p. 11)

Collaborative approaches such as co-production of a film, joint preparation of a recipe, or participatory design of a prototype are interventions (Pink 2015 , p. 7). A design object, after all, does not yet exist during the design process, which is why it cannot be investigated with a conventional ethnographic research approach (Halse 2013 , p. 282). The “natural” context in which a new design object will be used cannot be empirically investigated. This is why it is necessary to design prototypes that can be used to intervene in everyday situations. These design interventions can be described broadly as experiments (Hegel et al. 2019 ), in the sense of open-ended experiments, not those that confirm or refute a hypothesis. Joachim Halse and Laura Boffi speak of “Design Interventions as a Form of Inquiry” and define the method as

a form of inquiry that is particularly relevant for investigating phenomena that are not very coherent, barely possible, almost unthinkable, and consistently under-specified because they are still in the process of being conceptually and physically articulated. (Halse and Boffi 2016 , p. 89)

Fundamental design methods such as prototyping and sketching are used to intervene in order to see lifeworld contexts and segments of reality in a new light. According to Friedrich Stephan, designers take on “the role of creatively destroying certainties and seek occasions for disruptions that call for and enable new adaptations” ( 2010 , p. 86). Footnote 11 Gatt and Ingold write that “anthropology-by-means-of-ethnography” is a practice of description while “anthropology-by-means-of-design” in contrast is a practice of correspondence and mediation ( 2013 , p. 144). Barbara Tedlock writes of a development “from Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation” ( 1991 ).

5.25 Withdrawing from the Field

Especially during longer and more actively participatory fieldwork, relationships and possibly even friendships between the researcher and the participants develop. There grows a mutual empathy and intimacy. While at the start of the process the researcher may still be an irritant, the participants will have soon become used to him. But every research project must come to a temporal end, at which point the researcher retreats from the field—at least in his role as researcher. If the researcher remains emotionally and socially connected to the people in the investigated lifeworld, this is described as “going native” (Knoblauch 2003 , p. 96 ff.). But even where the researcher does not become a “convert” to the group in question, other forms of relationship still arise—for instance, a moral one, as when the researcher has investigated a socially marginalized group and afterwards engages in political activism on their behalf, which may be seen as what César Cisneros Puebla has called “activemia” ( 2016 , p. 173 ff.), a combination of political activism and academic knowledge. Another ethically important point, of course, comes when the researcher publishes about the studied group. In this regard, Roland Girtler recommends sharing the data and texts with the participants prior to publication and discussing them together ( 2001 , p. 128 ff.). The ethical questions raised by the retreat from the field will be dealt with in the next chapter.

5.26 Ethics

In contrast to morality, which is based on socially accepted values and norms, ethics is reflective. It begins at the point where moral concepts are questioned and considered (Luhmann 2008 , p. 372). Ethnographic fieldwork gives rise to numerous ethical concerns (Roth and von Unger 2018 ) that often have to do with various kinds of disparities between the researcher and the participants in the field. While such disparities do not speak against the project at all, still they need to be taken into consideration. The American Anthropological Association advocates the following seven points on the question of ethics: Footnote 12

Be Open and Honest Regarding Your Work

Obtain Informed Consent and Necessary Permissions

Weigh Competing Ethical Obligations Due Collaborators and Affected Parties

Make Your Results Accessible

Protect and Preserve Your Records

Maintain Respectful and Ethical Professional Relationships

Concretely, the ethical questions concern primarily personal rights. In contrast to quantitative research, where reports are based mainly on statistical data, ethnography sketches out people’s lifeworlds. Participants tell their life stories, offer a view into their everyday worlds, and perhaps reveal intimate and embarrassing details. If this information is published, it can harm those involved, which must absolutely be avoided. The issues that are associated with this must be weighed carefully, especially in research with children or people will impaired judgment. Consent must be obtained from parents or appropriate authorities.

An important point concerns the way in which research data is made available to the public. In the case of textual data, there are varying degrees of anonymization. But visual data is different (Pink 2015 , p. 67 ff.; Schnettler and Knoblauch 2009 , p. 279; Tuma et al. 2013 , p. 67 f.): Since people are photographed or filmed, they are identifiable. They should therefore be informed of any publication and give their consent. Sarah Pink recommends involving the people from the investigated lifeworlds in the research process rather than defining them as objects ( 2015 , p. 68).

The concept comes from Kimbundu ( Mu-seke ) and means something like a sandy place, which describes the unpaved ground of the Luandan slums (Moorman 2008 , p. 32).

These four types of ethnographic approaches are also described in Crabtree et al. ( 2012 , p. 77 f.) and Knoblauch ( 2001 , p. 128).

Noteworthy in this context, for instance, is the Master’s thesis of Priscille Jotzu ( 2018 ), who aims to convey future scenarios with scents. https://digitaltag.zhdk.ch/en/conference/masterclasses/masterclass-10-smell-o-topia/ (accessed 4 July 2019).

See also the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA): https://sel.fas.harvard.edu (accessed 4 July 2019).

https://blog.wiwo.de/look-at-it/2017/09/14/12-billionen-digitale-fotos-werden-allein-2017-geschossen-davon-85-prozent-per-smartphone/ (accessed 4 July 2019).

https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/309656/umfrage/prognose-zur-anzahl-der-smartphone-nutzer-weltweit/ (accessed 4 July 2019).

http://www.vejournal.org/index.php/vejournal (accessed 4 July 2019).

https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rvst20/current (accessed 8 August 2019).

http://visualsociology.org (accessed 4 July 2019).

The exhibition “Sometimes people in Luanda shine. About landmines, disability and creativity in urban landscapes,” curated by Bitten Stetter and Flurina Rothenberger, was shown March 9–16, 2015 in the Zurich Hochschule der Künste. The video “Throbosis,” which was edited by the ethnologist Sandra Gysi, can be seen at http://www.bittenstetter.com/sometimes-people-in-luanda-shine/ (accessed 30 June 2019).

Noteworthy in that regard is the work of Andrea Staudacher, who experiments in her Future Food Lab with the cultural acceptance of insects and in-vitro meat ( 2015 ). The aim is to show that social norms surrounding food can be reconsidered and reflected upon and new patterns of consumption can be explored. Staudacher wants to create awareness for the nutritional possibilities of the future. https://www.futurefoodlab.ch . accessed 17 August 2019.

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• What is Field Research: Meaning, Examples, Pros & Cons

Introduction

Field research is a method of research that deals with understanding and interpreting the social interactions of groups of people and communities by observing and dealing with people in their natural settings. 

The field research methods involve direct observation, participant observation, and qualitative interviews.

Let’s take a deeper look at field research, what it entails, some examples as well as the pros and cons of field research.

What is Field Research

Field research can be defined as a qualitative method of data collection focused on observing, relating, and understanding people while they are in their natural environment. It is somewhat similar to documentaries on Nat Geo wild where the animals are observed in their natural habitat. 

Similarly, social scientists, who are sometimes called men watchers carry out interviews and observe people from a distance to see how they act in a social environment and react to situations around them.

Field research usually begins in a specific setting and the end game is to study, observe and analyze the subject within that setting. It looks at the cause and effect as well as the correlation between the participants and their natural setting. Due to the presence of multiple variables, it is sometimes difficult to properly analyze the results of field research. 

Field research adopts a wide range of social research methods, such as limited participation, direct observation, document analysis, surveys, and informal interviews. Although field research is generally considered qualitative research , it often involves multiple elements of quantitative research.

Methods of Field Research

There are 5 different methods of conducting Field Research and they are as follows;

1. Direct Observation

In this method of research, the researcher watches and records the activities of groups of people or individuals as they go about their daily activities. Direct observation can be structured or unstructured.

 Structured here means that the observation takes place using a guide or process developed before that time. 

Unstructured, on the other hand, means that the researcher conducted the observation, watching people and events, and taking notes as events progressed, without the aid of any predetermined technique.

Some other features of direct observation include the following;

• The observer does not attempt to actively engage the people being observed in conversations or interviews, rather he or she blends into the crowd and carries out their observation.
• Data collected include field notes, videos, photographs, rating scales, etc.
• Direct observation most times occurs in the open, usually public settings, that requires no permission to gain entry. Conducting direct observation in a private setting would raise ethical concerns.
• The outcome of direct observation is not in any way influenced by the researcher.

2. Participant Observation

This research method has an understanding with a group of individuals, to take part in their daily routines and their scheduled events. In this case, the researcher dwells among the group or community being observed for as long as is necessary to build trust and evoke acceptance.

Data from the participant’s observation take the following varying forms;

• Field notes are the primary source of data. These notes are taken during the researcher’s observations and from the events they experienced and later developed the notes into formal field notes.
• A diary is used to record special intimate events that occur within the setting.
• The process of participant observation is intent on developing relationships with the members which breed conversations that are sometimes formal or informal. Formal here refers to deliberate depth interviews, while informal could stem from everyday conversations that give insight into the study. 

Data from these events can be part of the field notes or separate interview transcripts.

The method of participant observation aims to make the people involved comfortable enough to share what they know freely without any inhibition.

3. Ethnography

Ethnography is a form of field research that carries out observation through social research, social perspective, and the cultural values of a social setting. In this scenario, the observation is carried out objectively, hence the researcher may choose to live within a social environment of a cultural group and silently observe and record their daily routines and behavior.

4. Qualitative Interviews

Qualitative interviews are a type of field research method that gets information by asking direct questions from individuals to gather data on a particular subject. Qualitative interviews are usually conducted via 3 methods namely;

• Informal Interviews
• Semi Structured Interviews
• Standardized Open ended Interviews

Let’s take a look at each of them briefly along with their advantages and disadvantages.

This kind of interview is often conversational and occurs during participant and direct observations.

The interview is triggered, most times spontaneously by conversing with a member of the group on the areas of interest and as the conversation progresses, the researcher fluidly introduces the specific question.

• Semi-Structured Interviews

In this scenario, the researcher already has a list of prepared questions, that are open-ended and can evoke as much information as possible. The researcher can venture into other topics as the interview progresses, using a call-and-response style.

This method of field research can adopt a mix of one-on-one interviews or focus groups.

• Standardized, Open-Ended Interviews

These are scripted interviews with the questions prepped and written before the interview following a predetermined order. It is similar to a survey and the questions are open-ended to gather detailed information from the respondents and sometimes it involves multiple interviewers.

5. Case Study

A case study research is a detailed analysis of a person, situation, or event. This method may seem a bit complex, however, it is one of the easiest ways of conducting research. difficult to operate, however, it is one of the simplest ways of researching as it involves only a detailed study of an individual or a group of people or events. Every aspect of the subject life and history is analyzed to identify patterns and causes of behavior.

Steps to Conduct Field Research

Due to the nature of field research, the tight timelines, and the associated costs involved, planning and implementing can be a bit overwhelming. We have put together steps to adopt that would make the whole process hitch free for you.

Set Up The Right Team : To begin your field research, the first step is to have the right team. The role of the researcher and the team members has to be well defined from the start, with the relevant milestones agreed upon to measure progress.

Recruiting People for the Study : The success of field research largely depends on the people being studied. Evaluate the individuals selected for the research to be sure that they tick all the boxes required for successful research in the area of study that is being researched.

Data Collection Methodology : The methodology of data collection adopted must be suited to the area or kind of research being conducted. It could be one of the methods or a combination of two or more methods.

Visit The Site: A prior visit to the site is essential to the success of the field research. This should be done to also help determine the best methodology that would be suitable for the location. 

Data Analysis: Analyzing the data gathered is important to validate the hypothesis of the field research. 

Communicating Results : Once the data is analyzed, communicate the results to the stakeholders involved in the research so that the relevant action required based on the results can be decided and carried out promptly. 

Reasons to Conduct Field Research

Field research has been widely used in the 20th century in the social sciences. However, it can be time-consuming and costly to implement. Despite this fact, there exist a lot of reasons to conduct field research.

Here are 4 major reasons to conduct field research:

Solves the problem of lack of data : Field research fixes the issue of gaps in data, especially in cases where there is very little or no data about a topic. In cases like this, the only way to validate any hypothesis is through primary research and data. Conducting field research solves the problem of data lapses and provides material evidence to support any findings.

Understanding the context of the study : In many cases, the data collected is appropriate, however for a deep understanding of the data gathered there is a need for field research to help understand other factors in the study. For instance, if data show that students from rich homes generally do well academically. 

Conducting field research can bring to the fore other factors like, discipline, well-equipped teachers, motivation from their forebears to excel in whatever they do, etc. but field research is still conducted. 

Increasing data quality: Since this research, method employs the use of multiple tools to collect data and varying methodologies, the quality of data is higher.

Collecting ancillary data : Field research puts the researchers in a position of being at the center of the data collection process, in terms of location, one on one relationship with the participants, etc. This exposes them to new lines of thought that would have hitherto been overlooked and they can now collect data, that was not planned for at the beginning of the study.

Examples of Field Research

1. Interprete social metrics in a slum By employing the use of observation methods and formal interviews, researchers can now understand the social indicators and social hierarchy that exist in a slum.

Financial independence and the way the slum is run daily are part of the study and data collected from these areas can give insight into the way a slum operates differently from structured societies.

2. Understand the impact of sports on a child’s development This method of field research takes years to conduct and the sample size can be quite huge. Data collected and analyzed from this study provides insight into how children from different physical locations and backgrounds are influenced by sports and the impact of sporting activities on a child’s development. 

3. The study of animal migration patterns Field research is used immensely to study flora and fauna. A major use case is scientists observing and studying animal migration patterns alongside the change of seasons and its influence on animal migration patterns.

Field research takes time and uses months and sometimes years to help gather data that show how to safely expedite the passage of animals.

Advantages of Field Research

Field research and the various methodology employed have their pros and cons.

Let’s take a look at some of them.

• Provide context to the data being analyzed in terms of settings, interactions, or individuals.
• The source of data does not require or involve verbal interactions, and there is no intrusion of anyone’s personal, space because everything is done quietly, from a distance.
• The researcher develops a  deep and detailed understanding of a setting and the members within the setting.
• It is carried out in a real-world and natural environment which eliminates tampering with variables.
• The study is conducted in a comfortable environment, hence data can be gathered even about an ancillary topic, that would have been undiscovered in other circumstances.
• The researcher’s deep understanding of the research subjects due to their proximity to them makes the research thorough and precise. 
• It helps the researcher to be flexible and respond to individual differences while capturing emerging information. Allows the researcher to be responsive to individual differences and to capture emerging information.

Disadvantages of Field Research

• The researcher might not be able to capture all that is being said and there is the risk of losing information.
• The quality of the information derived is dependent, on the researcher’s skills.
• Significant interactions and events may occur when an observer is not present.
• Some topics cannot easily be interpreted by mere observation.g., attitudes, emotions, affection).
• The reliability of observations can be complex due to the presence of multiple observers with different interpretations.
• It requires a lot of time (and resources)and can take years to complete.
• The researcher may lose objectivity as they spend more time among the members of the group.
• It is a subjective and interpretive method that is solely dependent on the researcher’s ability.

Field research helps researchers to gain firsthand experience and knowledge about the events, processes, and people, being studied. No other method provides this kind of close-up view of the everyday life of people and events. It is a very detailed method of research and is excellent for understanding the role of social context in shaping the lives, perspectives, and experiences of people. Alongside this, it may uncover aspects of a person that might never have been discovered.

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Understanding Qualitative Field Work

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2. What is fieldwork?

