Hi, my name is Chloe and I'm a geography field studies tutor.

This lesson is all about rural fieldwork, what kind of things you can study in rural areas and how you can go about collecting data for fieldwork inquiries, let's begin.

By the end of today's lesson, you'll be able to collect primary and secondary data in rural areas, and that will help you answer a geographical inquiry question based there.

Let's look at some keywords before we start.

So first of all, character.

This is quite a difficult one to define, but we're gonna say it's kind of the cultural, often historical features of a rural area that make it special.

Then we've got a stakeholder.

This is a person with a particular interest in the issue that's being investigated.

The lived experience is the everyday personal experience that someone has from living in a place.

There are three parts to today's lesson, so let's look at those now.

First of all, what inquiry questions are asked in rural areas? How do geographers collect data in rural areas? And finally, what secondary data is used to study rural areas? Let's start with that first one.

Now, there's a misconception that because rural areas tend to be quieter than towns, it means that there's fewer things for geographers to study there.

But in actual fact, there's lots of issues that affect rural areas in particular, and geographers can ask a range of questions because of these things.

One example is inequality.

Local people in rural areas may struggle to access public services compared to people who live in towns and cities.

So a question you could ask is something like, to what extent do residents of Middleton village have unequal access to healthcare? Connectedness is a kind of aspect of inequality in rural areas.

So rural areas tend to be more remote and it makes it more difficult and expensive for people to work in other places.

This means rural industries can find it hard to make a profit or be economically competitive when you compare it with industries that are placed in towns.

So a good question would be something like, to what extent have the rural industries of Hanningfield adapted to a lack of connectivity? You could also ask something like, what are the main barriers facing new industries in Cresswell in this example? But it could apply that to lots of different places.

So let's have our first check for understanding.

There are fewer issues to study in rural areas compared to urban ones because rural areas are quieter and have no industry.

Is that true or false? It's false, but why is it false? Well, as we've just heard, the issues that are affecting rural areas are different to urban ones, but there's still lots of inquiries that geographers can study.

Geographers also like to study the character of rural areas, and especially how that character is affected by changes that are taking place there.

Now, character is quite a difficult concept to define.

It can mean lots of different things in different scenarios and to different people.

It kind of covers how a place feels, the history of a place, its culture, as well as what makes that place special and kind of defines its identity.

Where changes in urban areas tend to be kind of absorbed fairly quickly because it's a faster pace of life there, in rural areas where the pace of life is a little slower, those changes can have an impact in different ways and they can be felt locally differently as well.

The changes that I'm talking about could be to do with the people themselves who live in rural areas.

So, for example, a question could be, how has an increase in the size of the ageing population affected the character of Barton-on-Sea? Rural character might also be affected by more structural changes.

So things like this question, to what extent has the closure of Sampford Courtenay Railway Station affected the character of the local area? You might notice that question is also to do with connectivity.

Rural areas can receive a high volume of visitors and tourism is often a key industry, especially in rural areas that are in or near a national park.

Geographers frequently study the impact of tourism in these places, so let's look at some of the questions you could ask in these places.

To what extent do visitors to Bannau Brycheiniog have a positive environmental impact? What indicators are there that the Lincolnshire Wolds are defined by tourism? There's lots of questions that can be asked about the impact of tourism in particularly.

Let's check our understanding again.

Which of the following inquiry questions could be asked about the character of a rural place? First of all, how has coal mining shaped the identity of Easington? To what extent does tourism improve service provision in Lyndhurst? In what ways does the culture of the Isle of Wight change from east to west? And to what extent is Glen Coe a honeypot site for visitors? A honeypot site is one that attracts lots of people.

I'm gonna pause the video here, have a think and get back to me.

Right, let's see what your answers were.

So with looking at inquiry questions that are looking at the character of the place.

So hopefully you saw that there were actually two answers here.

First of all, question A is talking about the identity of a place, so that's definitely to do with character.

And then question C talks about the culture of a place, so that's also going to be to do with character.

Hope you got those right.

