70 Field Notes

The aim with field notes is to record your observations as straightforwardly and, while in the field, as quickly as possible in a way that makes sense to you. Field notes are the first—and a necessary—step toward developing quality analysis. They are also the record that affirms what you observed. In other words, field notes are not to be taken lightly or overlooked as unimportant; however, they are not usually intended for anything other than the researcher´s own purposes as it relates to recollections of people, places and things related to the research project.

Some say that there are two different kinds of field notes: descriptive and analytic. Though the lines between what counts as “description” and what counts as “analysis” can become blurred, the distinction is nevertheless useful when thinking about how to write and how to interpret field notes. In this section, we will focus on descriptive field notes. Descriptive field notes are notes that simply describe a field researcher’s observations as straightforwardly as possible. These notes typically do not contain explanations of or comments about those observations. Instead, the observations are presented on their own, as clearly as possible. In the following section, we will define and examine the uses and writing of analytic field notes more closely.