*Wow, when will it exist, where's mine, etc.
http://thefieldstudyhandbook.com/table-of-contents/
Table of Contents
"The Handbook follows the trajectory of a project from start to finish making it suitable for beginners to read cover to cover, while serving as a reference for those with more experience.
1: Introduction
"How do organisations gather and apply insight? Who are the clients and what are they asking? What aren’t they asking that they need to know? How to select a research consultancy. Field research versus other ways of gathering insight. How to pitch and define a field study project and pull together a proposal. The eight guiding principles of field research.
2: Planning the Field Study
"Understand the trade-offs to different approaches. Scheduling, tempo and lead times. Coping with culture shock. Budgets and accounting. Handling large sums of cash. Equipment.
3: Recruiting
"The pros and cons of using recruiting agencies versus nurturing recruiting competence in-house. Building and maintaining networks. How to select a recruiting agency. How to run multi-layered recruiting. Creating a specialised recruiting role. Writing and deploying the participant screener. Snowballing and learning to live comfortably on the edge.
4. Team
"Core versus extended team. Roles and responsibilities. Clients. Building the optimal team mix. The “no tourists” rule.
5. Dynamics & Flow
"Different corporate working models. Optimising the live-work space. Cultural calibration. Compression and decompression.
6. Lenses & Frames
"Ways to think about the world around you including: understanding etiquette and knowing when to break it; inappropriate behaviours; rule-breaking, law-breaking, naming; rituals, formality; gift giving; hierarchy and power; body language; punctuality and other notions of timing; coping with distractions; public & private; informal distance classifications; in-group & out-group; sales tactics; clean and dirty spaces, objects and usage, experiential vocabulary. (((Probably worth the price of the alleged book all by itself.)))
7. Principles of Research
"The art and science of finding the optimal blend of methods. Achieving convergent validity. Working with data from other research approaches. Structured vs unstructured. Using quant, pseudo quant, data analytics. The hacker mindset. Longitudinal studies. Informed and inspired. Organisational metabolism. The honesty of data. The lies we tell. Testing and iterating. Method naming. Research dynamics. Asking smarter questions.
8. Data Gathering Methods
"A comprehensive documentation of methods to meet foundational, generative and evaluative goals for maximum impact on design, strategy, innovation, brand, and marketing. Draws on a range of disciplines including design research, anthropology, data science, clinical psychology, conflict journalism, photojournalism, interrogation techniques and social engineering.
9. Risks
"Understanding the risks. Personal, institutional and client attitudes to risk. Knowing when, how and whether to mitigate.
10. Data
"Setting up workflow for collection, scrubbing, filtering, management, storage and use. Meta data and naming. The weight of data. The viscosity of data. The data manager and curator roles.
11. Sense Making
"Synthesis methods and how to make sense of data. Mapping sense making to the clients and team. Tuning the mental and physical space. Knowing and communicating the strengths and weaknesses of your insights. Turning data into insight that impacts decision making and the business. Documenting ideas.
12. Sharing
"What is shared, with whom, when and why. The limits of the researcher as gatekeeper of knowledge. The researcher as storyteller. Moral and legal obligations. The ownership of ideas. Credit where credit is not due. Stockholm syndrome. The asset library and the insight engine.
13. Deliverables
"What clients expect and what to deliver. Types of report for: user/consumer experience, strategy, brand, segmentation, marketing. Appealing to the left and right brains of the organisation. The difference between what is contracted and what is delivered. The art and science of storytelling.
14. Looking Ahead
"Riding the storm. The evolution of questions, data, insight, methods and storytelling. The evolution of stakeholders, clients and organisational literacy. How we evolve. What we become.
"15. Appendices: Suggested Reading; Glossary; Meta-data; Job Descriptions. Index."
