Having time outside of the field to reflect upon your thoughts about what you’ve seen and the meaning of those observations is crucial to developing analysis in field research studies. This is often where the analysis of field research data begins. Field researchers typically spend several hours typing up field notes after each observation has occurred. We’ve already noted that carefully paying attention while in the field is important so too is what goes on immediately upon exiting the field. Often field notes will develop from a more descriptive state to an analytic state when the field researcher exits a given observation period, messy jotted notes or recordings in hand (or in some cases, literally on hand), and sits at a computer to type up those notes into a more readable format. Analyzing field note data is a process that occurs over time, beginning at the moment a field researcher enters the field and continuing as interactions are happening in the field, as the researcher writes up descriptive notes, and as the researcher considers what those interactions and descriptive notes mean. are notes that include the researcher’s impressions about his observations. Analytic field notes Notes that include the researcher’s impressions about her or his observations. Here we’ll consider analytic field notes.

In Section 10.4 'Field Notes', we considered field notes that are mostly descriptive in nature. Writing and analyzing field notes involves moving from description to analysis.

Field notes