摘要：
Fieldwork strategies are showing increasing concern about contributing
something of value to the local community, where one has conducted
research. This concern for payback has centered on countermanding
the obvious, visible benefits to individual researchers, or a research
team, than whatever contributions have gone to the community, which
are likely to be much less visible. Alternatives to direct community
contributions include sharing expertise with those that provide
basic services and advocates who work on behalf of the population.
Research with farm workers requires shifts in field techniques that
take into account continuing geographic mobility, irregular employment,
and a precarious economic situation experienced by the study population.
This article describes the author’s experience in conducting
long-term ethnography among farm workers across multiple sites along
the eastern United States. Strategies of fieldwork among this mobile
and hard-to-reach population are compared against standards of fieldwork
that have been articulated in four classic monographs from the social
sciences. An overview of findings from research among agricultural
workers is offered as evidence of the appropriateness of reliance
on emerging field strategies that consider the safety and well-being
of the population, simultaneous with selecting what eventually become
valid and reliable techniques of data collection.
