Fielding (2004) ‘Working in Hostile Environments.’
Citation: Fielding, Nigel (2004) ‘Working in Hostile Environments,’ in Seale, Clive, Gobo, Giampietro, Gubrium, Jaber F. and Silverman, David (eds.), Qualitative Research Practice, London: Sage Publications, pp. 248-260.
Fielding (2004:249): “Hostile research environments are those where the research population is actively resistant to research. It isn’t simply indifferent, uninformed, or susceptible to being upset by certain questions or poor technique. It does not want research done, and if research nevertheless takes place, it seeks to control the research and the researcher.”
Fielding (2004:249-250): Extensive literature on research ethics “both reflects something noble – sociology’s aspiration to be a moral discipline that falls over backwards to respect its human objects of study – and something less impressive: timidity about entering the more difficult reaches of the social world. It is the latter that has produced a situation where we know a good deal more about the poor – those who are as powerless to resist research as they are to resist every other imposition – that we do about the powerful.”