Fieldwork is an integral part of qualitative research. Originating in anthropology and sociology, fieldwork has become a recognised method in health sciences in recent years. Fieldwork involves going into a natural setting to understand people within that context i.e. understanding people in their everyday natural setting. A field worker is comparable to a child who learns by observing and engaging in the activities within their environment.

Fieldwork can be used to gain an understanding of people's experiences within a context, how a culture works/influences health care practices and the multifaceted relationships within the work environment. For example, if you want to research how care is delivered and received in a secure mental health unit, the most reliable way to do this is to observe the environment itself and the experiences of individuals within it.

Fieldwork is not itself a research methodology, rather there several research methodologies and methods in qualitative research that utilise fieldwork. These include, but not limited to ethnography, discourse analysis and conversation analysis.

This resource will focus predominately on ethnography and observations, but many of the principles of fieldwork are universal to the other methodologies too.

Click on each title to see a definition and how fieldwork might be used to support this methodology.

Build your Research Protocol Sheet.

Ethnography

Direct Observation

Qualitative Interviews

Participant Observation

Ethnography:

Direct observation:, qualitative interview:, participant observation:, case study:, qualitative fieldwork protocol form.

This example of a Qualitative Fieldwork Protocol Form will be completed by you as you progress through this resource. You can save/print the finished form at the end.

Human Relations Area Files

Cultural information for education and research, an introduction to fieldwork and ethnography.

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Francine barone, human relations area files at yale university, ethnographic fieldwork.

Ethnographic fieldwork is how anthropologists gather data. Fieldwork is the process of immersing oneself in as many aspects of the daily cultural lives of people as possible in order to study their behaviors and interactions. Nearly any setting or location can become “the field”: a village along the Amazon river, a large corporate office in Tokyo, a small neighborhood café in Seattle, or even a social networking site like Facebook.

Fieldwork takes time. Anthropologists enter the field location much like a newborn child. They may have trouble communicating until they have learned the local language. They will likely make mistakes, and locals will find them funny or strange. It can take months or years to begin to accustom themselves to the society or community within which they will live and learn. In the fieldwork process, anthropologists eventually piece together ideas about kinship, language, religion, politics, and economic systems, which allows them to build a picture of the society.

Ethnography

Ethnography can mean two things in anthropology:

a) the qualitative research methods employed during fieldwork b) the written descriptive and interpretive results of that research

Doing ethnography

The hallmark method of ethnographic field research in anthropology is known as participant-observation . This type of data-gathering is when the anthropologist records their experiences and observations while taking part in activities alongside local participants or informants in the field site. Anthropologists also engage in informal conversations, more formal interviews, surveys, or questionnaires, and create photos, sound or video recordings, as well as conduct historical or archival research into correspondence, public records, or reports, depending on their research area. Some anthropologists use quantitative methods when analyzing their research, such as producing statistics based on their findings.

Writing ethnography

Ethnographic writing differs from other types of academic, historical, journalistic, or travel writing about peoples and places. While ethnographers may also keep a fieldwork diary containing personal notes, ethnography is much more than a recounting of daily events. Ethnography engages with the theoretical foundations of anthropology and is written with cultural contextualization in mind, speaking to anthropology as a discipline as well as furnishing greater understanding of the cultural world that has been explored. The aim of ethnographic writing is to produce work that contributes to, and advances, the comparative interpretation of human cultures and societies.

An insider’s view

Ethnography is a collaborative effort between the ethnographer and their research participants. Anthropologists have ethical codes that guide their behavior in the field as they rely on relationships with others in order to conduct their research. In the ethnographic process, informants or key participants can help to induct the ethnographer into the society and explain its customs and ways.

Traditionally, anthropologists have attempted to arrive at an emic perspective or “insider’s point of view”. In other words, ethnographers wish to understand the structures, categories, and patterns of behavior as conceptualized by members of the culture they are studying. This is contrasted with etic models, which are analyses of cultural meaning as seen from the “outside” by an objective observer. This uneasy simplification of emic vs. etic gets at the heart of the paradox of doing ethnography: what people say they do, what they say they should do, and what they actually do, rarely – if ever – coincide.

Anthropologists today are increasingly aware of their own views and biases that they carry with them into the field from their home cultures, acknowledging wherever possible how this affects their methods and findings. Despite all of the best intentions, any practicing fieldworker can tell you that fieldwork is, at best, unpredictable. A reflexive approach to ethnography acknowledges that no researcher can be 100% objective, and that fieldwork constitutes an ongoing dialogue of consent and mutual respect between participants and the ethnographer.

Workbook Activity 1: The Fieldwork Experience

Read the following passages in eHRAF World Cultures that describe different aspects of fieldwork and conducting ethnography. Then, answer the questions.

Malinowski (1922) – Argonauts of the Western Pacific , Chapter 1, Section VII, pages 17-21 on participant-observation  

• What is “the imponderabilia of actual life”?
• How does Malinowski suggest that ethnographers should observe and record this imponderabilia during fieldwork?
• According to Malinowski, why is it good for the ethnographer to sometimes put aside their notebook and camera?

Stross (1971) – Aspects of Language Acquisition by Tzeltal Children , “Appendix B: The Fieldwork”, pages 201-202 on data collection in the field  

• List the kinds of research methods that the ethnographer used during fieldwork.
• How did he familiarize himself with the field location?
• Describe the relationship(s) that the ethnographer had with informants.
• What unexpected problems did the ethnographer run into? How were they resolved?

  Textor (1973) – Roster of the Gods , Appendix One, pages 855-858 on working with key informants

• Describe the relationship between the ethnographer and his informants.
• How critical were the informants to completing the ethnographic research?
• Do you think that learning the local language is essential for doing fieldwork?

Landsman (1988) – Sovereignty and Symbol , pages 7-8 on taking notes with informants

• How did the emotions of informants/research participants impact the ethnographer’s fieldnotes?
• How were historical, archival, print, and photographic materials utilized in their study? How did informants assist with this?
• How critical do you think informants are to conducting ethnographic research?

  Hill (1972) – Rural Hausa: A Village and Setting , page 148 on the anatomy of poverty

• What do you think the author means by “the poor are usually unobserved”?
• Are there some types of insights that are difficult or impossible to ascertain through participant-observation? Why might this be the case?
• How do you think anthropologists should deal with sensitive information or vulnerable members of a culture?

Workbook Activity 2: Thinking Ethnographically

How would you observe the following cultural practices ethnographically?

• Shopping in a bookstore
• Traveling by public transportation
• Ordering takeout from your favorite restaurant
• Having coffee with friends at Starbucks

Choose one of these or select your own scenario. Write a brief ethnographic account of everyday events. Consider methods such as participant-observation, interviews, surveys, and engaging with informants. If you are unable to participate in these activities face-to-face, simply try and imagine how you would describe them to an outsider not familiar with your culture.

Begin by recording your “field notes”, keeping track of everything that you see and do, and what you observe others saying and doing.

Then, describe what’s happening from both emic and etic perspectives.

For the emic perspective , consider the activity you are engaged in and how it is viewed in your own culture. What are the established “rules” or patterns of each interaction that make up the scene you have chosen?

• For example, at a café, you might find that one of your friends buys coffee for the entire group, which is fairly typical among friends. If asked why they have done so, the buyer may simply reply that “it’s a nice thing to do”, and indicate that someone else would pay next time.

For the etic perspective , look beyond your notes and step outside your own cultural expectations. What over-arching structures, symbols, or meaning are at play in this setting?

• For example, why do you think people really take turns buying rounds of drinks? What happens if one person never pays for the coffee? Due to the fact that such a person would not be considered a good friend, an etic analysis might find that coffee exchange is meaningful for building and sustaining friendship rather than being about money.

Hill, Polly. 1972. Rural Hausa: A Village and Setting. Cambridge, England: University Press. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=ms12-018 .

Landsman, Gail H. 1988. Sovereignty and Symbol: Indian-White Conflict at Ganienkeh. Albuquerque, N.Mex.: University of New Mexico Press. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=nm09-058

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=ol06-001 .

Stross, Brian. 1971. Aspects of Language Acquisition by Tzeltal Children. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=nv09-010 .

Textor, Robert B. 1973. “Roster of the Gods: An Ethnography of the Supernatural in a Thai Village.” In Ethnography Series, 3, 44, 911 leaves. New Haven, Conn.: Human Relations Area Files. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=ao07-011 .

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3.3: Fieldwork Methods

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In anthropology there are several types of fieldwork methods that are used while conducting research. Below we will go more into depth with several fieldwork methods that are used.

Observational Methods

The observational method is viewed as the least invasive method where the anthropologist minimally integrates themselves into the society they are studying and gathers data through verbal communication while attempting to remain non-intrusive of the culture.

This group of methods focuses on community interaction through language. It usually entails many open ended interviews with participants who are members of a group being studied. The researcher strives to learn as much as they can about the history of the community as well as the individuals within it in order to gain a full understanding of how their culture functions. Interviews can take place individually or with focus groups within the community based on age, status, gender, and other factors that contribute to differences within the community.

This type of research often strives to create an open dialogue, called a dialectic, in which information flows back and forth between researcher and subject. Think of this situation as a conversation between two people about homework or an upcoming exam. This dialectic poses a challenge to the objectivity of socially produced data. The challenge is dealt with through reflection on the inter-subjective creation of meaning. This leads anthropologists to value reflexive abilities in their ethnographic writing. Because many anthropologists also hope to help the communities they work with to make change on their own terms within the confines of their own culture, in some cases objectivity is abandoned in favor of community based activism and social change.

Participant Observation

Participant observation is a method for anthropological Fieldwork, used to collect data such that the anthropologist must create an intimate relationship between themselves and the culture studied. This method requires that an anthropologist participate in a social event that is part of a specific culture. This includes, but is not limited to, observing members of a culture by taking notes, eating the food that is provided, and participating in festivities. The goal of participant observation is to be involved in the culture like a member of that society, all while observing and studying the culture. An example of participation observation would be if an anthropologist went to a Native American Tribal gathering and took notes on the energy and traditions they were being shown. This anthropologist could participate in things like face painting or songs, and eat the food that the Natives eat. The information gathered in this observation is then recorded and reflected upon to gain further insight into the culture being studied. This observation method helps the anthropologist develop a deeper rapport with the people of the culture and can help others understand their culture further. This experience may result in the individuals opening up more to the anthropologist which allows them to understand more than an etic point of view of the culture.

Non-Participant Observation

In contrast to participant observation, non-participant observation is the anthropological method of collecting data by entering within a community but with limited interaction with the people within the culture. This anthropologist can be thought of as a fly on the wall. An etic approach that researchers often use to examine the details of how the subjects interact with one another and the environment around them. Detailed research such as body behavior (e.g. eye gaze, facial expression), speech styles (e.g. pitch) can be recorded through the nonparticipant method, but usually the emic approach is preferred when observing social context. An example of data collected through non-participant research would be the an estimation of how often women in a household wear high heels due to how worn out the carpet is.

The non-participant observation, although effective in providing some research, has limitations. One being, the observer affect. This is caused by the presence of the researcher having an influence over the participants' actions. The researcher may use systematic approaches of field notes, sampling and data to ensure and increase comfortable interactions. While using the non-participant observation method, the researcher's opinions may oppose that of the participant's on a certain issue. The only solution to this problem and to have a fuller and unbiased take on the research is to use both non-participant and participant method.

Ethnographic Method

Cultural data assumes the form of directly observable material items, individual behaviors, performances, ideas and arrangements that exist only in people's heads. From the perspective of the culture concept, anthropologists must first treat all these elements as symbols within a coherent system and must record observations with attention to the cultural context and the meanings assigned by the culture's practitioners. These demands are met through two major research techniques: participant observation and key informant interviewing.

After the initial orientation or entry period, which may take 3 months or longer, the researcher follows a more systematic program of formal interviews involving questions related to research hypotheses and specialized topics. Several different methods of selecting informants are possible. Usually, a few key informants are selected for in-depth sessions, since the investigation of cultural patterns usually calls for lengthy and repeated open-ended interviews. Selection of such a small number does not allow for strict assurance of a representative sample, so the anthropologist must be careful to choose subjects who are well informed and reliable. Ethnographic researchers will also train informants to systematically report cultural data and recognize significant cultural elements and interconnections as the interview sequences unfold.

Key informant selection is known as judgment sampling and is particularly important for the kind of qualitative research that characterizes ethnography. Anthropologists will very frequently also need to carry out quantitative research from which statistically validated inferences can be drawn. Accordingly, they must construct an either larger random sample or a total population census for more narrowly focused interviewing according to a closed questionnaire design. Other important quantitative data might include direct measurement of such items as farm size, crop yield, daily caloric intake, or even blood pressure, depending on the anthropologist's research focus. Aside from written observation and records, researchers will often provide ethnographic representations in other forms, such as collected artifacts, photographs, tape recordings, films, and videos.

Comparative Method

Since the beginning of anthropological studies, the Comparative Method has been a way to allow a systematic comparison of information and data from multiple sources. It is a common approach for testing multiple hypotheses on subjects including co-evolution of cultures, the adaptation of cultural practices to the environment, and kinship terms in local languages from around the world. The comparative method, may seem like an outdated form of fieldwork information gathering, however this method is still quite prevalent in modern day anthropological research. The use of this form of information gathering is intended to compare globalization, which uses a version of this method called multi-sited Ethnography by participant observation gathered from many different social settings. Another form of the comparative research method is shown through the Human Relations Area Files, which collects and organizes ethnographic texts from hundreds of societies all over the world. These files cover topics ranging from types of kinship systems, to trading practices found in all of human culture.

Anthropologists Ruth Mace--an anthropologist who specializes in evolutionary ecology--and Mark Pagel explore the comparative method of anthropological research in their article The Comparative Method in Anthropology . They explain how in the past decade there have been many expansions in other branches of anthropology, including cultural diversity as a scientific endeavor. This is when the comparative method is used by those interested in cultural evolution and by those who study other human sciences. However, "cultures cannot be treated as independent for purposes of investigating cross culture trends," therefore they must instead be studied in relation to one another: How two or more cultures grow together, or how they are researched together has the ability to outline the entire premise of the comparative method. Having been used for hundreds of years, this method is still one of the main forms of research for anthropologists all over the world.

Reflexivity

Reflexivity is the awareness of the researcher of the effect they may be having on the research. It involves a constant awareness and assessment of the researcher's own contribution to and influence on the researcher's subjects and their findings. This principle was perhaps first thought of by William Thomas, as the "Thomas Theorem". Fieldwork in cultural anthropology is a reflexive experience. Anthropologists must constantly be aware that the information they are gathering may be skewed by their ethical opinions, or political standings. Even an anthropologists' presence in that culture can affect the results they receive. Reflexive fieldwork must retain a respect for detailed, accurate information gathering while also paying precise attention to the ethical and political context of research, the background of the researchers, and the full cooperation of informants. In our everyday lives reflexivity is used to better understand ourselves by comparing our culture to others. For example, when someone talks about their religion, you may immediately disagree with specific aspects of their religion because you have not grown up believing it as they have. By being reflexive, one would be able to recognize their bias. Some anthropologists have taken this method to the extreme, Margaret Wilson, for example, wrote her book 'Dance Lest We all Fall Down' in a reflexive biographical manner; this accounted for her inability to fully integrate into Brazilian society. [2]

Intersubjectivity

Intersubjectivity is the realization that knowledge about other people emerges out of people's relationships with and perceptions of each other. The concept was first introduced by the principal founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, and creates a "theoretical frame for thinking about the ways in which humans interpret, organize, and reproduce particular forms of social life and social cognition". Intersubjectivity is defined by five key principles. The first is that intersubjectivity is not limited to the concept of matching one's mental state with another’s mental state. Instead of a one-way transaction, intersubjectivity should be seen more as a type of mutual understanding. The second claim of Husserl's dissertation is that intersubjectivity is founded on the principle that we all share the same world, so that if two individuals were to "trade places", it would be present itself in the same way. Through empathetic insight, human beings achieve Platzwechsel , which is a term used in chess to mean "place exchange". The third claim is that intersubjectivity creates a synthesis of worldviews through the usage of empathy. Although there may be different perspectives in the relationship presented, the collective world is assumed to be the same through the bilateral insight of shared knowledge. The fourth claim is that intersubjectivity must precede meaningful interaction, as well as " The possibility of reflection on the self, discovery of the ego, capacity for performing any epoché, and the possibility of all communication and of establishing a communicative surrounding world as well". In other words, intersubjectivity is not the result of communication, instead it is the condition required for it to occur. Finally, the fifth claim is that intersubjectivity is the principle by which anthropologists must view their work. In order to properly create an account of a group of people, one must develop relationships with others and deduce perceptions through experience.

