This is a 4 part series. Check out the other entires below:
1. Setting Up the Plan
2. Lessons from the Field
3. Organizing and Analyzing Data
4. Communicating Your Results
You’re now in field half way across the world, have jet lag, don’t speak the language, and are planning to conduct intense and fantastic research over the next few weeks. What do you do?
Tip #1: Plan 1-2 buffer days
Lesson from India
[tweetmeme]First, get some sleep. Plan 1-2 buffer days between arriving in field and starting the research to deal with jetlag, possible travel delays, and most importantly, to iron out kinks. Meet your local agency as soon as you can and plan to spend a half day with them. Build some rapport, perhaps over a cup of tea. Your success is highly dependent on your working relationship with them. Go over the schedule, participants, discussion guides, and get all of your contact phone numbers. Don’t forget the driver’s number. In my experience, this is one of the biggest ways to throw off the schedule: a misunderstanding about the meeting time.
If you are doing research at a facility, go there and ensure everything works. I once did a concept evaluation in India and when we went to the facility to check it out, we found out the audio didn’t feed into the observation room. After hours of a technician trying to fix it, we gave up and had to book another facility last minute. It meant that we lost our first participant, but at least we got data for all the rest.
Tip #2: Schedule a pilot
Lesson from China
An absolute must: Schedule a pilot (read: extra, possible throw-away, data). I cannot stress the importance of this enough. During a pilot in China, I found out: my video recorder ran out of battery half way through a session, the order of the discussion was unnatural, and there was way more traffic than we anticipated so we had to eat lunch while in the car to save time.
Having a pilot will also give you a chance to test out the translator. It seems simple, but getting a good translator is one of the big challenges with international research. First, you have to decide whether you want simultaneous or consecutive translation. I prefer simultaneous because it doesn’t interrupt the flow of the conversation and thought process of the participant, and doesn’t eat up session time like consecutive does. But, beware: getting a really good simultaneous translator is really hard in some places and it is usually a lot more expensive. Stress the importance of getting a ‘UN quality’ translator to your local agency and ask them to prepare a backup in case you are not satisfied with the one they provided after using them in the pilot.
Tip #3 : Explore the environment
Lesson from South Africa
Schedule an afternoon to explore the environment with your driver and local research expert early during your time in field. This will help you understand your participants’ lives and put what they say into context. It will also instigate discussion and questions for the local expert that you couldn’t have known were relevant to you. For example: On a project in South Africa, we were investigating financial transactions and planned to spend time at people’s homes, banks and at the shopping plazas. From exploring some neighborhoods, we noticed a lot of neighborhood pubs. Inquiring about them further and going inside revealed that there were a lot of transactions taking place in there as well; not only for alcohol but also cell phone airtime, cigarettes, and snacks. This discovery led to a few late addition interviews with pub owners and resulted in some really fruitful data.
Tip #4: Be organized about your artifact collection
Lesson from the Philippines
My last tip for a successful time in field: be organized about the artifacts you collect. It is really easy to take a ton of pictures, video, brochures, etc and end up with an overwhelming mess when you start data analysis. Figure out what’s important to you and write a list to make sure you capture all of those things consistently across sessions. Review this list after the pilot. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself only taking photos of unique things over time, like a pet goat, but when you come back you’ll have pictures like this and not enough good exterior home shots, for example. Yes, the pet goat thing really happened to me in the Philippines, one of my first international research projects.
During your time doing international research, you will not only grow your skills as a researcher, but you might also become a scheduler, technician, videographer, photographer, project manager, lunch maker, charades expert, and a plethora of other things. I hope my tips and experiences will leave you a little more successful in whichever of these professions you fall into while in field!