Now our first task of this lesson.

Sort the inquiry questions into those about inequality, rural character and tourism.

Write the letter code in the correct column.

So you can see we've got four questions written underneath here, so immediately you know that at least one of the columns is going to have more than one letter in it.

First of all, what economic impact has increased visitors had on Bowness? How does poor public transport affect industry in Elvington? To what extent is the health deprivation in Monkton? And to what extent does folklore affect the feel of Lerwick? Now, if you don't know these places, it actually doesn't matter.

It's more about the other parts of the question that are going to give you the answers to this task.

So pause the video, have a chat with somebody nearby if you need to, and see if you can work out which of those questions applies to which of those column headings.

Okay, let's look at your answers now.

Right, so let's start with question A, so this is talking about the economic impact that increased visitors might have on a place.

So we're talking about visitors, so it's gotta be the one that's gonna be to do with tourism, isn't it? Then we've got B, how does poor public transport affect industry? So public transport is about, is a service that's being provided, or in this case perhaps not provided, and that is indicating that we've got a level of inequality happening there.

C, to what extent is there health deprivation in Monkton? Now, again, health is going to be to do with service provisions, so that is also to do with inequality.

Health deprivation is quite a strong term which denotes inequality in place.

And finally, the last one in Lerwick is talking about folklore, and that's to do with identity and character and how it's affecting the feel of the place.

So yes, D goes in that middle column there to do with rural character.

Now we're moving on to the second part of today's lesson, thinking about how geographers collect data in rural areas.

One technique that geographers use when interacting with people who live and work in rural areas is a stakeholder interview.

Stakeholders offer more in-depth perspectives on issues than members of the public who geographers tend to target when they're doing things like questionnaires on the street.

And in rural areas, stakeholders might be people like landowners, like farmers, they might be retirees who've migrated to the area, or they might be people who've lived in the area their whole lives.

It's anyone who's got a bit more experience about that place and has a very particular interest or specialism or expertise.

Conducting a stakeholder interview is different from conducting a questionnaire, so let's take a look at that now.

So, first of all, you're gonna need to write a list of topics that you would like the interview to cover.

You can see on the clipboard here we've got healthcare, education, public transport, and online access, so some of the things that this person really wants to talk about.

What you then do is place these in the order of priority from most to least important.

This means that if the interview overruns, you at least have got covered the big issues that you really wanted to talk about.

Then, for each of those topics, in turn, write a single or one or two open questions.

Open questions, remember, are the ones in which the respondent can answer in any way they choose.

Check that none of the questions are leading questions.

In other words, questions which are kind of telling the respondent how they should respond.

Instead, they need to be really open.

So we've got an example here about healthcare.

What are the biggest challenges to healthcare provision in this area? So the person who's responding to that can answer in any way they feel necessary.

Then the most important part of a stakeholder interview, it's not asking the questions and it's not writing down the answers, it's actually listening, and it's listening really actively.

For that reason it's probably best to try and audio record the interview if you can.

It means that all of your attention can be given to the person who's answering the questions.

As the person is answering, it means that you might need to ask for clarification, you might want them to give an example of a point, it means that you can actually ask them to expand their answers in real time.

And then what you need to do is use the answers that the stakeholder gives you to the first question to then decide the direction of the next.

And don't worry if this means you are going off script because your stakeholder interview needs to flow a little bit more like a conversation.

Let's take a look at the example here.

So the stakeholder is answering a question and in their final remarks they're saying that the closure of the GP surgery meant that people had to start travelling to town for appointments, and the interviewer picks up on this straight away and says, "Well, how did local people feel about those changes?" And then that invites the stakeholder to expand upon that point rather than just have it as a quite narrow idea of, oh, well, people had to start travelling to town.

How did that affect people? What impact did that have? Did people start missing appointments? You know, you can see how the conversation would flow a little more from that point.

So let's check what we understand by a stakeholder interview.

In what ways is a stakeholder interview different to a questionnaire? A, it will give the geographer a more in-depth perspective from the respondent.