Participatory Action Research

This specific method requires a community commitment to change. It occurs in five steps:

• Education on the Process or Creating a Dialogue
• Collective Investigation
• Collective Interpretation
• Collective Action
• Transformation: Self-Determination and Empowerment

Because of the intrinsic qualities of this type of research (ideally being conducted by people with close ties or membership of a community), it is usually very applicable to situations in the community. The research is an analysis of the community's behavior by the community's members. Not only are they by necessity, motivated to work on the problem, but they will already have significant rapport with other community members which allows them to better address and analyze it. The dynamic attributes of the process allow constant reevaluation and change. This cyclic or regularly repeated tendencies can develop into healthy adaptation patterns in the community without outside contributions or aid.

Triangulation Method

The triangulation method is the "combination of methodologies in the study of the same phenomenon". [3] It is used to investigate a single topic through individual perspectives or multiple methodologies. It is usually the preferred way to research because it can combine all methods of researching to get the best results. It uses qualitative and quantitative practices together. The qualitative practice gives the triangulation method its inquiry results. The quantitative practice gives it the validation results. It combines a scientific approach with an observational approach. According to the Administrative Science Quarterly, it is a "vehicle for cross-validation when two or more distinct methods are found to be congruent and yield comparable data". [4] The foundation of triangulation relies on one form of research being weak and the other form stepping up to make up for it. Relying on one form of research can create a bias. The general problem with measurement data, is the individual or group being researched tends to tell you what you want to hear instead of the full truth. Triangulation helps prevent bias by giving the researcher the opportunity to participate in individual, self-reported and observational methods with those being researched. Sampling bias generally means that the researcher doesn't have time to cover the entire group they are focusing on. Or they focus on what they think the important parts of a society are and don't study the less important aspects. Triangulation can combine phone research, face-to-face interviews, and online surveys to ensure that the researcher is getting the most accurate results. In all, the triangulation method for fieldwork can combine all aspects of research to create the most accurate and detailed results, taking different perspectives and various sources to culminate into the most accurate model or a culture.

The Integrity of Psychological Research: Uncovering Statistical Reporting Inconsistencies

• Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science
• Statistical Analysis

Accurate reporting in psychological science is vital for ensuring reliable results. Are there statistical inconsistencies in scientific articles?  

In this episode, APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum speaks with Michele Nuijten from Tilburg University to examine how overlooked errors in statistical reporting can undermine the credibility of research findings. Together, they discuss Nuijten’s research published in Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science and examine practical strategies to enhance the quality of psychological research. 

Send us your thoughts and questions at [email protected]  

Unedited transcript

[00:00:10.160] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum  

Statistical reporting is a core part of writing scholarly articles. Many conclusions in scientific reports rely on null hypothesis significance testing, making accurate reporting essential for robust findings. What if there are inconsistencies in academic journals? How would it affect our field? If we cannot trust the numbers reported, the reliability of the conclusions is at stake. I am Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum with the Association for Psychological Science. Today, I have the pleasure of talking to Michele Nuijten from the Tilburg University. Michele recently published an article on Statistical Reporting Inconsistencies in APS’s Journal: Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. Join us as we explore the impact of these inconsistencies and discuss potential solutions to enhance the credibility of psychological research. Michele, welcome to Under the Cortex. 

[00:01:09.810] – Michele Nuijten  

Thank you very much. I’m honored to be here. 

[00:01:12.520] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum  

Please tell us about yourself first. What type of psychologist are you? 

[00:01:17.420] – Michele Nuijten  

I guess you could classify me as a methodologist. I have a background in psychological methods. That is what I studied. But right now, I think I would call myself a meta-scientist, so someone who researchers’ research. I’m really focusing on trying to detect problems in the way that we do science in psychology and related fields. If I uncover any issues, to also think about pragmatic solutions to make sure that we can move forward in our field in a better and more solid way. 

[00:01:49.360] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum  

Yeah, that is fantastic. How did you first get interested in becoming a meta researcher and studying statistical inconsistencies? 

[00:01:59.980] – Michele Nuijten  

It’s actually quite some time ago now. I was still in my master’s program, which is over 10 years ago now, I think. I was a master student in a very interesting time, I think, around 2011, 2012, which is also often marked as the start of the replication crisis, as it’s often called in psychology. We had the massive fraud case of Diederik Stapel, who, coincidentally, was a researcher at the university I’m working now. But there was also an article that seemingly proved that we could look into the future. That was the article that proved that if you have so much flexibility in data analysis, you can inflate your type 1 error to 50%. A lot of these things were happening. Around that time, I also got interested in reporting inconsistencies, mainly out of a more technical interest, I guess. People around me were working on these inconsistencies. Together with a friend, Sacha Epskamp, we thought, Well, this seems like a problem that you can automate. Maybe we can write a program to help us detect problems in articles. 

[00:03:06.220] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum  

Yeah, I will come to that. But it is interesting that we are contemporary. During that replication crisis, I was in grad school as well. I was a senior graduate student then. Us also had some replication problems in my field in developmental side. I totally hear you. I’m glad it created a research program for you. Now we have a tool called called statcheck. Can you tell our listeners what it is? 

[00:03:34.480] – Michele Nuijten  

I think the easiest way to explain what Stat Check is is to compare it to a spell checker for statistics. Instead of finding typos in your words, you find typos in your statistical results. What it does is it takes an article, it searches through the text for, as you mentioned, null hypothesis significance tests, so effectively tests with P values, and it tries to use the numbers to recalculate that P value. An equivalent would be if you would write down 2 plus 4 equals 5, then you know when you read that, that something is off, like these numbers don’t match up. Stat Checkdoes a similar thing. It searches for these test results, which often consists of a test statistic, degrees of freedom, and a P-Value. It uses two of these numbers, the test statistic and the degrees of freedom, to recalculate the P-Value and then see if these numbers match or not. 

[00:04:29.850] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum  

Yeah. This is an important tool because what I read from your study is that before Stat Check, your earlier work shows about 50% of articles with statistical results contained at least one P-value that didn’t match what the test statistic and the degrees of freedom would indicate it should be. How did you first notice there were problems in statistical reporting? 

[00:04:56.250] – Michele Nuijten  

This was actually a project that some of my colleagues were working on at the time, back when I was still a student, so my colleagues Marion Bacher and Jelte Wicherts, who are, incidentally, my colleagues still now at a different university, they noticed that one high-profile paper contained such inconsistency. They noticed just by looking at the numbers like, Hey, something doesn’t add up here. When they went through this particular paper, they thought, Well, if such a high-profile paper published in a high-quality journal already has some of these just visible errors in it, How much does this occur in the general literature? They actually went to the painstaking process of going through, I think, over a thousand P values by hand to see how often this occurred. When I and my friend saw that this was such a painstaking process, and ironically, also an error-prone process. You can imagine if you have to do this by hand, then we thought, Well, this seems like a thing that you can automate. That’s how we got on this path of looking at reporting inconsistencies in statistics. 

[00:06:04.350] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum  

Yeah, let’s talk about how it works then. I have this tool. Could you describe our listeners? What are the steps? We go to this website, and then what happens? 

[00:06:16.110] – Michele Nuijten  

Well, for the side of the user, it’s very straightforward. You go to the web application, which is called statcheck.io. There’s literally one button you can click on. The button is upload your paper. You upload a paper in a Word format or HTML or PDF. Nothing gets saved in the back-end. It only gets scanned by Stat Check, and you get back a nice table with all the results that Stat Checkwas able to find and a list of whether or not it was flagged as consistent. 

[00:06:49.010] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum  

In your work, you must have seen a lot of examples. What are some of the worst examples that you saw? 

[00:06:57.330] – Michele Nuijten  

Yeah, that’s a difficult question because Stat Check, in a way, it’s not an AI or something. It merely just looks at numbers and says, Well, these numbers don’t appear to add up. What it does is it recalculates the P-value because we had to choose a number to recalculate calculate, and given the enormous focus on P values in our field, that seemed like the most logical choice. But just as with my earlier example, if you say 2 plus 4 equals 5, the 5 could be incorrect, but the 2 or the 4 could also be incorrect. You don’t know. This also means that sometimes Stat Check flags an inconsistency where the reported P value is smaller than 0.001, but the recomputed P value is 0.80 or something. Which might look like a blatant error and a really dramatic difference. But it could be the case that there is a typo in the test statistic. For instance, if you write down that your T-value is 1.5, but you meant 10.5, it’s only a typo, but it seems as if it would have huge influence on your results. Those type of inconsistencies look dramatic, but might not be. At the other side, you also have types of errors that might, at first glance, seem inconsequential that might have big consequences. 

[00:08:21.260] – Michele Nuijten  

For instance, we have a lot of focus on this P must be smaller than 0.05 criterion to decide whether something is statistically significant. I do sometimes come across cases where the reported P-value is smaller than 0.05, and if I recompute it, it’s 0.06. In absolute terms, this is a very small difference, and you could argue that the statistical evidence that this P-value represents does not differ much. But I think it could signal a bigger underlying problem that people might round down P-values in order to increase their chances to get published. This is something that Stat Check cannot tell you. It only flags these numbers don’t seem to add up. It’s very hard to pinpoint what exactly the reason is. But with these particular types of inconsistencies, I do get a little bit suspicious, like what might What is going on here? 

[00:09:17.050] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum  

Yeah. One of the other things I noticed in your report is that there are a few articles that could be 100% wrong in a way that up to 100% of the reported results are inconsistent. How do you think that happens? 

[00:09:36.440] – Michele Nuijten  

Yeah, this signals a problem, or not really a problem, but a difficulty in reporting such prevalence of inconsistencies. Because at what level do you display this? The problem is that different articles have a different number of P-values they report. Sometimes articles only report one P-value. If they report it incorrectly, then they have a 100% inconsistency rate. But it could also be the case that people report 100 P values and 10 of them are wrong. The inconsistency rate would be different, but which one is worse? In absolute sense, you have more errors than the other, but yet you can also argue, Well, if you report a lot of P values, it’s easier to make at least one mistake. It’s hard to come up with a summarizing statistic that fairly reflects what is going on. Yeah. 

[00:10:30.580] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum  

Why did you decide to try to fix it in our field? 

[00:10:36.920] – Michele Nuijten  

It seems like such low-hanging fruit. I mean, it’s an issue that technically could be spotted by anyone. It’s just in the paper. It’s right there. Peer reviewers could spot it, but it turns out that they don’t, which makes a lot of sense as well, because we are all very busy. We’re often not that trained in statistics, especially not seeing inconsistencies with the naked eye. But I do think these type of errors or inconsistencies are important because, as you also mentioned at the start, if you cannot trust the numbers that a conclusion is based on, how can you trust the conclusion is correct at all? I think this type of reproducibility, I would call this. If I have the same data and I do the same analysis, I should get the same results. If you spot If I have an inconsistency in a paper, I can already tell you that that result is not reproducible. I cannot get to an inconsistent result based on your raw data. It’s very hard to judge to what extent the data is then trustworthy or the conclusions are It’s worth it. There’s quite a lot of issues going on right now in psychology, things that have been flagged as potential problems. 

[00:11:53.130] – Michele Nuijten  

I think this seems like one of the easiest things that we can solve. If we have a spell checker like this and we can just quickly We quickly run our manuscript through it before we submit it, we save both ourselves and the readers and the editors and everyone involved a lot of pain if we just managed to get out these errors beforehand and we don’t have to get into this annoying world of issuing corrections or just leaving the errors in there. 

[00:12:20.130] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum  

I’m really glad you said it is like spell check because I wrote down grammar check for statistical reports. This is what the tool does. Now, do you think journal editors use it or are they allowed to use it? 

[00:12:34.750] – Michele Nuijten  

It’s completely free and everyone is allowed to use it. I would encourage everyone to use it. It’s an R package underneath it. You can use the R package if you have research intentions, if you want to have larger sets of articles to scan. But if you just want to scan a single paper, go to the web app, go through it. It’s free. Within a second, you have your results. I would definitely encourage editors to use it. There are a few that do. For instance, psychological science, if we’re talking about APS journals. I’m not sure, but I think maybe Amps also mentioned something about it. I don’t have a curated list. People or editors that start using Stat Check usually don’t notify me. By the way, if you are an editor interested in using it, feel free to notify me or ask for help. I’m more than happy to assist in any way I can. But I think It’s a great use of the tool. 

[00:13:31.670] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum  

Yeah, that’s exactly why I’m asking it, to encourage people that they should use it. It is not AI. I’m glad you clarified that point. It is just a check. If we do grammar check or spelling check for text, we should be able to do it for numbers. This is a great tool that everybody can use and it is free. Let’s take a step back. What was the process of making stat check like? How long did it What was your team like? 

[00:14:03.470] – Michele Nuijten  

Well, I don’t think there will ever be an ending to this. It’s an ongoing project. I’ve been working on this for 10 years now. But I think the initial framework was set up in… Well, I think as it goes with tools like this, the first version is usually done within a day or within an hour by someone. In this case, Sasha Epskamp was the person who developed the first version of Stat Check. After that, I ran with it for the next 10 years to develop it further. There have been many, many updates, mainly behind the scenes. I learned a lot about software development in the process. I learned about unit testing. I learned about best practices on how to use GitHub and branches and all these terms that were new to me. That was a lot of fun to do. During the years, I’ve had many people contributing interesting ideas of people writing code for me. But mainly, I’ve kept it quite close because sometimes tools like this that point out mistakes feel a bit tricky. I have very I very much want to present Stat Check as something that can help improve everybody’s work as something that you can use yourself. 

[00:15:23.240] – Michele Nuijten  

Sometimes people don’t always see it like that. I’m a bit afraid to give it away to have more people develop to develop on it because I’m afraid that maybe mistakes will be introduced. This is a very big pitfall of mine. I really need to learn to let go and invite more people to work on it, especially because I think that many people will be a lot better at it than I am. But this is one of the things I’ve been struggling with a little bit. 

[00:15:52.630] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum  

Yeah, but it’s your baby. 

[00:15:54.580] – Michele Nuijten  

I know, yeah. 

[00:15:55.780] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum  

You want it to work better and better every single day. No, this is a great resource for everyone involved in our field. Thank you for all the hard work you put into that. Michele, is there anything else that you would like to share with our listeners? 

