From Fieldwork to Writing: When the Data Surprise Us
Elżbieta M. Goździak, Wiktoria Moritz-Lesniak, and Larysa Sugay reflect on the unexpected turns between ethnographic fieldwork and writing—and what happens when the material leads researchers in directions they hadn't anticipated.
Ethnographic fieldwork produces an abundance of material: interviews, conversations, observations, fieldnotes, and moments that stay with us long after we leave the field. Some seem immediately significant. Others appear unremarkable until we return to them months later. And some continue to intrigue us without ever finding their way into a publication.
Writing forces us to make choices. We identify patterns, develop arguments, and decide which observations support our interpretations. But writing also makes us question what we thought we knew. A promising idea may prove difficult to sustain. An unexpected conversation may send us back to interviews we thought we understood. Sometimes we discover that the most interesting question is not the one we originally planned to answer.
Three researchers working on the educational experiences of children and families with migration backgrounds in Poland reflect on these experiences.
Wiktoria Moritz-Lesniak: What Doesn't Make It into an Article
Writing makes me increasingly aware of the limits of an article. There is always more in the material than I can possibly address within a single text.
I experienced this particularly strongly while writing about Belarusian parents and the social capital they build through the development of an ethnic community. Given the focus of the article, I had to narrow my analysis to a particular group of parents and their educational activities.
Yet my fieldwork had revealed much more. There were numerous practices related to cultural identity and the creation of a shared cultural space: maintaining the Belarusian language, board-game meetings, a choir, concerts, and art exhibitions. There were also subtle observations—whispers, tears, and stories about those who stayed behind or about life before coming to Poland.
Some of these observations could perhaps have developed into entirely different analytical threads. Others did not necessarily fit together or lead anywhere obvious, at least not at that point in my writing. Nevertheless, they stayed with me.
One observation that remained separate from my analysis concerned the interior of a home I visited. The apartment was quite spacious, and the mother I interviewed seemed very proud of it. Yet there were hardly any personal belongings around, and the place looked rather empty.
I remember this encounter because it left me with questions. Was this a temporary place to live, or did the family simply not have many things? Did the emptiness carry any meaning?
I was rarely invited into my interlocutors' homes, so I did not have enough material to explore this further. The observation remained with me without becoming part of my analysis.
Writing an article means deciding not only what to include but also what to leave aside. Some observations may become important in future work. Others remain unanswered questions, reminders of how much of people's lives exceeds the boundaries of any single research project.
Larysa Sugay: Learning to See What Was Already There
When I began interviewing children and adolescents from Ukraine attending Polish schools, I was particularly interested in the challenges they encountered and the ways they navigated their new environments.
I initially understood their experiences largely through the lens of limited choice. Most had not participated in the decision to migrate. Their parents had chosen where to settle, often based on existing family or social networks. Children were presented with a fait accompli: they would now live in another country and attend another school.
As the research progressed, however, I began recognizing forms of agency that I had initially overlooked.
Some children requested transfers to different classes or changed schools altogether. One child chose to remain in a familiar school after the family moved to a larger city, commuting approximately 30 minutes by train for more than a year. Another chose to attend a school in a larger city rather than remain in a nearby rural school, accepting a daily commute of about an hour.
These were not simply educational decisions. They were also choices about friendships, belonging, aspirations, and the kinds of everyday lives children wanted to create.
Interestingly, I did not immediately recognize the significance of these decisions while conducting or transcribing the interviews.
One of my final interviews prompted me to reconsider what I had been hearing. A teenage girl from Ukraine remarked that she found it surprising how long some Polish children could deliberate over seemingly straightforward decisions. She was accustomed to deciding within minutes, while her Polish peers might spend days considering similar questions.
She interpreted her ability to make decisions quickly as a sign of greater maturity. I began wondering whether it might also reflect the circumstances in which she had learned to make choices. Migration and uncertainty may require children to assess situations and act without prolonged deliberation.
That conversation sent me back to earlier interviews. I began noticing how often children had described negotiating their educational environments, relationships, extracurricular activities, and future plans.
The material had been there all along. What changed was my way of reading it.
I had initially focused on the circumstances constraining children's choices and paid less attention to how they negotiated those circumstances. Returning to the interviews helped me recognize forms of agency that had not immediately registered as such.
Sometimes the most interesting findings emerge not because participants tell us something entirely new, but because we begin to see familiar material differently.
Elżbieta M. Goździak: When the Question Changes
When I began interviewing children from mixed families—families in which one parent was Polish and the other came from a different national or ethnic background—I expected to encounter complex, shifting identifications.
And I did. Some children identified as Polish in one context and British or American in another. Others thought of themselves as cosmopolitan, having lived in several countries. What I had not anticipated was how strongly school principals and teachers insisted that these children were simply Polish.
“They are our children,” I heard repeatedly. “They have a Polish parent and speak Polish.” Some Polish parents also emphasized their children's Polishness, even when the children themselves described more complicated identities.
Initially, I was interested in how children understood their identities and negotiated belonging. But as I returned to the interviews, another question became increasingly important: What happened when schools recognized these children as Polish but overlooked their migration histories?
The answer led me in a direction I had not anticipated.
Because educators assumed that Polish citizenship and conversational fluency meant educational preparedness, children who struggled with academic Polish often received none of the additional language support available to other migrant students.
Their Polishness was unquestioned, but their educational needs were frequently overlooked.
The most significant finding did not contradict my initial expectations about children's identities. Instead, it emerged when I began asking what the adults' insistence on their Polishness meant for their everyday experiences at school.
An article that might have focused primarily on identity became an examination of how institutional assumptions about belonging can simultaneously include and exclude children.
Writing as Part of Discovery
These three experiences illustrate different possibilities.
An observation may remain intriguing without providing enough evidence for an interpretation. An interview may prompt us to revisit material we thought we understood. Or an unexpected pattern may lead us toward an entirely different analytical question.
Not every observation becomes a finding. Not every promising idea develops into an article. And not every important discovery occurs while we are conducting interviews.Much of ethnographic analysis happens when we sit down to write, return to our fieldnotes and transcripts, reconsider our assumptions, and ask different questions.
Writing is not simply the final stage of ethnographic research. It is one of the ways we discover what our research has taught us.
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