Flexible fieldnoting for contemporary consumer culture research

Consumer culture researchers have long used fieldnotes in ethnography, grounded theory and netnography projects. Fieldnotes focus on capturing the researchers’ observations and experiences in the field through written records. Fieldnotes take multiple formats and serve various purposes: condensed accounts or jottings during fieldwork, expanded accounts made soon after each immersion in the field, fieldwork journals that record the researcher’s experiences, ideas and thoughts, and analysis and interpretation notes. Hence, fieldnotes are not only a type of data, but also ‘a process of analysis-in-description’. We introduce the practice of flexible fieldnoting, and shows how it can be performed along six axes of flexibility: (1) Location, (2) Format, (3) Team, (4) Timing, (5) Interaction and (6) Archive.