Building trust and conducting interviews

As explained previously, the sensitivity of the topics addressed during the research

Page | 65 required spending time working on building trust with the participants, including national and immigrant communities. I therefore first identified and met some key people identified as gate keepers within the larger communities. These people had to be trusted by the community and to have a good knowledge of it. They were generally identified as gatekeepers because of their social positions, generally as a person of reference or influence. By snowballing, I was then referred to other people who the gatekeeper thought would accept to talk to me.

To build trust and to have access to more personal information, I also spent time participating in the life of the community and let people get to know me more personally, not just as a researcher. They were then more inclined to talk freely to me and to develop their answers. It was perceived more as a mutual exchange, where I was also informing them about aspects of my life, than purely a data collection exercise. To meet the Dominican (DR) community for instance, a gate keeper invited me to join a service at the Dominican (DR) Church where he could introduce me to a part of the community and therefore make further meetings easier. However, it did not enable me to meet the rest of the community, less involved at the Church. It was more difficult to find a way to access them as they tended to mix less with the rest of the society. The main place where I could have met and started to discuss with them in an informal way would have been the bars where they often gather. This was much more difficult for me for various reasons. My level of Spanish is not high enough to conduct a spontaneous discussion in a noisy and agitated environment such as a bar. Moreover, as a young foreign woman, I felt very uncomfortable going to bars, alone, as it is mainly a masculine place. This prevented me from building a closer relationship with this community.

I therefore had less access to this group of people and had to find an alternative way to collect data. Instead I could collect some information and get an overview of the situation of this community by talking to intermediate people such as teachers, medical doctors or Red Cross staff.

It was also difficult to get access to the Guyanese and Jamaican communities as they are not such cohesive communities. They mix more with the rest of the society than the Dominicans (DR) generally do. Even though they face some specific issues relating to their origin, there are no specific places or events where I could meet them. The role of the gate keeper was therefore primarily to access people by snowballing. In several cases, I met members of the Guyanese and Jamaican communities in a very informal way, which was not anticipated. I was able to get data through informal and spontaneous discussions.

A large number of interviews (see Appendice) were conducted in quite an informal and spontaneous way, often in bars or when people approached me by themselves, often out of curiosity. Such situations were ideal to talk with people in a friendly and informal atmosphere. Although I could not anticipated these discussions, regular work on my data and on the topics I wanted to tackle helped me to better anticipate these spontaneous discussions and therefore to make them evolve from a short and superficial discussion, generally often focused on me as an outsider, to a deeperdiscussion on people’s experiences and perceptions.

In a few cases, it led to a more formal interview later on. Informal discussions and spontaneous semi-structured interviews were much more improvised than the formal and planned structured and semi-structured interviews. Objectives and questions to ask were not pre-defined. I had to constantly adjusted to follow the flow of the discussion and the interests of the person. When some of the research topics were not addressed spontaneously and if they seemed relevant during the discussion, I tried to bring them up in a natural way, which did not affect the flow of thoughts of the interviewee. I could not take notes during these spontaneous discussions, nor record them. However I tried most of the time to take notes as soon as possible, in the most complete way by remembering the discussion chronologically and thematically.

Apart from these informal interviews, which were conducted essentially with community members, the interviews with the authorities, disaster managers or key people of the social sectors were more organized and anticipated. Each interview was prepared in advance with a list of topics to tackle, specific to each interviewee depending on their field of expertise. The interviews were recorded only when I knew the interviewees would feel comfortable enough with this, and after asking for their agreement. In several cases, especially when sensitive topics were going to be addressed, I decided not to ask to record as I felt it may have made the person uncomfortable. In such cases, I took only brief notes of the key points during the interview and I tried as much as possible to complete the notes after the interview.

It was necessary to constantly adapt the interview process and design. For instance, the politicians, more used to such exercises, were often expecting a succession of clear and well-focused questions and were giving quick and pre-thought answers. It was therefore more difficult to reach their actual opinion, to raise a deeper reflection and to go beyond the politically correct. Apart from them, most of the interviewees seemed to feel more comfortable with a less structured interview, more akin to a normal discussion. The difficulty in this case

Page | 67 was to keep the discussion focused on topics relevant to my research without over-forcing the direction.

In total, 130 interviews were conducted during the three fieldworks and distributed as following (Table 3.1): (The members of risk management, social/health institutions and business people (categories 2, 3, 4) were both Montserratians and non-Montserratians. Their nationality was not specifically asked for the interview as these individuals were interviewed because of their particular task and job. The interviewees in categories 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 were specifically chosen because of the national group they identify with)