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27 Soc. Probs. 209 (1979-1980)
Field Research in Minority Communities: Ethical, Methodological and Political Observations by an Insider

handle is hein.journals/socprob27 and id is 221 raw text is: SOCIAL PROBLEMS, Vol. 27, No. 2, December 1979 FIELD RESEARCH IN MINORITY COMMUNITIES: ETHICAL, METHODOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL OBSERVATIONS BY AN INSIDER* MAXINE BACA ZINN The University of Michigan-Flint This paper reviews issues in field research in minority communities. The general question, Where shall minority research come from? is posed, then considerable attention is focused on the insider-outsider controversy-especially its importance for Chicanos in the social sciences. It is argued that minority researchers have cer- tain empirical and methodological advantages in conducting field research, but also face unique problems in simultaneously addressing ethical, methodological and political concerns. The author's field research experience among Chicano families is then drawn on for general implications for insider research in minority communities. In the past decade the social science literature on minority research has expanded greatly. Much of it is critical of earlier findings and of the relationships between researchers and minority peoples. The first critique is conceptual, emphasizing that inappropriate assumptions and frameworks have produced distorted accounts of minority group life. The second is political, stressing that the relationship between social researchers and the people they study has been un- equal at best and exploitative at worst: researchers take information and eventually receive pro- fessional advancement, but the minority people receive nothing for the time and information they provide. Some social scientists who study minority groups have experienced compelling pressures to re- examine their concepts and methods and to change their relationships with the people they study (Moore, 1973). Some critics of past research in minority communities have called for the use of field research in studying minority groups, arguing that this technique -better sensitizes in- vestigators to the true nature of the community and its members (Montero, 1977:71), and that more neutral and detached approaches are incapable of grasping social realities. Field research-here a generic team for observing events in their natural setting-requires first- hand involvement in the communities being studied. Because it can capture ongoing behavior and meaning in terms of the people being studied (Schatzman and Strauss, 1973:13), field research is particularly appealing to those who see the distortions in earlier research as coming from frame- works and conceptions imposed from the outside. Although many scholars have chosen field research as a corrective strategy, the literature on fieldwork processes (such as entering the field, and developing relationships of exchange and trust) does not adequately address all the special problems of conducting research in minority communities. Far greater attention has been devoted to the conceptual and ethical problems of minority research than to its methodological problems. Not only have the techniques of studying minorities remained largely uncodified (Montero, 1977:2), but there is very little information on the unique conditions faced by minority scholars conducting research in minority communities. Wax (1979:513) has observed recently that a fieldworker's gender, age, prestige, expertise or ethnic identity may limit or determine what he or she can accomplish. There is now a growing literature on the effects of gender in field research (e.g., Golde, 1970; Easterday et al., 1977; War- ren, 1977), but there is almost none on the effects of ethnic or racial identity in the field. For ex- ample, a recent volume of the Journal of Social Issues (44:1977) devoted to research among racial and cultural minorities has only one paper on the problems of the minority researcher studying minority people (Maykovich, 1977). * Revised version of a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Western Social Science Association, April 28, 1978, Denver, Colorado.

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