[00:16:16.370] – Michele Nuijten  

I think more in general about just improving practices in our field, because I think what I really like about Stat Checkand about the type of projects I usually take is I try to focus on things that are pragmatic, that are small steps towards a better science. I sometimes feel like it can be a bit overwhelming. The good news is there are so many initiatives to improve our field. I can imagine that, especially if you’re an early career researcher, that you don’t know where to start. I think that with these small tools like Stat Check, but many other initiatives are similar, just cherry-pick your favorite. Try one, see what happens. I think Christina Bergman calls this the buffet approach. You have this entire table full of open science practices, but you cannot eat them all at once. Just take some samples, try some stuff out, see what works for you and your paper, and in that way, get involved with the new developments. 

[00:17:26.150] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum  

Yeah. Thank you very much, Michele. This was a pleasure. Thank Thank you so much for joining Under the Cortex. 

[00:17:33.090] – Michele Nuijten  

Thank you for having me. 

[00:17:34.790] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum  

This is Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum with APS, and I have been speaking to Michele Nuijten from the Tilburg University. If you want to know more about this research, visit psychologicalscience.org. 

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Methods: How to Do Data Visualization Using R—Even If You Don’t Use R

Read about the advantages of using the programming language R in data processing and statistical analysis.

NSF Grant Submission Deadlines

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It Doesn’t Take a Scientist To See Through Implausible Research

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• Published: 22 August 2024

Time-of-day effects of cancer drugs revealed by high-throughput deep phenotyping

• Carolin Ector 1 , 2 ,
• Christoph Schmal 3 ,
• Jeff Didier   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0002-4825-423X 4 ,
• Sébastien De Landtsheer   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5421-2338 4 ,
• Anna-Marie Finger   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9148-4490 5   nAff9 ,
• Francesca Müller-Marquardt 1   nAff10 ,
• Johannes H. Schulte   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0671-1201 6   nAff11 ,
• Thomas Sauter   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8225-2954 4 ,
• Ulrich Keilholz 1 , 7 ,
• Hanspeter Herzel 3 , 8 ,
• Achim Kramer   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9671-6078 5 &
• Adrián E. Granada   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0537-9091 1 , 7  

Nature Communications volume  15 , Article number:  7205 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

Metrics details

• Chemotherapy
• Circadian rhythms
• High-throughput screening

The circadian clock, a fundamental biological regulator, governs essential cellular processes in health and disease. Circadian-based therapeutic strategies are increasingly gaining recognition as promising avenues. Aligning drug administration with the circadian rhythm can enhance treatment efficacy and minimize side effects. Yet, uncovering the optimal treatment timings remains challenging, limiting their widespread adoption. In this work, we introduce a high-throughput approach integrating live-imaging and data analysis techniques to deep-phenotype cancer cell models, evaluating their circadian rhythms, growth, and drug responses. We devise a streamlined process for profiling drug sensitivities across different times of the day, identifying optimal treatment windows and responsive cell types and drug combinations. Finally, we implement multiple computational tools to uncover cellular and genetic factors shaping time-of-day drug sensitivity. Our versatile approach is adaptable to various biological models, facilitating its broad application and relevance. Ultimately, this research leverages circadian rhythms to optimize anti-cancer drug treatments, promising improved outcomes and transformative treatment strategies.

Introduction

The circadian clock is a central regulator of multiple physiological and behavioral processes found in cyanobacteria, plants, fungi, and animals. In mammals, the hierarchical organization of the circadian system ensures coordinated biological rhythms from the level of the individual cell to the whole organism level 1 . Primate and mouse studies showed that protein-coding genes are rhythmically expressed in a tissue-specific by up to 80% and 40%, respectively 2 , 3 . These clock-controlled genes regulate key biological processes such as metabolism 4 , 5 , cell proliferation 6 , immune response 7 , DNA repair, and apoptosis 8 .

Disruption of the circadian system is classified as a carcinogen and is associated with multiple cancer subtypes 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 . Cancer hallmarks such as sustained proliferation and metastasis 13 , 14 have been linked to the circadian clock 15 , 16 and patients with mutations in circadian clock genes exhibit lower survival rates 17 , 18 , 19 . Beyond its role in cancer development, the circadian clock directly interacts with therapeutic targets that affect drug responses 19 , 20 , 21 . Consistent with these observations, recent works have shown that administration of chemotherapeutic agents aligned with the circadian rhythm changes their degree of efficacy throughout the day 20 , 22 , 23 , 24 . Despite the broad recognition of the benefits of circadian-based drug treatments 22 , 25 , 26 , an efficient strategy to identify optimal treatment times remains elusive, creating a bottleneck in the implementation. In addition, the mechanisms shaping time-of-day (ToD) sensitivity profiles remain widely unknown.

Here, we introduce a method for the thorough characterization of time-of-day responses in tumor and healthy tissue cell models (Fig.  1 ). Using an array of experimental and data analysis methods we perform a deep-phenotyping of the critical cellular factors underlying time-of-day responses, i.e., the circadian clock strength, growth dynamics and drug response features. We then deploy a high-throughput strategy to obtain ToD profiles in a panel of drugs and cell line models. Comparing tumor versus non-tumor ToD profiles provides candidate treatment timings to increase efficacy and reduce toxicity. We subsequently integrate our dataset with publicly available gene-expression databases to rigorously address three fundamental questions in the field of circadian pharmacology, known as chronopharmacology. These questions are: (A) What is the optimal time of day for drug treatment? (B) Which cell subtype benefits the most from circadian-aligned drug treatment? and (C) How do cellular features shape time-of-day profiles? Finally, we define a chronotherapeutic index, ranking cellular models and drug agents that stand to gain the most benefit from circadian-based treatments.

Schematic of the experimental and computational framework to thoroughly characterize time-of-day drug responses in a variety of cell subtypes, such as cancer and non-malignant cell models. A combination of live recordings is implemented for the deep phenotyping of circadian strength, growth dynamics, and drug responses that shape time-of-day profiles. Using a novel streamlined experimental approach, time-of-day sensitivity profiles are obtained in tumor and non-malignant cell models, providing best and worst timings for increased efficacy and reduced toxicity (top panel). A tandem computational pipeline integrates the deep phenotyping metrics as well as gene expression data of circadian clock genes to quantitatively address three fundamental questions in chronopharmacology (bottom panel). Combining multiple signatures, we define a chronotherapeutic index, ranking cellular models and drug agents by their size-effect gains from drug treatments aligned with the circadian clock (bottom right panel).

Deep circadian phenotyping in cancer cell models

Despite the increasing recognition of the role of the circadian clock in cancer progression and treatment response, the extent to which different cancer subtypes maintain circadian rhythmicity remains poorly understood. To address this and quantitatively characterize the degree of rhythmicity of cancer cell models, we implement an approach that integrates recordings of circadian clock activity with comprehensive time-series analysis techniques, as depicted in Fig.  2a . To robustly characterize the circadian clock molecular network, we monitored the positive and negative feedback arms of the molecular clock using a combination of two circadian luciferase reporters for Bmal1 and Per2 (Fig.  2b ). In Fig.  2c we show representative raw luciferase signals from the breast cancer cell line MDAMB468 and the corresponding detrended and normalized signals 27 . As expected for a robust functional clock network, Bmal1 and Per2 signals show stable anti-phasic expression patterns throughout the recording (Fig.  2c and Supplementary Fig.  1a, b ).

a Schematic of the deep circadian phenotyping approach. b Simplified circadian feedback loops involving Bmal1 and Per2 . c Raw and processed signals from MDAMB468- Bmal1 / Per2 -Luc cells. d Example of autocorrelation (AC) analysis. The arrow indicates 2 nd peak and abscissa (lag). Dashed lines = 95% CI. e Boxplot of AC values and ( f ) lags of signals from various cell models. g Wavelet power spectrum (bottom) from continuous wavelet transform (CWT) showing time-resolved periods of detrended-amplitude-normalized signals from MDAMB468- Bmal1 -Luc cells (top). Red line = main oscillatory component (ridge). h Boxplot of CWT ridge lengths from various cell models. Box bounds in ( e , f , h ) are defined by the 25 th and 75 th percentiles. Extending whiskers represent data points within 1.5 times the interquartile range from lower and upper quartiles. Red lines and crosses denote the median and outliers, respectively. n  = 12 samples, collected from Bmal1 -/ Per2 -reporters, with 6 samples per reporter ( n  = 2 biological replicates á technical triplicates or duplicates [HCC1806 Per2 -Luc]). n  = 6 for U-2 OS KO-lines ( Bmal1 -Luc-only) and MCF10A (single experiment). n  = 9 for MDAMB468 ( Per2 -Luc: single experiment). n  = 17 for SH-SY5Y (biological triplicates with technical triplicates or duplicates). i Multiresolution analysis (MRA) of detrended MDAMB468- Bmal1 -Luc signal. % = fraction to signal. j Scatterplot of normalized MRA noise versus circadianicity components from the indicated cell models. The shaded area covers an unattainable range. Data represents the mean ± s.d. of multiple samples per reporter cell line (see above). k Bar diagram ranking cell models by global circadian strength, integrating min-max scaled parameters from AC (peak), CWT (ridge), and MRA (circadianicity) for Bmal1 -Luc and, where applicable, Per2 -Luc signals. Data represents mean ± s.d of scaled parameters ( n  = 6, except U-2 OS knockouts where n  = 3 parameters). Only the positive s.d. is shown. Color coding in ( b – I , k ) corresponds to Bmal1 (yellow) and Per2 (blue) reporters. Color coding of cell models in ( e , f, h , j , k ) corresponds to tissue origin. One-way ANOVA and Tukey’s post-hoc test compared U-2 OS WT and KO cell lines, where **, ***, and **** indicate p -values of 5.7 × 10 −3 , 4.8 × 10 −4 and ≤ 0.0001, respectively. n.s. = non-significant. Source data for ( c – k ) are provided as a Source Data file.

Circadian clock strength varies in cancer and healthy cell models

Following the acquisition of Bmal1 and Per2 expression dynamics, we conducted a comprehensive circadian phenotyping of the signals. To accurately capture different aspects of the circadian clock dynamics, we implemented a strategy that integrates three complementary time-series analysis techniques, i.e., autocorrelation (AC), continuous wavelet transform (CWT), and multiresolution analysis (MRA). The rationale behind using this complementary analysis is to harness the strengths of each technique; AC for identifying stable temporal features, CWT for revealing time-dependent amplitude and period changes, and MRA for extracting multi-scale features, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the signal dynamics. Using this approach we screened a broad panel of cell models, including non-malignant breast epithelial MCF10A, cancer cell models of various entities (breast cancer, neuroblastoma, and sarcoma) as well as two knockout variants of osteosarcoma U-2 OS cells with a single deletion in the circadian clock gene Cry1 (U-2 OS sKO) or paired with a deletion in the Cry2 locus 28 (U-2 OS dKO).

Autocorrelation is a robust method for estimating the periodic quality of a signal, particularly for time series whose properties remain stable over time, known as stationary signals. Calculating the autocorrelation function from each recording provides the strength and period values, obtained from the second peak ordinate and abscissa (lag), respectively (Fig.  2d ). This analysis showed a wide range of circadian strengths across models with the U-2 OS wild-type ranking highest with a median autocorrelation value of 0.74, whereas U-2 OS sKO and U-2 OS dKO variants ranked lowest with median correlation values of − 0.04 ( p  = 7.7 × 10 −12 ) and 0.09 ( p  = 1.4 × 10 −10 ), respectively (Fig.  2e ). Heterogeneity between and within cancer types was further observed for the oscillation period ranging from short periods of ~ 21 h in HCC1806 and U-2 OS sKO cells ( p  = 0.83) to longer periods of ~ 26 h in MDAMB468 and MCF10A cells. U-2 OS dKO (34.8 h, p  = 8.2 × 10 −5 ) and the neuroblastoma cell line SH-SY5Y (39.2 h) showed periods well above the circadian range and were excluded from this analysis (Fig.  2f ). Consistent with these results, detrended signal traces of the different cell models and additional breast cancer cell lines indicate high variability in circadian clock signals across the models tested (Supplementary Fig.  1c ).

To capture non-stationary features of circadian signals, such as unstable periods and fluctuating amplitudes, we implemented continuous wavelet transform, a prevalent technique for analyzing dynamic temporal signals 29 . Figure  2g shows a CWT power spectrum heatmap of the Bmal1 signal from the MDAMB468 example. The heatmap displays signal components (0–40 h period) over the 120-h recording, color-coded by relative power (see “Methods”). Time-connected regions of high relative power mark the signal’s main oscillatory component, referred to as the ridge. Strong signals exhibit continuous long ridges whereas weaker signals have short and discontinuous ridges. As a complementary measure of clock strength, we quantified the ridge length from all our recordings. Our analysis shows that U-2 OS cells have a well-maintained clock with a median ridge length of 4.1 days, closely followed by MCF7, MDAMB468, and MCF10A cells (3.4–3.8 days). U-2 OS sKO and dKO cells showed ridges shorter than two days (1.9 days [ p  = 5.7 × 10 −3 ] and 1.5 days [ p  = 4.8 × 10 −4 ], respectively) (Fig.  2h ).

While both autocorrelation and continuous wavelet transform, provide insights into the most significant signal component, they do not quantify how the signal is distributed among non-circadian frequencies. To obtain more comprehensive signal information and an analogous signal-to-noise metric, we next implemented multiresolution analysis. MRA involves decomposing the detrended signal into four distinct component bands, namely the noise (1–4 h), ultradian (4–16 h), circadian (16–32 h), and infradian (32–48 h) components (see “Methods”). In Fig.  2i, we present an example of MDAMB468 Bmal1 -Luc where 75.9% of the signal is in the circadian range, 4.7% in the noise and the remaining 19.4% in the ultradian or infradian range. To obtain an analogous signal-to-noise measure of all recorded cell models, we plotted the circadian component (“circadianicity”) versus the noise component and observed a broad range of ratios (Fig.  2j ). Consistent with our previous analysis, U-2 OS cells show strong circadian signal with the lowest noise levels (< 1%) and the highest proportion of circadian components (~ 93%) for both reporters. Knockout of Cry1 or Cry1/Cry2 reduced the circadian component to 59% ( p  = 5.8 × 10 −6 ) and 40% ( p  = 2.0 × 10 −8 ), respectively, while increasing the noise component by 5.8-fold in the single knockout and by 209-fold in the double knockout. This signal-to-noise analysis map indicates that signals from the Per2 -reporter were slightly more circadian and less noisy than those from the Bmal1 -reporter (Fig.  2j and Supplementary Fig.  1d ). Bmal1 and Per2 exhibit unique oscillatory patterns, reflecting distinct biological pathways within the circadian clock system. Their individual behaviors might offer valuable insights into the functionality of the circadian rhythm. To streamline our analysis and facilitate comparison, we averaged the values of Bmal1 and Per2 in Fig.  2e, f, h, and k . However, for a more detailed examination, separate analyses for each can be found in Supplementary Fig.  1e, f .

Finally, to obtain a global strength metric, we normalized each circadian parameter to its respective maximum value across all tested cell line models and computed the mean, facilitating a gradual ranking of cell models from low to high circadian strength (Fig.  2k , see “Methods”).

In summary, by using a multi-faceted approach to characterize circadian rhythms in the different models tested, we identified heterogeneous circadian clock phenotypes, suggesting a strong clock in U-2 OS, MCF7, MDAMB468, and MCF10A cells and an impaired but present clock in GIMEN and HCC1806 cells. These results challenge the common expectation that most cancer cells have a weak clock and underscore the significance of defining gradual metrics of circadian strength in a model-specific manner.

