The SAGE Handbook of Fieldwork

"This is an excellent collection of papers which celebrates the best of traditional approaches to fieldwork, whilst also looking to its future. The Handbook will quickly become essential reading for the novice and experienced fieldworker across many of the social sciences"
--Chris Pole, University of Leicester

Fieldwork is widely practiced but little written about, yet accounts of the exotic, mundane, complex and often dangerous are central to not only sociology and anthropology but also geography, social psychology and criminology. In all these - increasingly overlapping - fields, experience underlies any comprehensive understanding of social life.

The SAGE Handbook of Fieldwork presents the first major overview of this method in all its variety, introducing the reader to the strengths, weaknesses, and ′real world′ applications of fieldwork techniques. Its 22 carefully chosen chapters are each based on a substantive field of empirical enquiry, written by an acknowledged expert in the field. The range is impressive: from the traditional to the virtual, concerning subjects as diverse as emotion, sexuality, sport, embodiment, identity, self-narrative, fieldwork in organizations, science and technology.

Specifically intended for use in undergraduate and postgraduate courses in qualitative research design and methodology in sociology, anthropology, criminology, urban studies, social geography, public health and education, the handbook will also prove beneficial to academic researchers in these and other disciplines.

Dick Hobbs is Professor of Sociology. He worked in a number of manual and clerical jobs before training as a schoolteacher and working in London schools. He undertook postgraduate work at the LSE and the University of Surrey, and worked at the Centre for Criminological Research at the University of Oxford, and briefly at the Polytechnic of Central London, before taking up a post at Durham University in 1990 where he worked in both the Sociology and Law Departments. He joined the LSE in September 2005.

His interests focus on ethnographic work, working class entrepreneurship, the sociology of deviance, professional and organized crime, violence, drug markets, and the night-time economy. Dick Hobbs is currently working on a book looking at the sociology of organized crime in the UK.  He is also working on a 4 volume edited collection on ethnography, and a collaborative book on the policing and security implications of the 2012 Olympics.

Richard Wright is Curators′ Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Bibliographies [Criminology]. He has been studying active urban street criminals, especially residential burglars, armed robbers, carjackers, and drug dealers for twenty-plus years. He is the author or co-author of five books and seventy scholarly articles and book chapters, including Armed Robbers in Action and Burglars on the Job, which won the 1994-95 Outstanding Scholarship in Crime and Delinquency Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. In addition, he has written widely for the popular press, locally, nationally, and internationally. He has appeared on numerous nationally broadcast TV news programs in the US and Great Britain, and he has been interviewed twice on NPR′s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Justice, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Icelandic Research Council, National Consortium on Violence Research, and Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.