Fieldwork Ia practice questions.

A student's observation notes read: 'The stallholder was annoyed with the inspector.' Under the conventions for an observation record, the entry should be rewritten as

• 'The stallholder raised her voice and turned back to her scales while the inspector was still speaking.'
• 'The stallholder was annoyed, which is typical of traders when an inspection is under way.'
• 'There was tension at that end of the market, as anyone standing nearby would have felt.'
• 'The stallholder appeared annoyed, although an observer can of course never know another person's state of mind with certainty.'

Answer: 'The stallholder raised her voice and turned back to her scales while the inspector was still speaking.'

The record holds what could be seen and heard; annoyance is an inference the analysis may later argue for. Hedging the inference, as the last option does, does not turn it back into an observation.

After a first observation at a village bus stand, a student finds that her notes record who waited and for how long, but give no purchase on why some passengers were let on ahead of others. For the second of the four standard level activities — the methodological and conceptual extension — she should

• repeat the first observation exactly as before, so that the two records can be set side by side and checked against one another
• narrow the question and change the method, for example by asking those waiting how the order of boarding is decided
• leave the site and find one where the answer can be seen without any further work being needed
• hold the question and the method steady but stay for longer, since more material of the same kind will settle the point in the end

Answer: narrow the question and change the method, for example by asking those waiting how the order of boarding is decided

At standard level the second activity is a methodological and conceptual extension: the first round of fieldwork is used to sharpen both the question and the way it is pursued. More of the same observation cannot answer a question that observation alone could not reach.

A student's write-up is four hundred words over the limit. The material she should cut first is

• the general background on the topic drawn from reading, which supports no claim of her own
• the quotations from her interviews, since these can be summarised more briefly in her own words
• the account of how her interviewees were selected, which the reader can infer from the analysis
• the passage in which she reports a case that did not fit her conclusion

Answer: the general background on the topic drawn from reading, which supports no claim of her own

Background reading is the only one of the four that carries no marks in a fieldwork write-up. The other three are exactly what is being assessed: the evidence, the account of how it was gathered, and the honesty of the analysis.

A student plans to record her interviews at a busy café. Setting aside the question of permission, the practical consideration she should weigh most carefully is that

• recorded interviews carry more evidential weight than notes taken during a conversation
• background noise may make much of the recording unusable, so notes should be taken as well
• a recording removes the need to write anything down until the analysis begins
• café interviews are more likely to produce candid answers than interviews held anywhere else

Answer: background noise may make much of the recording unusable, so notes should be taken as well

A recording that cannot be transcribed is worse than no recording, because the student will have stopped taking notes. The standard practice is to record and to keep brief notes at the same time, so that the interview survives a failed file.

In her written account a student replaces every participant's name with initials, but names the school, the street and the club, and describes one participant as the only man who coaches the junior team. The weakness of this arrangement is that

• initials are unacceptable in written work and full pseudonyms should be used instead
• naming the location makes the account more useful to a reader and should therefore be extended, so that a reader can judge how far the findings are likely to travel
• the descriptions and the named location identify the participants to anyone local, so the initials protect nobody
• the identification matters only for the participants who were interviewed rather than observed

Answer: the descriptions and the named location identify the participants to anyone local, so the initials protect nobody

Concealment has to hold against the readers who could actually recognise someone, and those are people who know the setting. Where a role is unique, the role itself has to be generalised or the site left unnamed; removing the name alone accomplishes nothing.

A student's notes run: 'Two women came in at 4.10 and sat at the back they looked uncomfortable maybe because the meeting had started.' The convention that would repair this entry is to

• record only the arrival time and omit any impression the observer formed at the time, since an impression formed on the spot cannot afterwards be checked
• rewrite the whole entry in continuous prose once the observation has finished
• keep only what was said aloud, since anything else cannot be verified afterwards
• separate observation from inference typographically, so the guess is marked as the observer's own

Answer: separate observation from inference typographically, so the guess is marked as the observer's own

The impression is worth keeping: it may be the beginning of a finding, and it records what the observer noticed at the time. What must not happen is that it becomes indistinguishable from the record months later, when the analysis is being written.