Fieldwork Skills » Human Fieldwork Techniques

Human fieldwork: collecting data about people and places

Human fieldwork collects data about people and the places they use, such as streets, shops and traffic. The equipment and the physical methods, such as transects and pebble indices, are in Fieldwork Equipment and Physical Techniques. This lesson covers the human techniques. For each one you need to know what it is, when to use it, how to carry it out and its limitations.

Key terms:

• Environmental quality survey: scoring how pleasant or unpleasant a place is, using a set of criteria.
• Bi-polar survey: a survey that scores a place between two opposite statements, from -3 to +3.
• CBD (Central Business District): the main shopping and office area at the centre of a town or city.
• Sphere of influence: the area from which a place or shop attracts its customers or visitors.

Environmental quality surveys

An environmental quality survey measures how good the environment is at different sites. Use it to test a hypothesis such as "the environment is better further from the town centre".

1. Choose the criteria, for example litter, graffiti, noise, building condition, traffic and greenery.
2. Choose a scale, such as 1 (very poor) to 5 (very good), and write down what each score means.
3. Visit each site and score every criterion.
4. Add the scores for each site, or find the mean, and compare the sites.

Limitations: scores are a matter of opinion, so two people may score the same street differently. A group can reduce this by scoring in pairs, agreeing a score and using clear descriptions for each number. The result also depends on the day and time, for example before or after the bins are collected.

Bi-polar surveys

A bi-polar survey is a type of environmental quality survey. Each row has two opposite statements. You circle a score from -3 (the negative statement fits best) to +3 (the positive statement fits best). 0 is neutral. Use it to compare how pleasant different sites feel, or to test whether the environment gets better further from the centre.

Negative statement	-3	-2	-1	0	+1	+2	+3	Positive statement
Dirty and littered								Clean and tidy
Noisy								Quiet
Unsafe								Safe

Add up the scores for each site. A high positive total means a good environment. A negative total means a poor one.

Limitations: the same as an environmental quality survey. It is subjective, which means it depends on a person's opinion, and the choice of statements can bias the result. The numbers look exact but they are only opinions.

Questionnaires and interviews

Traffic counts and pedestrian counts

A traffic count records the vehicles passing a point. A pedestrian count records the people on foot passing a point. Use them to compare busy and quiet places, for example to show how traffic changes with distance from the town centre, or to find the busiest part of a shopping street.

1. Choose a safe spot on the pavement with a clear view, away from a crossing so you can count without being in the way.
2. Decide a fixed time, such as 5 minutes, and use the same time and day at every site, or the sites cannot be compared.
3. Use a tally chart. Mark one stroke for each vehicle or person passing, in groups of five. For traffic, use columns for types of vehicle.
4. Repeat at each site and, if you can, repeat at different times.

Limitations: counts change with the time of day, the day of the week and the weather, so one short count may not show the normal pattern. It is easy to miss people in a crowd. A count shows how many, but nothing about why people are there.

Land use surveys

A land use survey records what each building or plot is used for. Use it to show how a town is arranged, for example where the shops, offices and homes are.

1. Start with a base map of the study area.
2. Decide categories and a colour for each, such as shops, offices, homes, restaurants, empty units and open space.
3. Walk the area and colour each building on the map by its use. Note the ground floor use and, if you can, the upper floors.
4. Make a key and count the buildings in each category, perhaps as percentages.

Limitations: it takes time over a large area. Upper floors are hard to judge from the street. Some buildings have more than one use and are hard to place in one category, and uses may change after your survey.

Delimiting the CBD

To delimit something means to mark its edges. The CBD has no clear boundary, so geographers combine several surveys and look for where values fall away from the centre.

Technique	What to expect in the CBD
Pedestrian counts	The highest counts, falling towards the edges
Building height survey (count the floors)	The tallest buildings, because land is expensive and space is used upwards
Shop and land use survey	Mostly shops, banks and offices, with few homes

Map the results along a line out from the centre. The CBD edge is where the building heights drop, the counts fall and homes begin to appear.

Limitations: the edge is a judgement, because the change is gradual and the results will not all agree. One day's data may not be typical, and a few survey lines may miss part of the CBD.

Delimiting a sphere of influence

A shopping centre, a school or a market town has a sphere of influence, the area its customers come from. A town with many shops and services has a larger sphere than a village with one shop.

1. Ask shoppers or visitors, by questionnaire or short interview, where they have come from, such as their postcode or home village.
2. Plot each answer as a dot on a map.
3. Draw a line around most of the dots to show the sphere of influence.

Limitations: you only reach the people who are there on that day. Some people will refuse or not say where they live. People may travel to several towns, so the line is approximate.

Exam-style question

A group studied the main street of a town. Fig. 1.1 shows made-up results of 5-minute pedestrian counts and building heights at five sites, A to E, moving away from the town centre.

Site	A	B	C	D	E
Pedestrians in 5 minutes	118	74	31	22	10
Building height (floors)	6	5	3	2	2

(a) Identify the site most likely to be in the centre of the CBD. [1 mark]

(b) Calculate the mean number of pedestrians for the five sites. [1 mark]

(c) Describe one limitation of the pedestrian count. [2 marks]

(d) Plan how the group could use human fieldwork to find where the CBD ends and how far shoppers travel to the town. [6 marks]