B, it will not take us long to carry out.

C, it involves more active listening and reacting to the answers given.

And D, it will only ask closed questions.

And I'm gonna give you a clue here.

There is more than one correct answer.

Pause the video, have a think, and then get back to me.

Okay, let's see what you came up with.

Hopefully you recognised that a stakeholder interview allows you to get a more in depth perspective of the particular issue that you are discussing.

And another thing that makes it different from a questionnaire is that it involves a lot more active listening and then reacting to the answers that are given.

Hope you got those correct.

Defining the character of a place can be quite a difficult thing for geographers to do, especially if they're only there for a short amount of time.

One way is to think about carrying out an epitome survey.

In this survey, a single word is chosen to describe something about the rural area.

Now, typical aspects that you could choose would be things like the culture or the ethos of the place, how the past is influenced, the kind of character of the place, what the landscape is like, what the people, the community are like, something about the local economy perhaps, but anything that can be summarised in just one single word.

These elements of a rural area could be defined by the geographers themselves, so you could actually do this yourself and actually come up with the word yourself.

Or it could be that you want to come back to your stakeholders and use those, so key people could be asked for their one-word summaries of a place.

These kind of people could include children, local workers, commuters, retirees, landowners, community leaders like a religious leader, local volunteers, tourists.

Really, it depends on the kind of place that you're looking at as to what kind of people might be available to you.

You can imagine the kind of words that one group would come up with would be quite different to another.

For example, a retiree might describe their village as being quite peaceful, whereas children might find it boring.

And actually what they're doing is describing the same idea but they're coming at it from quite different angles.

Epitome surveys carried out using these groups allow geographers to see where there are areas of consensus.

In other words, who agrees with whom.

And also, of course, where there's areas of conflict, who disagrees with each other.

So let's do a check on our understanding now.

Complete the sentences with the missing words.

You've got three different parts of this sentence which has been removed.

See if you can find them.

Do pause the video, give yourself time to think.

Right, let's have a look at what answers you've got.

So, an epitome survey can help geographers to think about the character of a rural area.

This survey asks people to sum up the character of an area by giving one-word descriptions.

Different people can be asked.

This helps the geographer to find areas of consensus and conflict.

I hope you got those.

Behaviour surveys are used by geographers to investigate the local lived experience of a place.

These look at how people use spaces as well as how they might use space in a disruptive or an unexpected way.

The geographer either positions themselves in one place and kind of watches people from there, or they could move along a transect and see how people are using the space as they move along with you.

They record who they see and what they see them doing.

Now, it depends on the location, but this could take a few minutes, it could take a whole day, and it depends on how much depth you want to go into in this particular survey.

Now, you could be ended up writing down quite a lot of information, so you might wanna come up with some codes to make it easier for you.

For example, you might see an older woman walking her dog and she's heading in an easterly direction, so there's one way you could note this.

"FFF" refers to the idea that it's a female and it's an older one.

And then you've got "+ dog" and then we've got an arrow indicating that there's movement and "E" to represent east.

Now, I know that sounds a little bit complicated, but you can see that that is still much quicker than writing down all of the words that we've got above it.

It's an older woman walking her dog heading east is quite a mouthful, whereas that's a much, much quicker way of doing it.

Another example here, you could have two middle-aged fathers and they're walking their young daughter to nursery school.

So you could have "MM + MM" indicating that the two gentlemen are middle aged, a single F representing the young daughter.

She's much younger, so it's just a single letter.

You've got the arrow indicating movement again, and then you've got the word "nursery." Now of course you could use symbols and you could use colours and other things as well.

There's no right or wrong way of doing this except just making it easier to note down.

You could also use a tick sheet, so you could actually include all the activities you might expect to find in that area, and then as you see them you tick them off or you note down who is doing what activity.

You could also use something called a services survey.

So this tells geographers a lot about the levels of connectivity and inequality in a rural area.

You would measure the distance from the centre of the village to the nearest key service.

