Fieldwork

A Life Lesson in Ambiguity

This month marks my 30 year anniversary with the Department of Veterans Affairs. I never thought that I would remain with the VA; however, the joys of being a public servant cannot be matched. My career has been fun, varied, and never boring, with many opportunities to do good work. I have been a researcher, an educator, and an organizational development consultant, focusing on teams, conflict and communication, and leadership. It has been a great pleasure in recent years to see more and more anthropologists come into the public sector. As I thought about what makes us successful as facilitators and brokers between government and the people it serves, it was fieldwork that came to mind.

Anthropological fieldwork is a unique and strange experience that has the capability to challenge and change expectations. In many ways, it is a rite of passage but it has more than a symbolic function as a gateway to being a scholar. Fieldwork is both an exploration of your subjects and yourself.

My first fieldwork experience was for my dissertation. This experience gave me the understanding of how to work with people on their terms in their environment and how to match seemingly unrelated pieces to make a whole. This method of interaction is part of everything I have done in the VA from research to organizational development.

Getting to this understanding, however, involved a great deal of distress. My dissertation did not start off as a traumatic experience. I (thought that I) knew what fieldwork would be like. I had followed the rules and I knew what was expected of me. To this point, my life was planned and structured. My fieldwork site was only three miles from my house, in an older revitalizing neighborhood in downtown St. Louis. I had been invited into the neighborhood by one of the neighborhood associations, composed of young people moving back into the inner city, to work with the older residents who had remained in the neighborhood after “white flight” occurred several decades earlier.

What could be easier? And yet, my first feeling on encountering my fieldwork site was sheer unmitigated terror. Suddenly, I was on my own. After a month, my fear had been replaced by depression. I was truly a failure – possibly the worst researcher in the history of science. No one wanted to talk to me. I could think of hundreds of other careers I could have and should have pursued.

What could happen that would change my views so drastically? Was my experience unique? My difficulties were basically the same as those faced by all new researchers (and by most of us as we continue research). Researchers go from a planned environment with specific expectations and feedback determined by others to a totally unstructured environment. Research is supposed to be straight, coherent, measurable, linear. Things do proceed, but not always in an orderly fashion. Neat timetables, dear to the hearts of committees and funding agencies, are usually the first things to be tossed out. The research experience is carefully described in the research proposal, but reality changes or perhaps proposed reality never exists.

Like many young researchers, one is overwhelmed with feelings of helplessness, anxiety, and a profound sense of being unworthy. Surely, no other scholar has ever floundered like this: not enough articles, not enough research, something missed, bad hypotheses, unfit to be a scientist. These thoughts become unwelcome but constant bosom companions.

Mastering these feelings involves learning to live with ambiguity. You can attempt constantly to restructure your internal map of what should be happening, you can push facts into your pattern, or you can resign yourself to some loss of control. Letting go of our rigid preconceived ideas of what we will find enables us to make discoveries that are often much more exciting.

My initial disappointment and failure to gain entry to the group were very discouraging but very valuable. I eventually did find a sponsor who gave me entrée to the older population and credibility, but giving up the official pathway caused me to find different things, re-think my expectations, and ultimately understand my results.

I realized that my expectations about these older persons and my view of their interactions were wrong. I expected to find a geriatric population that had not been able to leave when their neighbors had. I believed that only by clinging together in community could such a group survive in the relatively hostile urban environment. I did not find a single, closed and static community, fighting for survival. Instead, I found dynamic and inter-woven groups. As members and/or institutions left, networks were called into play and other institutions and leaders were available to take over their functions.

I discovered that for Hyde Park’s older residents, their ability to change and their linkages were major factors in their strength and their neighborhood’s survival. These were exciting findings and their importance went beyond both Hyde Park and my dissertation. I realized that they were also important factors in my strength and survival as a scholar. Like Hyde Park’s residents, I, too, became flexible. I gave up my preconceived biases and my need for absolute structure. I became confident that I could handle problems and accept ambiguity.

This moment in field research happens to all anthropologists. It is what separates us academically, methodologically, and personally from other academic disciplines. Unlike the bench researcher or the clinical scientist, our whole orientation points us toward the ability to reframe and reformulate our hypotheses when our preconceived ideas don’t fit reality. This training and expertise makes anthropologists perfectly suited to work in the public sector, where each stakeholder has a different view of what is happening and what should be happening.

Treating each of our experiences and interactions as anthropological fieldwork gives us the ability to enter into new situations with open eyes and open hands, and makes us valuable in helping to foster understanding and find solutions for those we serve.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the Department of Veterans Affairs or the United States government.

Linda Nichols is a health services researcher at the Memphis Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Professor, Departments of Preventive and Internal Medicine, University of Tennessee Health Science Center at Memphis. She is a medical anthropologist with interests in dementia caregiving, family caregiving for military personnel, and organizational development. One special area of focus is how generational, cultural and regional differences affect leadership, organizations and health care behaviors. She is the Co-Director of the Caregiver Center at the Memphis VA Medical Center. As part of VA’s national caregiver program, the Center provides training to VA staff across the country to work with dementia, SCI and TBI caregivers and with spouses of Veterans.

Sarah Ono, Heather Schacht Reisinger, and Samantha L. Solimeo are contributing editors of Anthropology in the Public Sector.

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/02/04/fieldwork/