Talking about a Field Study & Field Research Method: Just a Little Description

Someday in one case, if researcher is a person who comes from different culture toward the native location of the subject that would be researched. There must be a meeting of different cultures (culture encounter).

With the location of research and the subject of research like this, researcher will enter to environmental research with among a truly defocus, free from preconception and follow the currents flowing in the research environment. Researcher will involve in natural settings and observe empirical evidence. These circumstance straights to qualitative research approach.

Research strategy that will be used in the qualitative research approach is ethnography. More explanation of ethnography can be found in fields research. Main types of field research are: ethnography, ethno-methodology, and the phenomenological study. Purposes of the field research are the data collection and theory construction. In Sociology, ethnography usually called a field study.

Qualitative research is multi-method in focus, involving an interpretive, naturalistic approach to its subject matter. This mean that qualitative researchers study thing in natural setting, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in term of the meaning people bring to them. Qualitative research involves the studied use and collection of a variety of empirical material (Groat & Wang, 2002).

Ethnography typically refers to fieldwork (alternatively, participant-observation) conducted by a single investigator who lives with and lives like those who are studied, usually for a year or more. (John Van Maanen,1996). Ethnography literary means portrait of people. Ethnography is a written description of particular culture – the customs, beliefs, and behavior – based on information collected through fieldwork. (Marvin Harris & Orna Johnson, 2000).

Ethnography is the art and science of describing a group or culture. The description may be small tribal group in an exotic land or a classroom in middle-class suburbia (David M. Fatterman, 1998) (Genzuk, 2005). Different from grounded theory that emergent theory, ethnography research culminates in rich and full delineation of particular setting that persuades a wide audience of it human validity (Groat & Wang, 2002). Ethnography can be reached from art preservation and cultural view, more a descriptive effort than analytical way.

Field research is a form of research that aims to reveal the meaning given by members of the community on the behavior and the reality around. Three important thing in this research are selection of appropriate sites, sources of information that can be, and distinctive. According to Neuman (2003), field research method has got to compile those requirements. Field research method will be powerful; if researchers have a different background from that indigenous culture would be studied. So the field research method suggested that researcher came from a different environment.

In the field research was known verstehen term. The meaning of term is: seeing reality through the views of the subject in that field. Observations conducted based on this. The analysis involved researchers as research instruments. Thus, field research become encounter culture; between own researchers culture in the another hand and the subject of research culture in the other hand.

The field research method started from the breakdown. Breakdown is the starting point of research when irregularities occur. They can be presumed that there are any deviations such as between the researchers and the environment; an observation on culture; events; people; and values that foreign and can not be understood and explained by the tradition of the original researchers. Breakdown is very important and determines whether the field research conducted research that will produce successful, or not. Therefore, one important aspect in the field research is the researchers should have what by Neuman (2003) called: a gesture foreignness.

In the field research of anthropology study, the time allocated to research can be very long. Enculturation research needs for a long time and layered. Koentjaraningrat (1990) offers a compromise within the method, called Controlled Comparison. In this architecture, researchers can choose three sites where believed have the process enculturation likewise. Firstly, location has enculturation little experience in a short time. Secondly, location has more experienced enculturation in a longer time. And thirdly, location has the most experienced enculturation time in the relative length of the third. By comparing the phenomenon that occurs in three locations, researchers can build models from process architecture enculturation that occur in time.