When different needs, "worlds apart", meet in the field: Reflections from a PhD student and mother.
In 2009 I was off to my first field trip in Africa. A
preparation workshop introduced us, a handful of master students, to
participatory methods. Since then, focus groups, participant observations, and
unstructured interviews have become an important part of my data collection
repertoire. In combination with structured livelihood interviews, these methods
have provided me with a good insight into households in rural Niger and lately
also in rural Mozambique.
My experience does not allow me to call these methods what
many researchers do: rapid. All that is said in a meeting must be acknowledged
as single perceptions. Assessing common perception (or maybe facts?) usually
requires a great deal of time. The insights provided by one group is double
checked with groups of similar composition and cross-checked with different
groups.
The more time you spend with your respondents, informants,
participants, the more you learn about their lives, the smaller is the distance
that separates you. “They there” slowly approaches “us here”. Participatory
methods, by allowing “them” to guide you, the facilitator, into their world
constitute a powerful tool in this approximation.
In combination with open-ended participatory methods, I
often rely on structured livelihood interviews. How much land is used by the
household members? How many ruminants are owned? What are the main crops? What
are the income sources? Which skills are detained by the household members?
These, and a series of similar questions, are posed in attempt to estimate the
various resource basis that could be drawn upon in pursue of different
livelihood alternatives. I usually interview one adult household member at each
time, in order to allow them to answer without interference from others. Once
individual interviews have been conducted, group household groups follow and
tend to enrich each other’s stories and answers.
I have relied on this set repertoire for collecting what I
hold to be qualitative unstructured data and also qualitative structured data
in some of the poorest regions of the world. Out of the 187 countries ranked by
UNDP’s Human Development Index in 2014, Niger and Mozambique lie at the bottom,
Mozambique at the 178th position and Niger at the absolute last 187th
position. If we add into consideration the fact that my research has been in
rural areas, the general urban development bias gives an idea of just how
deprived my informants were.
Finding out that a single mother with five young children
had nothing but a quarter of a hectare that hardly sufficed to feed them was
common place. Too little rain, too much rain, sickness, crop pests, every
unpredictable although not uncommon event reminded them of just how vulnerable
their lives were. I listened carefully, reminded myself that I am a student, a
researcher, not an aid worker, and noted their answers: male, female, elder,
younger, richer, poorer, less or more vulnerable according to my classification.
Back home I processing the data, often with distressing
thoughts. My informants are so generous, they share their time and so many
aspects of their lives and livelihoods with me, I know that deep inside they
hope I may be of some help. When we speak the same language and share the same
jokes, their hopes become less implicit, and distances must be reviewed: close
enough to collect good data, and far enough to remain in the researcher’s
position.
The problem is, and my reason for writing this text, that I
am no longer only a researcher, I am a mother. I have a little daughter who
must eat, and sleep, who needs a clean and safe environment and clean water to
bathe, who has received a first round of vaccination, and has been to the
hospital already a couple of times. And now that I have her, I think of all the
parents that I have come across, women that went through their pregnancy without
any medical assistance, babies that were born to undernourished mothers, to
homes without water and proper toilets, where food is scarce, and where medical
care is rare. As I look at my baby sleeping, I wonder if I will be able use the
same methods and listen to similar stories when I now can feel the consequences of what they are telling me. Will I be
able to ask, listen, note, and move to next question? I wonder if the other
researchers I have met in the field have understood the consequences of their
respondents’ stories. We have all listened to them, and noted that their
endurance is a proof of just how resilient they are! But I question whether the
majority of us has understood them, particularly
those storming through selected sites applying “rapid” methods.
I think that now I understand. And, although becoming a
mother is probably not a sine qua non condition
to feel empathy towards others’ sons and daughters, it is what has led me to
realize that in any point of time their deprivation is incommensurably larger
than my research objectives; that, when we meet, their needs are far more vital
than mine! How to conciliate these “needs” so dramatically apart?
Maybe the
following suggestions can help... 1) To
reflect with empathy: taking the time to reflect over activities… what are
the consequences of these to the respondents? How sensitive is the information
we really need to know? More sensitive information should requires more time,
less structure, and more empathy; 2) To
allow for changes: How opened to changes in our own planning have we been?
Even if these changes may not seem “productive” to our own researches, can we
accept them when they derive from respondents’ initiatives and inputs? When
respondents lead the activities and discussions, these are usually more meaningful
to them. 3) To try to give back
throughout: regardless of what the research is about (even if the plan is
to publish a master piece paper explaining how to eradicate poverty!), why
should we wait for our research recommendations to be implemented instead of
giving back throughout the research process? A meaningful moment, new information,
a new critical thought, or even a larger contact network with persons and
organizations known by us can be of important value. What are we giving and what could we give that may
be of value to them (without harming future research in the area?)?
Although the researcher will continue a researcher and won’t
become an aid worker, we must talk more about the responsibilities that emerge
once persons “worlds apart” meet. When we, after eventually obtaining a formal
ethical approval, go on implementing subscribed methods without reflection, the
researchers’ agenda prevail, and power relations are reinforced and perpetuated
with a cynical silence. Tring to be more sensitive, opened, flexible and
generous will hopefully allow me to continue doing field work. I think that,
after so many years of development research and still so little change in the
most vulnerable “field sites”, it is still and always time for us to engage in renewed self-critical reflection.
What are your thoughts on these issues? Are you a formal
adept of “Action Research” or similar methodology? Have you reflected about
your eventual responsibility towards your respondents? Are you satisfied with
how you have conducted field work? Do you have suggestions or reflections to
share with us who were/are (or have never been!) struggling with distressing
thoughts of unfair relations in the field?
