Importance Of Fieldwork

Just as “behind every successful man is a woman”, fieldwork is also integral to the success of a research study. The fieldwork team is responsible for collecting quality data.

In a social research study, there are six parts to it: literature review, construction of the questionnaire, pilot testing of questionnaire, data collection and fieldwork, data cleaning, data analysis. Every part of the research study is significant. The fieldwork comprises of quantitative and qualitative research. Data collection and fieldwork is responsible for maintaining the quality of the research results, recruitment, training and the management of interviewers. During the recruitment, the fieldwork team chooses skilled and experienced interviewers. In the midst

The fieldwork focuses on the quality produced by interviewers and data collected from the respondents.

Significance of fieldwork

The fieldwork has two main focus; quality of the data, and that the interview is done in the most appropriate and respectful manner.

The fieldwork team is responsible for handling interviewer training, quality control checks and interviewer shadowing. The interviewer training lasts over a period of 4 days. The training includes some general interviewing techniques, tips on gaining respondents’ cooperation, common scenarios and ways to handle such crisis etc. The main purpose of the interviewer training is to ensure that interviewers remain objective and ethical throughout the interview and the data collected is of quality. For example, interviewers are not allowed to prompt the respondents with their own assumptions of the questions as this may sway the thoughts of the respondents, resulting in a fault in the result. To ensure objectivity in the data result, interviewers have to take precaution in the way the interview is being

Many respondents are often wary of giving a real feedback, and this could potentially affect the overall data collected. This is especially so whenever audio recording is involved and when interviewers introduced themselves to be from National University of Singapore (NUS). As a result, respondents limit themselves from expressing their truthful feelings to the questionnaire. Data results would altered to become less accurate as well. Furthermore, some respondents may be reluctant to do the interview, hence, to finish up the interview quickly, they provide superficial answers that are not true to their heart. The primary concern here is that data collected may not be representative of the overall