Growth and drug response dynamics in cancer cell models

Together with circadian potency, cell growth dynamics and how cells respond to drug treatment in time are expected to influence responses throughout the day. Thus, we next evaluated growth characteristics and drug sensitivities across a spectrum of drug and cell line models. To showcase our approach’s ability to detect within-subtype differences, we examined nine cell lines of the triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) subtype alongside the non-malignant MCF10A breast cell model. The TNBC cell lines were analyzed across several molecular subtypes as classified by Lehmann et al., specifically the basal-like 1 (BL1), basal-like 2 (BL2), and mesenchymal-like (MES) TNBC subtypes. Growth and drug sensitivity assays in cancer models often rely on single time point measurements (e.g., ATP-based viability and replating assays) that provide a time-averaged snapshot. However, cancer cells respond dynamically to drugs, with temporally evolving effects, so conclusions drawn from single time point data can potentially mask the true effects of drugs. To accurately capture the dynamics of growth and drug response, we implemented a time-resolved live-cell imaging setup, directly counting cell nuclei in a fluorescence channel, while simultaneously evaluating confluency in the complementary brightfield channel (Fig.  3a ). Figure  3b shows representative snapshots of both imaging channels from MDAMB468 cells under untreated conditions. Frame-by-frame quantification provides growth trajectories for each cell model tested (Supplementary Fig.  2a ), with MDAMB468 cells showing a 5.3-fold increase in growth and reaching a ~ 100% confluency after 4 days (Fig.  3c ). Quantification of doubling times (DTs) calculated from confluency and cell numbers correlated well across the 10 cell line models tested ( R 2  = 0.69) (Supplementary Fig.  2b ). Upon examining the normalized cell number trajectories, we observed substantial variability in growth across the cell line models, ranging from approximately 2- to 16-fold over the 4-day recordings (Fig.  3d ). To capture growth signatures from the entire recording, we fitted an exponential function to each time series and obtained the growth rate k for each trajectory (Fig.  3e ). As expected, cell number growth rates and doubling times exhibit a strong anticorrelation ( R 2  = 0.83) (Fig.  3f and Supplementary Fig.  2c ).

a Schematic of the experimental setup. NLS = nuclear localization sequence. b Snapshots of MDAMB468 growth in brightfield (top) and red-fluorescent channel (bottom). Ruler = 400 µM. c MDAMB468 confluency (black) and cell numbers (red) over time. d Normalized growth curves of indicated cell models. BL1, BL2, and MES refer to TNBC subtypes basal-like-1/-2, and mesenchymal-like, respectively. EP = epithelial. e Exponential fit (solid line) for MDAMB468 growth curves, yielding growth rate ( k ), and fit accuracy ( R 2 ). Dots represent normalized cell numbers averaged across 9 images taken per well. The shaded area represents the standard deviation. f Bar diagrams of doubling times and growth rates, sorted in descending order from highest to lowest growth rates. Parameters calculated from growth curves, averaged across 9 images taken per well (CAL51, HCC38, HCC1806, HCC1937, MDAMB231, MDAMB468), or across six control wells from later described time-of-day experiments. g Schematic of pathways targeted by drugs used in this study. h Cell numbers and growth rates of MDAMB468 cells treated with varying olaparib doses (color-coded) or solvent (dashed line). Data represents the mean±s.d. of two plates. i Dose-response curve of GR -values, highlighting various drug sensitivity metrics. The underlying data corresponds to the example shown in ( h ). Error bars=95% CI. j Normalized cell numbers of MDAMB468 treated with approximate GR i nf doses of the indicated drugs. Data represents the mean ± s.d. of two plates or mean±s.e.m of 9 images taken on a single plate (cisplatin). k – m Hierarchical clustering of drug sensitivity parameters across cell-drug combinations. GEC 50 -values are shown relative to the approximate GR inf dose. n Pearson’s correlation coefficients of sensitivity parameters shown in ( k – m ) and additional combinations (Supplementary Data  1 ; n  = 50 cell-drug combinations per parameter, except for EC 50 -values where n  = 49 due to fitting constraints). Denoted are significant pairwise correlation coefficients (two-sided test with no adjustments made), where * indicate p -values of 0.03 (Hill coeff. vs. GR AOC ) or 0.018 (Hill coeff. vs. GR 50 ), ** p -value of 0.0016, *** p -value of 0.0015, and **** p -values ≤ 0.0001. Data in ( k – n ) is based on the mean of two plates, or 9 images taken per well on a single plate (cisplatin). Source data for ( b – f , h – n ) are provided as a Source Data file.

Next, we studied the response of the cancer cell models upon treatment with a panel of seven drugs targeting a broad range of mechanisms and pathways, i.e., the DNA synthesis inhibitors 5-FU and doxorubicin, mitosis-inhibiting alisertib and paclitaxel, the PI3K/AKT/mTOR inhibitor torin2, as well as cisplatin and olaparib which target the DNA damage response (DDR) pathway (Fig.  3g ). We then tracked responses to a broad range of drug concentrations, as exemplified in Fig.  3h by MDAMB468’s olaparib treatment. Here, doses up to 1.5 µM resulted in slightly slower growth relative to the control, while 6.3 µM of olaparib significantly hindered growth, and ≥ 25 µM led to total inhibition and cell death. Fitting an exponential function to growth curves yielded positive growth rate values for weak doses while higher doses resulted in negative growth rates, indicating population decline. Using this approach, we next quantified the response and stratified all tested cell lines and drugs.

Multi-parametric evaluation of drug sensitivity reveals heterogeneity between and within models

Accurate assessment of drug effects is essential for identifying exploitable weaknesses in cancer treatments. Traditional drug sensitivity metrics, like the IC 50 (the drug concentration that reduces cell counts by 50% relative to the control), can be greatly influenced by factors such as the assay duration and the number of cell divisions between drug administration and the final evaluation of drug sensitivity. These factors can inadvertently introduce artefactual correlations and lead to misinterpretations of drug sensitivity results. To obtain robust drug sensitivity metrics, we employed the normalized growth rate inhibition ( GR ) approach as described by Hafner et al. 30 . Here, growth rates under-treated and untreated conditions are compared and normalized to a single cell division. Fitting a dose-response equation to GR -values yields five drug sensitivity parameters, namely, the concentrations at half-maximal effect ( GEC 50 ) and at which GR  = 0.5 ( GR 50 ), the drug effect at the infinite concentration ( GR inf ), the steepness of the sigmoidal fit ( Hill coefficient ), and the area over the curve ( GR AOC ) (Fig.  3i ). Moreover, the GR value directly reflects cellular response phenotypes, indicating partial growth inhibition for values between 0 and 1, complete cytostasis for a value of 0, and signifying cell death in the range from 0 to − 1. Interestingly, when the same cell line was treated with different cancer drugs at their respective concentration evoking a saturating GR inf response, distinct drug-dependent trajectories emerged (Fig.  3j ). This underscores the importance of a time-resolved approach for characterizing drug sensitivity across different drugs and, accordingly, across distinct cell line models.

We next compared a subset of drug-sensitivity metrics and cell line models for the different drugs tested (Fig.  3k–m ). While most drugs were able to induce death in the subset of cell lines to varying degrees, we identified three drugs that resulted in partial growth inhibition of HCC1806, namely olaparib, 5-FU and alisertib (Fig.  3k ). Hierarchical clustering of GR inf  −values revealed a grouping of the two TNBC cell lines and while this clustering was maintained for the GEC 50 -values (Fig.  3l ), the Hill coefficient resulted in a different clustering of the cell lines (Fig.  3m ). To explore the potential relationships between various sensitivity metrics, we combined data from multiple drugs and cell models and computed cross-correlations, revealing significant associations among GEC 50 , GR 50 , and EC 50 -values ( p  ≤ 0.0001) (Fig.  3n ). In addition, significant yet less pronounced correlations emerged between the Hill coefficient and different drug sensitivity parameters, whereas the GR inf and GR AOC -values showed minimal correlation with other metrics. For complete GR curves and information on additionally tested cell lines and drugs, see Supplementary Fig.  3 and Supplementary Data  1 .

Variability throughout the day depends on the drug and cell model

The presence of a robust circadian clock combined with drugs that efficiently affect growth in a tumor model are promising prerequisites for identifying drug variability throughout the day. However, these prerequisites do not provide a priori insights into the specific time-of-day response profile. To systematically screen ToD drug sensitivities, we developed an experimental strategy designed to significantly reduce the investigator’s workload and number of consecutive drug perturbations, thereby increasing throughputness, reproducibility and accuracy (Fig.  4a ). In this approach, cell populations are seeded 24 h prior to the start of continuous live-cell imaging followed by performing a 3-step circadian clock resetting protocol in which separate cell populations receive a dexamethasone pulse at three different times (0, 4, 8 h). To test cells in later stages of the circadian cycle, drugs are administered at their estimated half-effective dose 32 and 48 h after the first resetting step, creating a range of time differences between reset and treatment of 0, 4, 8, 16, 20 and 24 h in relative circadian time (Fig.  4a , right panel ). The effects of the different treatment times on cell growth were monitored by live-cell imaging up to day 6, enabling the evaluation of drug responses for 4 days in both treatment groups, as shown for the alisertib-treated TNBC cell line HCC1937 in Fig.  4b . In typical ToD assays, cells are constantly proliferating during the 24 h of ToD treatments, resulting in varying cellular densities at the time of the drug treatments. These varying cell densities have the potential to influence drug responses in vitro, possibly concealing or introducing bias when determining ToD-specific drug effects. To account for different cell densities at the time of treatment, drug responses are determined as the ratio of the number of cells at the time of each treatment to the number of cells 96 h after each treatment, keeping the time window from treatment to evaluation identical across conditions (Fig.  4c , left panel). To highlight relative response differences within a day, results are presented relative to the circadian time of 0 h. Values > 1 indicate increased resistance, while values < 1 indicate higher sensitivity compared to treatment at time 0 h (Fig.  4c , right panel). We quantify the maximum variability in relative responses as the ToD Maximum Range ( ToD MR ).

a Schematic of the experimental setup to screen for time-of-day (ToD) responses. Three clock-resetting steps are performed in 4-h intervals. Drugs are administered 32 or 48 hours post initial reset, resulting in six circadian times (0, 4, 8, 16, 20, 24 h). Growth is monitored by long-term live-cell imaging. Timelines on the right depict experimental (top) and relative circadian times (bottom), color-coded by each ToD tested. b Cell counts of HCC1937 treated with alisertib at different times of the day. Normalization to the respective time of treatment. c Cell numbers 4 days post-treatment versus treatment times, corresponding to ( b ) (left). ToD response curve (ToD-RC) depicting relative responses to ToD 0 h. Blue arrows mark the maximum ToD response range ( ToD MR ) (right). d ToD-RCs for HCC1937 (left) or MCF10A (right) cells treated with different drugs (color-coded). e ToD-RCs for 10 cell models treated with paclitaxel (left) or doxorubicin (right). Color coding of cell models according to tissue origin. f Hierarchical clustering of ToD MR -values across drug-cell combinations. Values above 0.2 are shown. Data clustering with the UPGMA method and Euclidian distance. g Bar diagrams ranking ToD MR -values per drug (top) and cell model (bottom). h ToD-RCs for alisertib-treated HCC1937 tumor and MCF10A non-tumor cells overlaid, yielding maximum and minimum benefit times. Data shown in ( b – h ) represents the mean ( ± s.d.) of two plates. i Polar histograms for benefit times across cell models ( n  = 7–9 drugs, as indicated in the figure) and j , drugs ( n  = 9 cell models). k Butterfly charts depicting fold changes relative to MCF10A at benefit times, averaged per cancer cell model (left,) and drug (right). Color-coding of maximum and minimum benefit times is shown in ( h – k ) in green and red, respectively. Data are shown in ( g and k represents mean ± s.d. of tested cell models per drug ( n  = 9 cell models; alpelisib and cisplatin: n  = 8) and vice versa ( n  = 8 drugs; HCC1806 and SUM149PT: n  = 7). For clarity, one-sided error bars are shown. Source data for ( b – k are provided as a Source Data file.

Our next objective was to explore the variability of ToD profiles of different drugs within a subset of TNBC cells. To accomplish this, we screened ten cell line models shown in Fig.  3 treated with eight different drugs, generating approximately 80 ToD profiles (Fig.  4d, e and Supplementary Fig.  4a, b ). Comparing examples from individual cell lines, namely HCC1937 and MCF10A, revealed that HCC1937 exhibited relatively conserved ToD profiles, whereas the non-malignant cell line showed greater ToD variability for the different drugs (Fig.  4d ). Furthermore, ToD sensitivity profiles varied significantly from drug to drug (Fig.  4e and Supplementary Fig.  4b ), suggesting that ToD profiles may be highly dependent on the cancer cell model and drug mechanism of action.

To assess varying time-of-day sensitivities across all tested cell line models and drugs, we calculated the corresponding ToD MR value for each drug-cell combination (Fig.  4f ). Averaging the ToD MR -values per drug and cell line revealed a gradual ranking of ToD variability for each drug and cell model tested (Fig.  4g ). Within the drug panel, the highest and lowest ToD variability was observed for cisplatin and alisertib, respectively, with a ~ 2-fold difference in the average ToD MR value (Fig.  4g , top panel). Similarly, the ToD variability of the tested cell lines varied by ~ 2-fold, with MCF10A showing the highest and HCC38 the lowest average variability. Considering only cancer cell lines, SUM149PT ranked highest and showed a similar degree of ToD sensitivity variability as the non-malignant cell line (Fig.  4g , bottom panel).

To assess the impact of circadian clock disruptions on ToD-dependent drug sensitivity, we evaluated circadian-perturbed U-2 OS Cry1/2 -dKO cells, alongside wild-type cells that demonstrated the strongest circadian rhythms in our assessments (see Fig.  2 ). Using our ToD treatment approach (see Fig.  4a ), we tested three drugs which elicited high ToD response variations in our breast cancer panel (see Fig.  4g ), and which target distinct molecular pathways. Our results demonstrate substantial ToD-dependent drug sensitivity in WT cells and markedly reduced responses in Cry1/2 -dKO cells (Supplementary Fig.  4c ). Specifically, ToD MR -values decreased by 62% for cisplatin, 58% for paclitaxel, and 40% for 5-FU in Cry1/2 -dKO compared to WT cells (Supplementary Fig.  4d ), highlighting a critical role of the circadian clock in influencing drug sensitivity throughout the day.

Together, our findings reveal distinct ToD profiles across most tested drugs and models, highlighting individualized ToD sensitivity within distinct drugs and cell models despite the common TNBC categorization and shared drug-target pathways.

Determining treatment times for maximum drug effect

The critical factor in the design of future chronotherapeutic treatments may be not only the sensitivity of cancer cells but rather the differential time-of-day sensitivity between cancer and non-malignant tissues 26 . To illustrate this, we compared the ToD response profiles of TNBC cancer cell models with the profile of MCF10A, as shown for HCC1937 and alisertib in Fig.  4h . In this case, the cancer and non-malignant cell models show an antiphasic ToD response profile, with an almost inverted profile. By calculating the greatest response differences between the two cell models, we determined the treatment times of maximum and minimum benefit (Fig.  4h–j ). Analyzing the entire panel of tested drugs per cell line model and plotting polar density histograms of the times of maximum and minimum benefit, we found that the highest overall benefit is achieved at 10–12 h and 18–20 h in the treatment of HCC1937, while earlier treatment times of the day yield minimum benefit. In contrast, SUM149PT and MDAMB231 show a single prominent time window throughout the day that provides maximum treatment benefit (Fig.  4i ). In addition to cell model-to-model variability in the benefit times, we explored the drug-to-drug variability by calculating the polar density histogram for the individual drugs tested across all cell line models (Fig.  4j ). 5-FU showed a clear preference for administration between 8 and 10 h, while torin2 and paclitaxel showed more variability in maximum and minimum benefit times, indicating different response relationships to the non-malignant cell model across the cancer cell lines tested.

