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The 800-Pound Gaijin In The Room: Strategies And Tactics For Conducting Fieldwork In Japan And Abroad, Daniel P. Aldrich

Daniel P Aldrich

Most graduate school training for United States-based political scientists focuses on details ranging from properly defining one’s independent variable to ensuring that we have sufficient cases from which to draw broader conclusions. And doctoral candidates regularly fly off to carry out fieldwork in developing and developed nations alike with two suitcases, several semesters of language training and a recently approved prospectus. But few of us receive advice on how to handle religious and cultural differences between ourselves and our informants or how to respond to situations in which we feel uncomfortable or perhaps in danger. Rarer still is advice on …