Taking Good Field Notes: Efficient Ways to Make Good Observations

In order to take good, accurate field notes, you first must be prepared with a research question: Why are are out to take field notes in the first place? Whether it's to observe the interactions students have with each other on campus, or how the waitress at the local diner treats her customers, you need to have an accurate and precise reason for wanting to take notes. If you head to a place to observe and study people without an accurate reason, you will find yourself extremely overwhelmed with all of the situations taking place, i.e. with the waitress and customer example you may get distracted by what another table is conversing about, or whets going on in the kitchen, and so forth.

After you have decided what your research question is, you need to actually go take the notes. With several things in mind, you can take accurate field notes.

First, you must be aware that if others notice you, they may feel compelled to act differently than they normally would behave because they are being observed. It is best to try to avoid being noticed, so that you can get people behaving in their natural states.

Second, you must be prepared to write horrible, write short handed, and write a lot. Taking field notes, no matter how long or how short of a period of time you devote to the observations, you will be taking a lot of notes. You can later go through your notes and correct any spelling errors or type them up for clarity and proper presentation that is not your concern right now. You must be prepared to write a lot quickly as you will be observing many things and want to write as much as you can from what you are seeing.

Third, you must put any judgments or prior biases away. Whether or not you like the fact that students speak on cell phones or use IPOD players, or whether you know the waitress at the diner, you must observe coming from a purely sociological natural state as if you knew nothing about these people, what they were doing, and so forth. If it's impossible for you to ignore your own judgments and bias' it may be best to pick a different research question and observational study because your field notes will be extremely bias' and thus reflect false information.

Regardless of what you are observing, taking field notes can be a very accurate sociological study and with the proper technique can be beneficial to you and your study.