Finally, we quantified the extent of maximum and minimum treatment benefit by calculating the corresponding fold changes in ToD responses between the cancer and non-malignant cell model (Fig.  4k ). By averaging these fold changes across cell lines and drugs, we established a ranking referred to here as the “chronotherapeutic index”. While the average ToD variability highlights the benefits of a single model (Fig.  4g ), the chronotherapeutic index reveals distinctions between the cancer models and the non-malignant MCF10A cell model, thereby offering valuable insights into the potential advantages of adopting a chronotherapeutic-based schedule. It’s worth noting that the rankings based solely on average ToD variability within a single model or drug didn’t align completely with the ranking of the chronotherapeutic index. This emphasizes the importance of evaluating effects in relation to healthy tissues when considering chronotherapy applications (Fig.  4g, k ).

To sum up, our findings emphasize distinct chronotherapeutic response dynamics in vitro between cancer and healthy cell models, underscoring two key objectives of chronotherapy: pinpointing optimal treatment times to maximize cancer toxicity while minimizing impacts on healthy tissues.

The relationship between time-of-day profiles and clock, growth, and drug sensitivity metrics

The time-of-day sensitivity in cancer models results from complex interactions involving the circadian clock, cancer cell growth, and drug responses. However, the specific mechanisms governing these interactions remain largely unknown. To address this, we employ statistical tools, including linear regression, dominance analysis, and determinant ranking, to uncover the main parameters influencing a key aspect of ToD sensitivity curves, namely the maximum range in responses ( ToD MR ) (Fig.  5a ). To explore how individual metrics relate to ToD MR -values, we first performed pairwise linear regression analysis (Fig.  5b–f ). We considered each circadian channel individually or combined and found the strongest and most significant correlations for clock metrics from the Bmal1 channel (Fig.  5d and Supplementary Fig.  5a , see Supplementary Data  2 for a complete set of circadian metrics across the cell models tested). ToD MR -values of 5-FU were significantly correlated with amplitudes ( r  = 0.8, R 2  = 0.6) and the prominence of the circadian component (circadianicity) of the Bmal1 signal ( r  = 0.7, R 2  = 0.43), whereas other circadian clock metrics were poorly associated (Fig.  5b, d ). On the other hand, we observed no significant and rather low associations for ToD MR -values and growth metrics as well as for ToD MR -values and drug sensitivity metrics (Fig.  5c, e, f ). To identify the best associated individual metric and drug, we integrated all correlations and generated a ranking as shown in Fig.  5g . For the different metrics, we observed the highest correlation for the amplitude ( r  = 0.43 ± 0.02, mean ± s.e.m.). Among the individual drugs, adavosertib ranked highest in overall correlation ( r  = 0.39 ± 0.03, mean ± s.e.m.) between ToD MR -values and the different metrics. Relative average associations between all metrics and ToD MR -values were predominantly positive, with only five metrics demonstrating inverse relationships (Supplementary Fig.  5b ). Notably, only one drug, paclitaxel, displayed average negative associations across all metrics. To further test the associations between individual cellular parameters and ToD MR -values, we applied a linear regression model and compared calculated versus actual ToD MR -values of up to five new cell line models in Bland-Altman plots (Supplementary Fig.  5c , see Supplementary Data  3 for the complete new dataset). This revealed mean biases of − 0.04, − 0.05, and 0.06 between calculated and actual ToD MR -values for the clock, growth, and drug sensitivity metrics, respectively. As also shown in Supplementary Fig.  5c , mean biases are near zero and most predicted data points lie within the limits of agreement, which indicates minimal overall bias and good agreement between the predicted and observed data points.

a Computational approach to investigate how circadian rhythms, cell growth dynamics, and drug sensitivity factors influence the time-of-day (ToD) drug efficacy. b and c Example of linear correlations between ToD MR and circadian ( b ) or drug sensitivity parameters (c), for 5-FU ( n  = 10 cell models) and cisplatin ( n  = 5 cell models), respectively. Color coding of cell models according to tissue origin. The central black line represents the regression line. Gray-shaded area = 95% CI of the linear regression fit. Model accuracy is indicated by R 2 -values. d – f Hierarchical clustering of Pearson correlation coefficients ( r ) between ToD MR -values of different drugs (rows) and the respective metric (columns) for clock strength ( d , n  = 10 cell models), growth ( e , n  = 10 cell models) or drug sensitivity ( f , n  = 5 cell models). r -values ≥ 0.5 and ≤ -0.5 are shown. Black rectangles indicate examples shown in ( b and c ). Significant pairwise correlations (two-sided test with no adjustments made) are indicated by stars, where *, and **, denote p -values ≤ 0.05 and 0.01, respectively. Exact p -values: Alisertib-AC-Lag = 0.011; Alisertib-Period-2d = 0.004; Doxorubicin-Ridgelength = 0.030; Doxorubicin-AC-Lag = 0.014; Doxorubicin-Period-2d = 0.012; Alpelisib-Amplitude = 0.002; 5-FU-Circadianicity = 0.044; 5-FU-Amplitude = 0.007. Note: sample size in ( d – f ) for alpelisib =  n -1; and for cisplatin =9. g Bar diagrams ranking the absolute correlation between ToD MR -values, and each metric depicted in ( d – f ), ranked by metric ( n  = 8 drugs) or by drug ( n  = 14 metrics). Data represents the mean ± s.e.m. For clarity, one-sided error bars are shown. h Hierarchical clustering of the dominance analysis matrix showing the individual contribution of the circadian clock, growth, and drug sensitivity parameters (columns) in predicting drug-dependent ToD MR -values (rows). Colors indicate the percentage contribution, as detailed in the color bar. See key for d–f for sample sizes ( n ). i Boxplot of the overall contribution of cellular metrics to predict ToD MR -values, corresponding to ( h ). Box bounds are defined by the 25 th and 75 th percentiles. Extending whiskers represent data points within 1.5 times the interquartile range from lower and upper quartiles. Red lines denote the data’s median, and white circles the mean. Source data for b–i are provided as a Source Data file.

While linear regression approaches are robust for examining individual metrics, they do not provide relative information about which metrics have the most significant impact on ToD MR -values. To address this, we used dominance analysis and systematically tested all possible combinations of metrics. By measuring how much each metric improved the accuracy of the model when added or removed, we identified the highest contributing ones to the ToD MR -values of the different drugs. For alpelisib, our analysis identified the amplitude of Bmal1 signals as the most important factor, accounting for 42% of the observed ToD sensitivity variability (Fig.  5h ). In contrast, paclitaxel and adavosertib showed the most homogeneous distribution of individual contributions, with no single metric appearing especially important. Considering the shares of each determinant combined for all drugs led to a ranking of determinants as shown in Fig.  5i . Here, we observed the largest contributions for the Bmal1 amplitude (mean = 21.9%) and smallest for the Hill coefficient of drug response curves (mean = 9.9%).

In summary, we were able to identify systematic dependencies of the maximal time-of-day drug sensitivities and different circadian clock, growth, and drug sensitivity parameters. We have further shown that the relative importance of the different determinants varies substantially depending on the specific drug, highlighting the importance of considering multiple factors in understanding the time-of-day dependent variability of drug response in a cell model.

Differential impact of core clock genes in shaping time-of-day sensitivity of cancer models

Beyond a cancer model’s circadian clock, growth, and drug features, the expression levels of core circadian clock genes are likely to contribute to the time-of-day sensitivity profiles. Thus, we explored the connection between the expression patterns of 16 essential clock genes and the maximum range in ToD sensitivity profiles ( ToD MR ). We defined core clock genes as those that directly control the transcriptional-translational feedback loops of the molecular clock network and whose dysregulation or mutations result in disrupted circadian rhythms 31 , 32 . The selected gene panel displayed distinct expression patterns across the TNBC cell lines tested (Supplementary Fig.  6a ). To examine potential relationships between core clock genes and ToD MR -values, we used three different methods, namely linear correlation analysis, dimensionality reduction by linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and principal component analysis (PCA) (Fig.  6a ).

a Approach to identify the role of core clock genes in determining the strength of time-of-day (ToD) drug sensitivity. b Hierarchical clustering of Spearman rank correlation coefficients between drug-dependent ToD MR -values (rows) and core clock genes (columns). Black boxes indicate examples shown in ( c ). Statistical significance of the correlations are indicated as stars, where * and **, denote p -values  ≤ 0.05 and 0.01, respectively. Exact p -values: Paclitaxel- Per3  = 0.002; Paclitaxel - Dbp  = 0.030; Cisplatin- Dbp  = 0.021; Torin2- Dbp  = 0.036; 5-FU- Per2  = 0.050; Alpelisib- Bmal1  = 0.021; Alpelisib- Per2  = 0.047. Cisplatin and alpelisib: n  = 8 cell lines, else n  = 9 cell lines. c Example of linear correlation analysis between paclitaxel ToD MR -values and Per3 or Dbp expression levels measured as log2(TPM). Color-coded data points indicate different cancer cell models. The gray continuous line indicates the normal distribution fit of the samples. Gray-shaded area = 95% CI of the linear regression fit. Model accuracy is indicated by R 2 -values. Top and lateral histograms indicate the count of samples along the range of gene expression, and ToD MR -values, respectively. n  = 9 cell lines. d Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) on median-based binarized ToD MR -values for paclitaxel. Cell models with ToD MR -values below or above the median (M) are colored in blue and red, respectively (middle and left panel). The contribution to the obtained discriminative information is shown in percentage for each of the circadian clock genes (right panel). e Boxplot showing the mean-based ranking of overall discriminative contributions of each circadian clock gene across all tested drugs. n  = 8 drugs. Box bounds are defined by the 25 th and 75 th percentiles. Extending whiskers represent data points within 1.5 times the interquartile range from lower and upper quartiles. Red lines denote the data’s median, and white circles the mean. Source data for b–e are provided as a Source Data file.

Linear correlation analysis revealed significant correlations between ToD MR-values of five tested compounds from our drug panel and selected core clock genes (Fig.  6b ). Focusing on the mitosis inhibitor paclitaxel, we identified particularly strong anticorrelations with the expression levels of Per3 ( r  = −0.88, R 2  = 0.78) and Dbp ( r  = −0.72, R 2  = 0.51) (Fig.  6b, c ). Yet, the overall correlation between circadian clock genes and ToD MR-values was relatively weak, which was also apparent when accumulating absolute correlations per drug or per metric (Supplementary Fig.  6b ). Here, the highest overall correlation of ToD MR -values were found for cisplatin ( r  = 0.40 ± 0.21, mean ± s.d.), while Per2 was most associated with ToD MR -values among the circadian clock gene panel ( r  = 0.48 ± 0.20, mean ± s.d.) (Supplementary Fig.  6b ).

To assess the cumulative impact of circadian gene expression on the strength of time-of-day effects as indicated by the ToD MR -values, aiming to uncover more complex patterns that might not be explainable through linear correlations alone, we proceeded to apply LDA on a drug-by-drug basis. To do so, we first categorized cell models into two groups based on the median ToD MR -value for each drug. Figure  6d provides an example using paclitaxel, effectively separating the data into groups of high and low ToD MR -values. Implementing LDA to examine the individual linear discriminant components of each circadian clock gene revealed a clear ranking of genes in terms of their importance in discriminating the cell lines into the two ToD MR groups. For paclitaxel, the core clock genes Cry2 , Dbp , and Per3 were the most important contributors to the specific discrimination, collectively accounting for approximately 46% of the discriminative information (Fig.  6d , right panel). Importantly, the contribution of each gene in discriminating between ToD MR -response groups varied for the tested drugs, suggesting that either the drug or the drug targets may interact differently with the molecular components of the circadian clock (Supplementary Fig.  6c–i ). To explore the circadian clock’s impact on ToD sensitivity across various drug treatments, we assessed the overall contribution of each gene by cumulating their effects across all drugs. This revealed modest overall contributions, with the highest ranking Rorβ accounting for 10.5% ± 9.6% (mean ± s.d.) of the discriminative information (Fig.  6e ).

While LDA is a powerful method to determine the discriminatory contribution of the individual core clock genes, PCA allows for identifying underlying patterns and relationships among the different genes. For paclitaxel, PCA distributed the cell models well along the first two principal components which combined explained 73.7% of the variability among the different ToD sensitivity profiles (Supplementary Fig.  6j , left panel). Ranking of the PC loadings showed that the degree of contribution of each circadian clock gene in shaping the PCA outcome was highly individual. For paclitaxel, Csnk1d was the major contributor to the ToD sensitivity variability within the first principal component, while along the second principal component, Clock ranked as the main contributor (Supplementary Fig.  6j , right panels).

Collectively, our findings suggest limited associations between individual expression levels of core clock genes and the observed ToD maximum ranges within the examined cell lines. However, we found interesting relationships when considering the circadian clock gene panel as a collective, indicating potential connections between the molecular circadian clock and drug-dependent time-of-day sensitivity.

While the fundamental role of the circadian clock in influencing disease progression and treatment response is widely recognized 22 , 33 , 34 , our understanding of the underlying biological mechanisms remains fragmented. Approaches that enable the precise study of drug perturbations and treatment responses within controlled circadian-timed environments play a pivotal role in advancing our understanding of the effects regulated by the circadian clock. To date, there has been a notable absence of standardized methodologies for the comprehensive exploration of the chronotherapeutic potential of drugs and cancer models. In this work, we present an integrative approach for the high-throughput quantification of time-of-day response profiles and the elucidation of circadian, growth, and drug sensitivity factors that shape these profiles (Fig.  1 ). This innovative method holds significant promise for advancing biological discovery, offering a robust platform to explore the intricate interplay between circadian rhythms, cellular growth, and drug timing efficacy.

Despite the general expectation that the circadian clock is likely dysregulated in highly transformed cancers 19 , 33 , our approach reveals robust rhythms in numerous cancer cell models (Fig.  2 ). Furthermore, our assessment of circadian rhythms in non-malignant epithelial cells, luminal breast cancer cells, and osteosarcoma cells aligns with prior research 28 , 35 , 36 , 37 , underscoring the versatility of our approach in elucidating circadian clock properties across various cancer and tissue types.

Among these, we focused on triple-negative breast cancer, a highly aggressive and heterogeneous subtype, representing about 15% of diagnosed breast tumors. Current therapies are ineffective, with cytotoxic chemotherapy still being an integral part of treatment despite limited efficacy and severe side effects 38 . Our investigation into the growth dynamics and drug responses of multiple TNBC cell models has generated a diverse array of metrics. Notably, our results indicate that our set of drug sensitivity metrics, namely the GR 50 , GEC 50 , GR AOC , GR inf, and the Hill coefficient, exhibit milder correlations to each other, which is in agreement with recent studies 39 . This challenges the conventional binary classification of sensitive versus resistant models and suggests that drug sensitivity rankings are rather drug-dependent and sensitivity metric-specific (Fig.  3 ).

