Entering a Fluid Research Field

Abstract

Obtaining access to the research field and participants is an essential part of conducting research successfully, particularly in ethnographic and qualitative research. It can vary to a considerable extent and usually requires time and expertise. Even so, it has been noticed that some researchers do not describe their access to the research field in their research reports. This chapter presents challenges regarding access and entrance to the field and how these connected to data collection during a research project about learning in an online community. The study aimed at understanding characteristics and meanings of participation in an existing online community built around a Free/Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS): Blender (www.blender.org/). This community was taken as an example of a virtual distributed community of practice in which people voluntarily develop, maintain and contribute to open source software and thereby produce knowledge and learning. The aim was to produce a ‘thick description’ of the Blender software learning ecosystem through an ethnographic study. The first challenge to be discussed in the chapter pertains to accessing and interacting with a field that doesn’t exist physically, is fluid and intersects online and offline spaces, and has no gatekeepers. A second challenge looks into access to the field in terms of relationships and authenticity. Because the ethnographer was not immersed in a physically delimited field and all the participants were geographically distributed, establishing trust and authenticity were particularly challenging.Some aspects of the challenges were specific to the community that was studied but most of the decisions and processes that were developed are relevant for any study focusing on existing online communities with distributed participation and leadership.