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2012 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

6. Doing Fieldwork

Authors : Dr. Andrew Crabtree, Dr. Mark Rouncefield, Dr. Peter Tolmie

Published in: Doing Design Ethnography

Publisher: Springer London

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Abstract

Our aim in this chapter is to elaborate some of the key issues involved in actually doing fieldwork – i.e., in going and looking at what people do for yourself and developing competence in their work. We focus particularly on a range of practical matters involved in getting into a setting, getting on with a study, and gathering resources sufficient for you to be able to provide a rich account of its work. This includes securing access, gaining acceptance in the setting, the need for informed consent, figuring out where to start your studies, developing vulgar competence in the work and, quite crucially, assembling a corpus of data or an ‘ethnographic record’ with which to develop an analytic account of work that reveals its real world, real time organisation.

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previous chapter Dispensing with Method
next chapter Analysing the Ethnographic Record
Footnotes
1
See, for example, the 1998 Data Protection Act in the UK, the EU Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC, and in the US the Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Human Research Protections Human Subjects Research (45 CFR 46, Sub-part A, Sec. 116).
 
2
Just as there was, you may recall, more to Cocke and Disney’s discovery of the optical pulsar than simply pursuing ‘proper’ scientific method as we elaborated in the previous chapter.
 
Literature
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Metadata
Title
Doing Fieldwork
Authors
Dr. Andrew Crabtree
Dr. Mark Rouncefield
Dr. Peter Tolmie
Copyright Year
2012
Publisher
Springer London
Book
Doing Design Ethnography

Print ISBN: 978-1-4471-2725-3

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-4471-2726-0

Copyright Year: 2012

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2726-0_6