And what I mean by a key service is things like a school, a doctor, a dentist, things like a bus stop or a station or a taxi rank, something like that.

Equally things like banks, post offices.

And there's the kind of things which are quite specific but still kind of essential for people's lived experience, so things like a mechanics workshop, a petrol station, you can probably come up with quite a few more things that you would think of as key services.

You would then record the distances for one rural settlement and compare these with another, or you could compare them with a local town to see what the level of inequality is in that service provision.

Now you wouldn't measure the straight line distance necessarily.

You'd actually measure the distance that people would have to travel, so along roads or footpaths and so on, in order to access that service.

So let's check our understanding on that.

A services survey can be used to measure how connected a rural area is to key amenities.

Is that true or false? Have a think and pause the video.

It's true.

Can you explain why? So a services survey measures connectivity by recording the distances between a rural area and a key amenity such as a doctor's surgery.

Right, let's look at our second task of today.

Jun observes this view while carrying out a behaviour survey.

Suggest some codes he could use to note down the different behaviours he is seeing.

You can see there's lots going on in that picture, so you're definitely gonna have to pause the video in a moment to have a good look at it.

Before you do, let's look at the second task as well.

Practise carrying out a stakeholder interview.

You do not have to be in a rural area, but choose somebody to interview who you consider to have a special interest in a particular topic, hopefully a geographical one if you can.

Note down the measures you take to ensure that the interview is both fair and successful.

So pause the video now, go back to the first task, have a really good at that picture, and I'll come back to you shortly.

Okay, so let's take a look at your ideas here.

We're looking at Jun's view and there's lots of things going on in this particular view, so you might have a few different answers to the the things that I've pulled out, but let's have a look.

I had a look at this gentleman here who's scooting along quite fast there, and so I decided to highlight him.

I've got "MM" to indicate that he's a man.

I've got a double arrow to indicate that he's moving quite quickly.

And then I've just included the word "scooter" to show how he's moving.

Then we've got this group here.

We've got a woman, a young boy, and a dog, and it appears like they're having a picnic.

So I've done "FF" to represent the woman, "+ M," the little boy, "+ dog," the dog.

And then I've used a downward arrow to show that they're sitting down.

And then I've just used the word "picnic" to show what they're actually doing.

And then there's this lady, so we've got "FF" to show it's a woman.

Again, downward arrow to show that she's sitting down.

And then I've used the words "bench" and "read" to show what she's actually doing and what she's sitting on.

Like I said, you're probably gonna have something different, you would've picked different things out of this picture, and you might have your own way of coding as well, using colours and pictures maybe as well.

If you're not sure if your codes stand up, maybe show them to someone else and see if they can work out what your coding means.

Then the second part of this task was about having a go at a stakeholder interview and noting down any measures that ensure that the interview is both fair and successful.

So here's some of the things you should have.

You want to make sure that your topics and questions are written down in order of priority.

You need to make sure that you're not asking any leading questions.

That's the fairness bit of the question there.

You need to make sure you're actively listening to the responses.

This is what really defines it as a stakeholder interview and not a questionnaire.

And you're gonna use those responses to ask the next question.

And then you've got the opportunity to ask for examples, for clarifications or further details about any points that the respondent makes.

Hopefully you've got at least a few of those.

Right, we're onto to the final part of today's lesson, and that's all about secondary data and what secondary data is used to study rural areas.

So, rural character can be found through analysis of social media posts.

Looking at the hashtags that people assign to posts about rural features such as a village, a national park, even a view, can tell geographers a lot about how people think about that place.

They could also look at the frequency of posts, how often are people actually posting about a particular place.

And the people who are doing those posts, where are they coming from? That can tell the geographers quite a lot about how connected that rural place is to the wider world.

Likewise, geographers can examine the images of the fieldwork location that appear on social media.

The images that people choose to post online have been chosen to give a particular message about that place, perhaps to invoke a particular feeling.

Geographers need to note which images have been chosen, but also importantly, which images have purposefully not been included on social media.

