became well known scholars of Indian society. is that it provides a very rich and detailed picture of life from the perspective of the ‘insider’. It is this insider perspective that is the greatest return on the substantial investment of time and effort that field work demands. Most other research methods cannot claim to have a detailed knowledge of the ‘field’ over a fairly long period of time — they are usually based on a short and quick field visit.
Field work allows for the correction of initial impressions, which may often be mistaken or biased. It also permits the researcher to track changes in the subject of interest, and also to see the impact of different situations or contexts. For example, different aspects of social structure or culture may be brought out in a good harvest year and in a bad harvest year; people could behave differently when employed or unemployed, and so on. Because s/he spends a long period in ‘full time’ engagement with the field, a participant observer can avoid many of the errors or biases that surveys, questionnaires or short term observation are inevitably subject to.
But like all research methods, field work also has some weaknesses — otherwise all social scientists would be using this method alone! Field work by its very nature involves very long drawn out and intensive research usually by a single scholar working alone. As such, it can only cover a very small part of the world — generally a single village or small community. We can never be sure whether what the anthropologist or sociologist observed during fieldwork is really very common in the larger community (i.e.
in other villages, region, or in the country) or whether it is exceptional. This is probably the biggest disadvantage of field work. Another important limitation of field work method is that we are never sure whether it is the voice of the anthropologist we are hearing or that of the people being studied. Of course, the aim is to represent the views of the people being studied, but it is always possible