BYU NewsNet - Field studies offer additional experience

Four people dressed in blue nylon gowns stood hunched over the body of an elderly woman lying on a table in the mortuary’s basement.

Ty Kenworthy twisted open a tube of red lipstick and tried to concentrate amidst the constant stream of suggestions from the morticians watching him.

“That shade is too bright,” one said.

“She wouldn’t wear it that way,” another commented.

“Put down the lipstick and start with the eyes,” the third said.

Kenworthy is an anthropology student who researched morticians’ relationships with each other and the deceased in a recent field study.

Many students have heard of study abroad opportunities. In these programs, students travel to relevant locations and learn basic classroom material.

Field studies are an alternative for students to research a specific topic, culture or anomaly. They are less structured than study abroad and more adaptable to students’ interests, said Nephi Henry, a field study facilitator for BYU.

Field studies are “independent, research-oriented” learning experiences, according to the Kennedy Center’s Web site. They give students the freedom to do in-depth research of a topic to an extent that is uncharacteristic in regular classroom lessons.

In the past field studies have been something mostly done by anthropology students, but now facilitators are spreading the word about the benefits of field studies for students studying any subject, Henry said.

One psychology student traveled to Mexico to assist with a study his professor was conducting about families with absent fathers. His professor acted as a mentor and guided him through what information to gather and which questions to ask. They co-authored an article from their research that was published in a British journal of psychology earlier this year, Henry said.

Because a field study is an independent project and there aren’t professors giving out deadlines, participants should be self-motivated. It is up to students to immerse themselves in their work and find out all they can in the time they have.

Heidi Kartchner, an anthropology student who completed her field study at the Museum of Peoples and Cultures, said she stayed at the museum from open to close every day interviewing attendees and watching them walk through the exhibits.

“If you don’t start immediately and give it 100 percent all the time you won’t end up with enough data,” she said.

Field studies require a lot of observation, active participation and interviews. A big part of the research is the extensive notes detailing the day’s events and conclusions.

Kartchner said she typed nearly 500 pages of notes about the museum’s audience by the end of the semester.

Kenworthy, who studied the mortician culture at a Salt Lake County mortuary, said he filled three notebooks with his findings.

Field studies allow students to be with the people about whom they are learning and to interact with them in their natural setting instead of watching in a museum or reading a textbook, Henry said.

“Immersion is the name of the game,” said Chris Gearheart, an anthropology student currently studying Nepali students at BYU.

Immersion presents the challenge of becoming a new person. Gearheart said he is striving to become like the Nepalese students he is studying through attending their classes as well as spending leisure time together playing soccer and dining.

Researchers seek a balance between becoming a part of the society they are studying and remaining a spectator.

Kenworthy said he worked in a mortuary for three years prior to beginning his research. Though he was in a familiar environment, he said it was sometimes shocking to look at the profession through an anthropologist’s eyes.

He participated in embalming and cosmetizing bodies under the tutelage of the professionals he worked with. Each had advice about which techniques to use and the procedure to follow, and while learning about morticians Kenworthy also learned to be a mortician.

At the end of his seven-week study, the morticians Kenworthy worked with were more impressed with the skills he learned in their field than with the research he conducted.

“I had learned something valuable in their eyes,” he said.