This tells geographers how the rural place is being portrayed to outsiders, which of course might be quite different from what it's actually like on the ground.

Geographers might also examine tourism materials in a similar way, so local tourist boards are likely to have leaflets and posters and websites and all kinds of materials that will certain attractions of an area, but also purposefully exclude other aspects.

They're only gonna be showing the most positive aspects of a place 'cause they want to attract people to it.

Many local tourist boards also collect data on visitor numbers, how they use the local area, how long they stay, where they stay, where the visitors themselves come from is sometimes collected as well.

So geographers can use this information to build a picture of what a typical visitor to an area is like.

Let's check our understanding of that.

Complete the sentences with the missing words.

You've got three missing words to find.

Read the paragraph, pause the video, and I'll tell you the answers in a moment.

Right, let's take a look at this.

Geographers might use social media to better understand how a rural place is portrayed to others.

They examine what images, descriptions, and hashtags of the place are used, and equally importantly, which are not used.

They can also study how frequently or often the posts are made and where the posters come from.

Data about access to services and potential inequality can be found through the Index of Multiple Deprivation.

This is an index that ranks places according to a number of criteria such as healthcare access and education standards.

You can see an example there where colour coding has been used to show the areas which are in terms of rank order more deprived than others.

The rankings are then plotted on a map say using a colour scale, and it allows geographers to see how some rural areas will compare with others as well as their nearest urban area, which is important, 'cause if you're really thinking about inequality, you need to compare like with like, rural with rural, as well as like with different, so how a rural area compares to an urban one.

Many people who live in rural areas face housing inequality.

Older houses and more affluent migrants can mean that younger people that are born in rural areas may not be able to afford to stay there.

Online sites that host properties on behalf of estate agents give an idea of how much it might cost on average to rent or buy a property in a rural area.

Some of these websites also show how long an average property is on the market for before it's sold, and this information can tell geographers how popular an area is as well as if local people might be able to afford to live there at all.

Let's check our understanding of that.

Geographers use estate agent websites to find out what type of person is moving into a rural area.

Is that true or false? It would be nice if they did, but no, they don't, it's false.

What do they do instead? Why? So, geographers use estate agent websites to find out the price of properties in a rural area.

It might tell you some other information, but it won't tell you about the type of person.

Right, let's look at our final task of today's lesson.

Aisha is studying whether the outsider's perspective of a national park is different to an insider's lived experience.

In other words, that outsider perspective, we're probably thinking about a tourist or a visitor to the national park, and comparing that with an insider's lived experience, so somebody who perhaps actually lives inside the national park or just on the outside of it.

What sources of secondary data might support her inquiry? So have a think about the different types of secondary data that we've just mentioned and think which ones would be most relevant to Aisha's study.

Pause the video and I'll tell you the answers in a moment.

Right, let's have a think about some of these sources of secondary data.

She's probably gonna want to look at the national park itself in a bit more detail, so maybe she could look at the website of the national park authority, she could look at the images, the words that are used to describe the national park, because that's gonna influence the outsider's perspective of it.

Likewise, leaflets and posters that the national park authority is producing.

Look at how they are promoting themselves to outsiders.

She could equally look at a social media search of the national park.

She could look to see who is posting what about it and what are they saying about it, because it is likely that a lot of people who are visiting the national park are going to put up images and hashtags that she can use to try to find out their perspective of it.

Then she might want to look at websites of the businesses that operate in the national park.

So that would be her insider's perspective, potentially.

How do they think about their place where they have their industry? So let's summarise our learning for today.

There are many geographical inquiry questions that you can investigate in rural areas, such as questions about inequality, rural character and tourism.

Data collection techniques in a rural area can focus on stakeholder interviews, epitome surveys and behaviour studies.

Geographers use secondary data to look at how rural places are portrayed and to understand in more detail what rural populations are like.

Well done, there was a lot of new information to understand there as well as techniques that you've probably never heard of before, but I do hope that gives you lots of confidence to go out and do some fieldwork in rural areas.