Agricultural Workers: Field Research with an Imagined Community that is Mobile and Hard-to-Reach

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.