Assess The Importance Of Field Research Methods

One of the most functional significance of field research is collecting first-hand data. However, nowadays, the method training for the field research is still inadequate. This week’s reading materials are presented guiding roles for IR students and scholars in this area: Christopher Lamont illustrates the importance of field research and he also introduces specific skills when the challenges occur; William S. Harvey notices several practical strategies of elite interview; and Lisa Harrison & Theresa Callan demonstrate a number of key points of focus groups method.
What is the field research? According to Lamont, Field research is the process of primary data collection, which accesses new primary data through interactions with human subjects. …show more content…
According to Harvey, elites have significant decision-making influence. Therefore, their characteristics provide a unique challenge for researchers to interview them. Most of elite subjects are sensitive about interviews, their time is limited and they play the important roles in their field. Aside from getting the trust, effective elite interviews are those that are able to easily adjust their style and make the interviewer feel as comfortable as possible. Also, we need to be careful about cultural contexts as well as our tone of the questions …show more content…
Harrison and Callan mention that “the major weakness of focus groups is that it is impossible to know how representative the group are of the population being researched.” but they also said that if the focus groups method is used in the planning stage, so the “sampling to ensure representativeness may or may not be crucial to the study.” For researchers, focus groups method is a good way to prepare our study by observation. But it can be highly time-consuming and costly. Besides, researchers must ensure diversity in outcomes, which means that relying on a single focus group is