Human beings always have a lot of questions, every one of us is no exception, from big philosophical questions like “who am I, where I come from, where I am going” to small life questions like what I eat today, with whom, where to eat, we constantly ask.
Our questions are actually research in a broad sense. The essence or purpose of this research is to find the answer to a question. However, the answer cannot emerge out of thin air, so the way to find the answer is actually through data collection: interviewing friends around to get first-hand data; or the information found on the internet is actually a method of using secondary data. This method belongs to Observation in field work, which is to collect data through field observation. Such research ideas based on data collection are called empirical study, while those not based on data are conceptual study or prescriptive article.
If you look closely, you will find that most articles on social sciences are prescriptive. For example, how to make public policies? “First, transparency, and second, law-based.” Those principles are all right, but where is the data? What variables are analyzed? Are they to be used in any policy and under any circumstances? This kind of empirical study that is not based on data (not necessarily quantitative data) is not empirical study.
Fieldwork is the research model of the 20th century by anthropologists Rodion Malinovsky, and he lived in New Guinea Islands for several years, learning the local native language, and the local people live together, participate in the local party and ritual, and after back to England published a detailed introduction to the local culture and trade patterns of ethnography. Going to a particular site to do fieldwork and record it as an ethnography has been a rite of passage for every anthropologist since he began; familiarity with the local language and close interaction with subjects became essential skills for anthropologists. If you don’t leave school to live with your subjects for a year or two, you’re not an academically mature anthropologist. Scholars like Paul Stoller, who spent seven or eight years in West Africa, are not uncommon, and a lifestyle of long-term fieldwork is crucial for anthropologists.
Is social change research good or bad? In some cases, both are correct. When you need to use research to solve real-world problems, social change research is great. In other words, if you want to know something more basic, more traditional research methods are more appropriate because there is more internal validity.
References:
Gruman, J.A.,Schneider, F.W., & Coutts, L.A. (2017). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.