Field research in political science: practices and principles "Fieldwork continues to be the most productive and exciting part of what we do." Philippe Schmitter (quoted in Munck and Snyder 2007, 337) Fieldwork is "one of the more disagreeable activities that humanity has fashioned for itself."
While observers of China have always paid attention to the “base-level” administrative institutions and mass organizations created by the Communist party-state, urban Residents' Committees (RCs; jumin weiyuanhui) have received relatively little study in recent years. Though the RCs remain pervasive in most areas of most cities and engage the energies of millions of activists and volunteers, this neglect is understandable. During the Mao era, Western writing on neighbourhood organizations emphasized their role in helping to police and administer the harsh political order that gripped the cities. In the 1980s and 1990s, the authorities have yielded much greater space to a private sphere in which law-abiding individuals are relatively free from intrusion. Instruments of state penetration such as the RCs have seemed less worthy of analysis. They also lack the requisite autonomy to qualify as part of an emergent civil society, and moreover their limited progress in serving as a focus for democratic participation earns them much less international attention than their rural equivalents, the Villagers' Committees. They may even seem worthy of derision rather than study; merely mentioning the term juweihui often brings an amused smile to people's faces, as it connotes ageing, officious busy bodies poking into people's personal matters.
Many qualitative social scientists conduct single-session interviews with large numbers of individuals so as to maximize the sample size and obtain a wide range of study participants. Yet in some circumstances, one-shot interviews cannot produce information of adequate quality, quantity, and validity. This article explains the several conditions that call for an alternative approach, serial interviewing, that entails interviewing participants on multiple occasions. This method is appropriate when studying complex or illdefined issues, when interviews are subject to time constraints, when exploring change or variation over time, when participants are reluctant to share valid information, and when working with critical informants. A further benefit is the opportunity it provides for verifying and cross-checking information. This article delineates the general features of this technique. Through a series of encounters, the researcher builds familiarity and trust, probes a range of key topics from multiple angles, explores different facets of participants' experiences, and learns from events that happen to take place during the interviews. This helps overcome biases associated with one-off interviews, including a tendency toward safe, simple answers in which participants flatten complexity, downplay sociopolitical conflict, and put themselves in a flattering light. This article illustrates the utility of this approach through examples drawn from published work and through a running illustration based on the author's research on elected neighborhood leaders in Taipei. Serial interviewing helped produce relatively accurate and nuanced data concerning the power these leaders wield and their multiple roles as intermediaries between state and society.
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