By implementing our screening approach for the profiling of drug sensitivities across different times of the day, we generated approximately 80 distinct time-of-day sensitivity profiles, unveiling a wide range of sensitivity variations across drugs and cell line models (Fig.  4 and Supplementary Fig.  4 ). We then ranked models by their time-of-day sensitivity and observed up to 30% response differences throughout the day for the top scoring models. We further detected substantial variation in time-of-day sensitivity among the panel of drugs tested, revealing time-of-day dependent drug effects. Consistent with previous findings, we show time-of-day dependent variability in responses to the DNA synthesis inhibitors 5-FU 22 , 23 , 40 and doxorubicin 22 , 41 as well as to the DNA intercalator cisplatin 22 , 41 . Furthermore, we have introduced a chronotherapeutic index, which gauges the relative advantages of adopting a circadian-based drug schedule. Various non-malignant cell models may be employed for calculating this index, tailored to the particular disease model under investigation. For example, fibroblast models, whose strong circadian rhythms have been described in several works 42 , 43 , 44 , are expected to show unique relationships with cancer models in terms of sensitivity patterns at different times of the day.

Delving into the molecular mechanisms that potentially govern time-of-day sensitivity, our method has unraveled key relationships between circadian clock dynamics, growth patterns, and drug sensitivities, all of which significantly impact time-of-day drug responses. It is noteworthy that the specific contribution of these parameters varies depending on the drug under consideration, underscoring the multifactorial nature of time-of-day dependent variability in drug reactions (Fig.  5 ). Aiming to simplify the circadian analysis and to provide an overarching view of circadian clock dynamics, we initially combined Bmal1 - and Per2 -signals in Fig.  2 . However, separate evaluations of the circadian genes, as presented in Supplementary Fig.  1e and f, proved crucial to elucidate the significant impact of oscillatory Bmal1 dynamics on ToD MR -values.

In an exploratory approach, we identified limited associations between expression levels of core circadian clock genes and ToD sensitivities (Fig.  6 ). This may hint at a more complex role of the molecular circadian clock network in this context, where distinct associations might be masked by high redundancy and interconnection between core clock genes. In addition, our results could indicate a discrete role of the cell cycle in shaping our observed ToD sensitivity profiles 45 , 46 , 47 , which also invites for further research in that context.

Assessing the cumulative impact of circadian gene expression on ToD MR -values, we found differential contributions of each circadian gene in discriminating between high and low ToD-dependent sensitivity based on the drug tested. To investigate whether this observation underlies variations in the expression levels of the drug targets, follow-up explorations involving e.g., mRNA or protein quantification techniques performed at different times of the day could be conducted in future studies focusing on the molecular mechanisms of ToD sensitivity.

Given their recognized influence on pharmacodynamics 22 , 33 , 34 , our study primarily focused on circadian rhythms. Nevertheless, our multiresolution analysis of Bmal1 and Per2 oscillatory signals uncovered distinct alternate rhythms of shorter and longer periods, as illustrated in Fig.  2i, j . The significant impact of independent 12-h ultradian rhythms on stress responses has been previously documented for mammalian cells 48 and constitutes an interesting field for future research in the scope of our time-of-day drug sensitivity profiles.

Despite employing a robust method to introduce luciferase reporters and validating several circadian results, as well as using population-based recordings of non-clonal cell lines, our approach does not rule out the potential impact of random reporter insertions on circadian clock estimation. Moreover, while our findings are primarily based on in vitro models and are not directly applicable to treatment recommendations, our framework can be directly applied to model organisms of higher complexity, such as 3D patient-derived organoids and animal models where the circadian clock can be tracked.

Altogether, we provide a comprehensive method to determine optimal drug treatment times for complex diseases and to identify the cell subtypes that will most benefit from a time-of-day based treatment. Leveraging innovative experimental and computational techniques our approach further elucidates the specific biological features that shape time-of-day response profiles, thereby advancing our understanding of the cellular mechanisms that drive time-of-day sensitivity. As a result, our method provides tools to uncover the cellular mechanisms that govern time-of-day sensitivity, paving the way for new biological discoveries.

Experimental methods

Cell culture.

HCC1143, HCC1806, HCC1937, HCC38, and MDAMB468 cells were obtained from the American Type Culture Collection. BT549, CAL51, MDAMB231, MDAMB436, and SUM149PT cells were kindly provided by the Sorger lab (Harvard Medical School, Ludwig Cancer Center, Boston, USA). MCF10A and MCF7 cells were kindly gifted by the Brugge lab (Harvard Medical School, Ludwig Cancer Center, Boston, USA). GIMEN and SH-SY5Y cells were provided by the Schulte lab (Universitätsklinikum Tübingen, Clinic for Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, Thübingen, Germany) and the U-2 OS reporter cell lines by the Kramer lab (Charité, Institute for Medical Immunology, Berlin, Germany). MCF10A cells were maintained according to the Brugge lab’s media recipe based on DMEM/F12 media (Gibco, 11320033) supplemented with 5% horse serum (Gibco, 26050088), 20 ng/ml EGF (Peprotech, AF-100-15), 0.5 mg/ml Hydrocortisone (Sigma, 50-23-7), 100 ng/ml Cholera Toxin (Sigma, 9012-63-9), 10 µg/ml Insulin (Sigma, I1882) and 1% penicillin-streptomycin (Pen-Strep, Gibco, 15140122). All other cell lines were maintained in RPMI 1640 (Gibco, 11875-093) supplemented with 10% fetal bovine serum (FBS) (Gibco, A5256701) and 1% Pen-Strep. For bioluminescence recordings and long-term imaging, cells were cultured in FluoroBrite DMEM medium (Gibco, A1896701) supplemented with 10% FBS, 300 mg L-Glutamine (Gibco, 25030024) and 1% Pen-Strep. Cells were kept at 37 °C in a humidified 5% CO 2 environment and regularly tested for mycoplasma.

Generation of reporter cell lines

To produce lentivirus carrying constitutive red-fluorescent nuclear reporters, HEK293T cells at 80% confluence were transfected with a mix of 1.8 μg gag/pol packaging plasmid (Addgene #14887), 0.7 μg pRev packaging plasmid (Addgene #12253), 0.3 μg VSV-G envelope plasmid (Addgene #14888) and 3.2 μg of a plasmid with a EF1α-mKate2-NLS sequence. Lentivirus expressing either Bmal1 - or Per2 -promoter driven luciferase reporter was produced by transfecting HEK293T cells with 6 µg psPAX2 (Addgene #12260), 3.6 µg pMD2G (Addgene #12259) and 8.4 µg lentiviral expression plasmid (pAB-mBmal1:Luc-Puro or plenti6-mPer2:Luc-Blast, respectively). Transfections were conducted using Lipofectamine 3000 (Invitrogen, L3000015) according to the manufacturer’s instructions, and media was replaced by RMPI 1640 medium supplemented with 10 mM HEPES (Gibco, 15630080) before adding the transfection mixture. Lentiviral supernatant was collected after 48 h and 72 h and passed through a 0.45 μm filter (Millipore, HAWP04700). For lentiviral transduction, receiver cells at 70% confluence were incubated with a mix of 1 ml lentivirus-containing supernatant, 8 μg/ml protamine sulfate (Sigma, P4020), and 10 μM HEPES for 6 h. Ensuing, cells were washed with PBS (Gibco, 10010-015) and cultured in their regular culture medium for 2 days before starting antibiotic selection of transduced cells. To select for transduced cells, cells were grown in a medium containing 5 μg/ml blasticidin (Adooq, A21608) or 2 μg/ml puromycin (Gibco, A1113803) according to the resistance cassette on the lentiviral expression plasmid until non-transduced control cells died. Details about the generation of the U-2 OS Cry1 -sKO, U-2 OS Cry2 -sKO, and U-2 OS Cry1 / Cry2 -dKO cell lines can be found in the original publication by Börding et al. 28 .

Bioluminescence recordings

Cells expressing Bmal1 - or Per2 -promoter driven luciferase reporters were seeded in 35-mm dishes (Nunc) to reach approximate confluence on the following day. To account for potentially different phases of single-cell circadian clocks in cell populations, we collectively reset the circadian clocks by administering a standard dose of 1 µM dexamethasone 49 , 50 (Sigma, D4902, dissolved in EtOH). After 30 min incubation, cells were washed once with PBS, and an imaging medium supplemented with 250 μM D-Luciferin (Abmole, M9053) was added. To avoid evaporation of the media throughout the bioluminescence recordings, the dishes were sealed with parafilm as described in Finger et al. 49 . Luminescence intensity was monitored at 10-min intervals for 5 days in an incubator-embedded luminometer (LumiCycle, Actimetrics). Bioluminescence recordings were conducted using two biological replicates. For each individual experiment, three, in some cases only two, technical replicates were assessed. MCF10A cells have been tested on a single day using three technical replicates.

Long-term live-cell imaging

All live-cell imaging experiments were performed with cells expressing the fluorescent mKate2-NLS nuclear reporter, seeded in 48-well plates (Falcon) at a density that saturates at unperturbed growth conditions towards the end of each experiment. Long-term live-cell imaging was conducted using an incubator-embedded Incucyte live-cell widefield microscope (Essen BioScience). Cells were imaged in the brightfield and for nuclei segmentation and cell counting in the red channel (excitation: 567–607 nm, emission: 622–704 nm). Images were analyzed by frame-by-frame nuclei counting with the in-built Incucyte software and results were further processed in MATLAB. For experiments that involved drug treatments, cells were seeded 1 day before starting the live recordings, and images were taken using a 4x magnification lens in 2 fields-of-views per well every 1–2 h for a total duration of 4–6 days. Two independent plates per condition were assayed in a single experiment. For drug response experiments with cisplatin, a single plate per condition was assayed in a single experiment, imaged in 9 fields-of-views per well using a 10x magnification lens. For experiments capturing unperturbed growth dynamics, 300–1000 cells, corresponding to ~ 10% confluency, were seeded 2 days before starting the live recordings. Using a 10x magnification lens, 9 images per well were acquired in 1–2 h intervals for a total duration of 4 days.

Dose-response curves

Drug stock solutions (100–10 mM) were prepared in DMSO and preserved at − 20 °C. Cisplatin (Sigma, 232120) stock solution of 3.33 mM was prepared in 0.9% NaCl and stored at room temperature. For dose-response assays, a serial 5–6 point log4 dilution of each drug was freshly prepared in its solvent prior to treatment. Following concentration ranges were tested: 100–0.1 µM for 5-fluorouracil (5-FU, Sigma, 03738-100MG), alpelisib (Biozol, TGM-T1921-10MG) and olaparib (Adooq, A10111); 10–0.01 µM for torin2 (Sigma, SML1224-5MG) and alisertib (Hölzel, S1133-5); 10–0.04 µM for adavosertib (Biocat, T2077-5mg-TM); 1–0.004 µM for doxorubicin (Hölzel, A14403-100); and 0.4–0.0004 µM for paclitaxel (Hölzel, M1970-50mg). Cisplatin was tested in a serial 10-point log2 dilution with doses ranging from 70–0.14 µM. Compounds were added to the cells one day after cell seeding in a drug-media mixture of 9% of the total well volume. Solvent-only treated control cells were assayed along the treated conditions. Each tested condition contained equal amounts of the solvent. Cell growth was monitored by live-cell imaging for at least 4 days as described above.

Time-of-day treatments

Cells were seeded and allowed to attach overnight. The next day, live recordings commenced as described earlier. We performed independent resetting steps every 4 h over an 8-h period, creating distinct cell populations at 0, 4, or 8 h of circadian time. Subsequently, we administered the same drug concentration, which corresponded to the estimated half-maximal effective concentration, at either 32 or 48 hours after the initial resetting step. This allowed us to simultaneously test six different circadian stages (0, 4, 8, 16, 20, and 24 h). Drug concentrations were determined separately for each cell line and drug combination. For cisplatin, the treatments we performed were slightly different, using 4 independent resetting steps every 3 h over a 9-h period followed by drug treatments 32 or 48 h post initial resetting. In all cases, cell growth was continuously monitored through long-term live-cell imaging for a total of 6 days.

Computational methods

Time-series analysis of circadian signals.

Raw time-series data were detrended by applying a sinc filter with a 48-h cut-off period using the open-source software package pyBOAT 27 (v0.9.1) within the Anaconda Navigator (v1.10.0).

Amplitude envelope and normalization

Continuous amplitude envelope calculation was obtained using continuous wavelet transform implemented in pyBOAT with a time window of 48 h. The amplitude normalization was done by taking the inverse of the envelope of the detrended signal as described in Mönke G, et al. 27 .

Autocorrelation analysis

Periodicity data was assessed by calculating its autocorrelation and abscissa at the second peak using the ‘autocorr’ and ‘findpeaks’ MATLAB functions 51 from the detrended time series.

Continuous wavelet transform

The main oscillatory component, known as the ridge component, was obtained using a wavelet-based spectral analysis from amplitude-normalized and detrended signals. For the ridge detection, we used both an adaptable threshold and a fixed threshold. The adaptable threshold was based on each signal’s half-maximal spectral power and was implemented for the “period” and “phase difference” metrics shown in Fig.  2 and Fig. S1. The instantaneous phase difference between the Bmal1 and Per2 signals was calculated using the MATLAB ‘atan2’ function (Supplementary Fig.  1a ) and for the polar histogram representation, we deployed the ‘polarhistogram’ function and the ‘Circular Statistics Toolbox’ (v1.21.9.0. by Philipp Behrens) from MATLAB (Supplementary Fig.  1b ). For the analysis of “amplitudes” and “ridge lengths” shown in Fig.  2 and the determinants for time-of-day sensitivity shown in Fig.  5 , the metrics of the main oscillatory component were derived using a fixed-ridge threshold of 40. This ridge threshold value was chosen as it offered a well-balanced threshold suitable for comparing signals of varying strengths.

Multiresolution analysis

Detrended time-series data were decomposed into a set of different wavelet details D j representing distinct disjoint frequency bands and a final smooth using a discrete wavelet transform-based multiresolution analysis 52 . The algorithm has been implemented using the ‘PyWavelets’ python package 53 , with a db20 wavelet of the Daubechies wavelet family as previously described in Myung, Schmal and Hong et al. 54 . Since each wavelet detail D j represents a period range between 2 j Δt and 2 j+1 Δt (for j = 1, 2, 3, …) we down-sampled the time series from a Δt = 10 min to a Δt = 30 min sampling frequency to obtain a circadian period band between 16–32 h for further analysis. Since the MRA decomposes the variance of the detrended signal with respect to the different disjoint period bands, it can be used to determine the rhythmicity of the signal in the circadian period range 55 .

Global circadian strength

To calculate the global circadian strength ( GCS ) of a cell line model i , the autocorrelation peak value (peak), the wavelet-based continuous ridge length (ridge), and the discrete circadianicity component (circadianicity) were normalized to the respective maximum (max) value measured among all tested cell line models and averaged according to the following equation:

Statistical analysis

Linear regression model fitting of Bmal1 and Per2 circadianicity components obtained by MRA was done with the ‘fitlm’ MATLAB function. Significant variances in circadian parameters between wild-type U-2 OS cells and both Cry1 -sKO and Cry1/2 -dKO cells were calculated with a one-way ANOVA and Tukey’s post-hoc test using the ‘anova1’ and ‘multcompare’ MATLAB functions.

Multi-parametric analysis of growth dynamics

Growth data obtained from long-term live-cell imaging was smoothed using a robust local regression approach of weighted linear least squares and a 2 nd degree polynomial model (‘rloess’ MATLAB function). Doubling times of smoothed cell numbers or confluency were calculated according to the following equation:

where \(t\) refers to the time of assessment, in our case 96 h, and \({y}_{0}\) refers to the cell number at timepoint 0. To calculate the exponential growth rate \(k\) per unit of time \(t\) , we normalized cell numbers to the initial timepoint 0 ( \({y}_{0}\) ) and fitted an exponential function to the growth curves:

Exponential function fitting was done with the MATLAB ‘fit’ function 51 . Linear regression model fitting to different combinations of growth parameters was done with the ‘fitlm’ MATLAB function.

Estimation of drug sensitivity parameters

Drug response data obtained from long-term live-cell imaging was smoothed using a robust local regression approach of weighted linear least squares and a 2 nd degree polynomial model (‘rloess’ MATLAB function). Following the method established by Hafner et al. 30 , we computed the growth rate inhibition ( GR ) at time t and for each dose c as follows:

where \(k\left(c,\, t\right)\) is the growth rate under drug treatment and \(k\left(0\right)\) is the growth rate of untreated cells. Drug response parameters were retrieved by fitting the dose-dependent GR -values to a sigmoid curve using the following equation:

where the fitted parameters are as described in Hafner et al. 30 . Standard EC 50 -values were calculated by fitting final nucleus counts, normalized to the respective count of the control, to the following sigmoidal function:

where E min corresponds to the minimum response, restricted to values between 0 and 1, and h is the hill slope of the response curve, constrained to 0.5–10. Sigmoidal function fitting steps were done with the MATLAB functions ‘fit’ ( GR metrics) or ‘lsqnonlin’ ( EC 50 value) 51 . Hierarchical clustering analysis was implemented with the MATLAB ‘clustergram’ function using an Euclidian distance and average linkage method 51 . To account for the different tested dose ranges across drugs for clustering, GEC 50 -values were normalized to the dose at GR inf . Pearson’s linear correlation coefficients across drug sensitivity metrics were computed using the MATLAB ‘corr’ function. For the comparison of cellular growth dynamics to drug doses evoking the maximum tested effect, we chose growth curves corresponding to the doses closest to the determined GR inf -values.

Time-of-day sensitivity evaluation

Drug response data of time-of-day treatment experiments was smoothed using a moving average (‘smoothdata’ MATLAB function). Final nucleus counts were normalized to the nucleus count at the respective time of treatment. ToD response data from U-2 OS WT and Cry1/2 -dKO cell lines were obtained from confluency readouts in the brightfield channel. Time-of-day response curves were generated from the relative final responses of each treatment timepoint to the final response at timepoint 0 and interpolated using the ‘smoothing spline’ function in MATLAB. The smoothing parameter was set to 0.7. The maximum range across smoothed time-of-day responses ( ToD MR ) was calculated by subtraction of the minimum from the maximum relative response. To assess whether the smoothing of response data introduces artifacts into ToD MR estimates, we performed linear regression analysis between ToD MR -values from raw and spline smoothed data using the ‘fitlm’ MATLAB function and confirmed a high positive correlation (Supplementary Fig.  7a ). ToD MR -values were clustered as described for the drug sensitivity parameters, with missing data points substituted by values from the closest relevant column, adhering to the ‘nearest-neighbor’ principle. Polar histograms of the treatment times with maximum and minimum benefit were generated using the ‘polarhistogram’ MATLAB function with ‘probability’ normalization to depict each bar’s height as the fraction of observations within its bin relative to the total observations.

Correlation and shapley value regression analysis

Linear regressions of cell-intrinsic features and drug-dependent ToD sensitivity have been obtained using the ‘stats’ and ‘optimize’ modules of the ‘SciPy’ and the ‘uncertainties’ package of the Python programming language. Predictions of ToD MR -values from new data was based on fitting a linear regression model to the original data that was associated with Pearson correlation coefficients ≥ 0.5, utilizing the ‘fitlm’ MATLAB function. Bland-Altman plots comparing predicted and actual ToD MR -values were generated using the ‘Bland-Altman and Correlation Plot’ package (v1.12.0.0) from MATLAB Central File Exchange (2017, Ran Klein). Live-imaging data yielding growth, drug sensitivity, and ToD sensitivity metrics from the new cell lines utilized for the predictions were based on the confluency readout due to the unviability of nuclear reporter cell lines for most models. Only the drug sensitivity metrics for MCF7 were based on nuclear counts. The relative importance of the different parameters in a multiple linear regression model is obtained by Shapley value regression via the Python ‘dominance-analysis’ package.

Circadian clock gene expression analysis

Gene expression data of circadian clock genes were obtained from the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia Dependency Map (CCLE DepMap, https://sites.broadinstitute.org/ccle/datasets , Q4 of 2022) 56 . Circadian clock genes of the individual breast cancer cell lines were clustered using the ‘clustermap’ plotting function of ‘seaborn’ with the euclidian distance metric and complete linkage method. Spearman rank correlation coefficients of circadian clock genes and drug-specific ToD sensitivity values were computed using the Spearman rank correlation algorithm of the ‘SciPy stats’ Python language module and hierarchically clustered with the correlation distance metric and single linkage method. Regression plots were obtained using the ‘jointplot’ plotting function from ‘seaborn’, showing drug-specific correlation between the ToD sensitivities and gene expression of each cell line, including their distribution, squared spearman rank correlation coefficient, p -value, and a confidence interval of 95%.

Supervised and unsupervised dimensionality reduction

Supervised dimensionality reduction by linear discriminant analysis was performed with the ‘LinearDiscriminantAnalysis’ function of the ‘sklearn discriminant_analysis’ Python language module. The default parameters were retained, using the exact full singular value decomposition solver and 1 component. Median-based binarization of the drug-dependent ToD sensitivity values was used as a target, and the resulting linear discriminant vector was plotted using random y-axis units to avoid overlapping of the data points. The robustness of the discriminative information from the LDA was tested using a leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) strategy (Supplementary Fig.  7b ). LOOCV was conducted using the ‘model_selection’ module from ‘sklearn’ in Python (v3.9.7) and implemented via the PyCharm Community Edition IDE (v2021.2.2). The contribution to the obtained discriminative information is shown in percentage for each of the circadian clock genes. Unsupervised dimensionality reduction by principal component analysis (PCA) was performed with the ‘PCA’ function of the ‘sklearn decomposition’ Python language module using the exact full singular value decomposition solver and number of components equivalent to the sample size of the corresponding drug. Further analysis of the most informative PCA components was done by drawing the biplots of the first two principal components and showing the loadings of each circadian clock gene for both components.

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the  Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

The experimental raw data and data tables generated in this study have been deposited in the Figshare database under the identifier https://figshare.com/projects/Time-of-Day-Drug-Response/180916 .  Source data are provided in this paper.

Code availability

All code used for the data analysis in this work (in MATLAB and Python) is publicly available through the dataset repository Zenodo under the identifier https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.11656060 .

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Acknowledgements

We thank Malthe Skytte Nordentoft Nielsen, as well as the laboratories of Michela Di Virgilio and Ingeborg Tinhofer-Keilholz, for their valuable feedback on our project. We are grateful to Annika Winkler and Marie Möser for their assistance with sample preparation, as well as to Sofía Peso-García and Franziska Reiher for their experimental support. Lastly, we thank Christian Gabriel and Valentina Alejandra Balde Araya for valuable feedback during the review of this manuscript. The results are part of a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) through the e:Med Juniorverbund DeepLTNBC TP3-01ZX1917C. C.E. was partially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)–RTG2424/CompCancer – project number: 377984878 and is enrolled in the doctoral program of the Berlin School of Integrative Oncology (BSIO). C.S. acknowledges support from the DFG–SCHM 3362/4–1 project number: 511886499.

Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.

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Anna-Marie Finger

Present address: Department of Anatomy, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

Francesca Müller-Marquardt

Present address: Institute of Research for Development, University of Montpellier, Montpellier, France

Johannes H. Schulte

Present address: Clinic for Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, Universitätsklinikum Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

Authors and Affiliations

Charité Comprehensive Cancer Center, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Carolin Ector, Francesca Müller-Marquardt, Ulrich Keilholz & Adrián E. Granada

Faculty of Life Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Carolin Ector

Institute for Theoretical Biology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Christoph Schmal & Hanspeter Herzel

Department of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

Jeff Didier, Sébastien De Landtsheer & Thomas Sauter

Institute for Medical Immunology, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Anna-Marie Finger & Achim Kramer

Department of Pediatric Oncology, Hematology and Stem Cell Transplantation, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany

German Cancer Consortium (DKTK), Berlin, Germany

Ulrich Keilholz & Adrián E. Granada

Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Hanspeter Herzel

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Contributions

C.E., A.K., and A.E.G. conceived and planned the experiments. C.E. performed the experiments. F.M.M. performed bioluminescence recordings of three cell lines. C.E., C.S., J.D., and S.D.L. analyzed the data. A.M.F. and A.K. supported the planning and implementation of the bioluminescence recordings. C.E., C.S., A.M.F., J.D., S.D.L., J.S., T.S., U.K, H.H., A.K., and A.E.G. contributed to the interpretation of the results. C.E. and A.E.G. wrote the manuscript. All authors provided critical feedback and helped shape the research and manuscript.

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Correspondence to Adrián E. Granada .

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Ector, C., Schmal, C., Didier, J. et al. Time-of-day effects of cancer drugs revealed by high-throughput deep phenotyping. Nat Commun 15 , 7205 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-51611-3

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-51611-3

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Research on the characteristics of oscillation combustion pulsation in swirl combustor.

1. Introduction

2. introduction to the experimental system, 2.1. centrally swirler stage combustor, 2.1.1. experimental research object, 2.1.2. layout of experimental system, 2.1.3. operating conditions, 2.2. swirl model combustor, 2.2.1. experimental research object, 2.2.2. layout of experimental system, 2.2.3. operating conditions, 3. numerical framework, 3.1. centrally swirler stage combustor, 3.2. swirl model combustor, 4. data processing methods, 4.1. signal processing method, 4.2. image processing method, 5. results and discussion, 5.1. analysis of experimental results of centrally swirler stage combustor, 5.1.1. heat release rate analysis, 5.1.2. cold state pressure signal analysis, 5.1.3. fire frequency analysis, 5.2. analysis of numerical simulation results for centrally swirler stage combustor, 5.2.1. analysis of heat release rate characteristics, 5.2.2. analysis of flame detachment characteristics, 5.2.3. cold state characteristic analysis, 5.3. experimental and simulation results verification of swirl model combustor, 5.3.1. analysis of experimental results, 5.3.2. analysis of numerical calculation results, 6. conclusions, author contributions, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Liu, C.; Ge, X.; Zhang, X.; Yang, C.; Liu, Y. Research on the Characteristics of Oscillation Combustion Pulsation in Swirl Combustor. Energies 2024 , 17 , 4164. https://doi.org/10.3390/en17164164

Liu C, Ge X, Zhang X, Yang C, Liu Y. Research on the Characteristics of Oscillation Combustion Pulsation in Swirl Combustor. Energies . 2024; 17(16):4164. https://doi.org/10.3390/en17164164

Liu, Chongyang, Xinkun Ge, Xiang Zhang, Chen Yang, and Yong Liu. 2024. "Research on the Characteristics of Oscillation Combustion Pulsation in Swirl Combustor" Energies 17, no. 16: 4164. https://doi.org/10.3390/en17164164

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The research will be conducted at universities in the united states, australia, and china. .

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The story so far: The Type 1 Diabetes Grand Challenge, a partnership between the Steve Morgan Foundation, Diabetes UK and JDRF, on Monday, August 12, 2024, announced grants of over £2.7 million for new research in the development of next-generation insulins to manage type 1 diabetes. The funding will accelerate research of insulins that imitate how healthy pancreas work, the initiative said.

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The funding will be provided to six new international research projects focused on developing the next-generation, or novel, insulins. The research will be conducted at universities in the United States, Australia, and China.

“The funded six new research projects address major shortcomings in insulin therapy. Potentially minimising the risk of hypoglycaemia through an insulin-glucagon combination would ease one of the major concerns associated with insulin therapy today. Therefore, these research projects, if successful might do no less than heralding a new era in insulin therapy,” Tim Heise, Vice Chair of Novel Insulins Scientific Advisory Panel of the Type 1 Diabetes Grand Challenge, said.

According to the Type 1 Diabetes Grand Challenge, four of the newly-funded projects are related to glucose responsive insulins (GRIs), which can respond to changing blood glucose levels.

GRIs activate only when there is a certain amount of glucose in the bloodstream and become inactive when it drops below a stipulated point. This is expected to prevent both hyperglycaemia (high blood glucose) and hypoglycaemia (low blood glucose).

Another research project focuses on developing a short-acting insulin. Among the currently available insulins, there is a delay between the administration of the drug and its action on blood glucose – even with the fastest acting variants. This can cause a spike in blood glucose levels before insulin can lower it, thus endangering the person.

The last funded project focuses on combining insulin with glucagon.

Also read: ‘Insulin’ homoeopathic tablets under CDSCO lens

Glucagon is also secreted by pancreas, and it increases blood sugar levels to prevent it from dropping below a critical level. The project relies on the concept that having both insulin and glucagon in one formulation can stabilise blood sugar levels.

GRI projects

The four GRI projects are being researched at Monash University, Australia, Wayne State University, U.S., Jinhua Institute of Zhejiang University in China, and University of Notre Dame, U.S.

The Monash University project involves development of a second generation of nano sugar-insulin system, based on advanced nanotechnology. In the first-generation experiment of this insulin delivery system, insulin and a glucose-sensing molecule in tiny particles called nano sugars are injected under the skin. These nano sugars react to very small changes in blood glucose and release insulin only when glucose levels are outside a range, without any intervention from the patient. The aim of this experiment is to reduce the number of times people with type 1 have to inject insulin.

Researchers at the Wayne University are working to develop a “smart insulin” which can detect changes in blood glucose levels and respond by releasing the right amount of insulin at the right time. Chemical engineer Zhiqiang Cao’s team plans to develop a smarter insulin which is “more” sensitive to changing glucose levels, because some novel insulins are not as powerful as the currently available ones, resulting in higher doses to obtain a similar impact on blood glucose levels.

The third project, conducted by researchers at the Jinhua Institute of Zhejiang University in China, involves novel insulins that respond immediately to rising blood glucose levels. This novel insulin forms a reservoir of insulin under the skin once it is injected, and can therefore be used either daily or weekly. The experiment uses an insulin/polymer complex as the starting point and adds a safe glucose-sensing molecule to it. In the project, the team will improve the GRI and ensure all components work together effectively. The next step will be to make sure the GRI releases insulin properly from the reservoir, especially when blood glucose levels are high.

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame, U.S, developed a smart insulin delivery system that uses tiny particles called nanocomplexes, which contain insulin. These nanocomplexes can also be injected under the skin to create a reservoir to automatically release insulin if blood sugar rises. The project will be developed further and tested in pigs exposed to relevant real-life scenarios.

Ultrafast insulin

Scientists at the Stanford University, U.S. are working on developing and testing an ultrafast-acting insulin that’s only active when needed and could reduce the risk of blood glucose highs and lows in people with type 1 diabetes.

The current fast-acting insulins are a group of six molecules which need to be separated to form single insulin molecules to regulate blood sugar. Sometimes, even these single molecules cluster into pairs, hindering the blood sugar regulation. The new research will focus on designing an insulin molecule that doesn’t cluster so that it acts in the bloodstream quickly. The design is based on insulin molecules found in the venom from the cone snail, a type of underwater snail that uses insulin as a weapon.

Insulin + glucagon

A team of researchers at the Indiana University, U.S. will combine insulin and glucagon in their project, to prevent the highs and lows in blood glucose. The molecules has been tested in rats with type 1 diabetes and found that it can reduce the risk of hypoglycemia both at mealtimes and throughout the day. The experiment will also test the stability of the molecule and explore different ways to manufacture it.

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