The three cases in this study

The stations I have chosen are Radio Sagharmatha (RS) in Nepal, Kothmale Community Radio (KCR) in Sri Lanka and Samoa Capital Radio (SCR) in New Zealand. Each radio station has been serving the community for more than a decade and hence is well-placed and positioned in their respective communities. They are also well known in their respective countries. For example, Radio Sagharmatha is Nepal’s first private radio station as well as its first community radio station. The station was founded in 1997 and is owned by a renowned local NGO known by its acronym ‘NEFEJ’ which stands for Nepal Forum of Environmental Journalists. The station only serves the Kathmandu valley region. As the country’s first radio station that was not owned by the government, RS is a household name throughout the country (O. Khadka, NEFEJ Director, personal communication, July 9, 2007).

Kothmale Community Radio in Sri Lanka was founded in 1989 and is owned by the state broadcaster, Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC). The station began, initially, as a radio project that was funded by the Danish International Development Agency and UNESCO in their effort to help minimise the emotional isolation of villagers who were relocated to new settlements when the Sri Lankan government built the Mahaweli Dam on the site of their original villages. Today, KCR is the country’s leading community radio station (S. Wijesinghe, KCR manager, personal communication, August 6, 2007).

Samoa Capital Radio is in Wellington which is home to the country’s largest Samoan community. The radio is owned by a Samoa Community Trust. The station had its beginning as a Samoan programme on Wellington Access Radio. However, as its popularity grew, it eventually became a radio station on its own right. SCR takes pride in describing itself as

New Zealand’s first ethnic community radio. Although the station is registered as a separate radio station, it does not own a frequency of its own and hence continues to broadcast over Wellington Access Radio. Despite this disadvantage, SCR remains the favourite radio of the Samoans living in New Zealand (A.T. Moresi, SCR manager, personal communication, November 26, 2009).

5.4.1 Case selection criteria- a discussion

As “case selection is often influenced by researcher’s familiarity with the language, of a country, a personal entrée’ into the locale, special access to important data, or funding that covers one archive rather than another” and “pragmatic considerations are often-and quite rightly- decisive in the case selection process” (Gerring, 2007:150), my choice of selecting the cases, especially the two South Asian stations, was also influenced by the good relationship that I had developed with the stations over time and hence viewed them as convenient for me to access information easily. As I will discuss below, there are also other reasons for choosing the selected cases.

Stations from Sri Lanka and Nepal were included for three reasons. Firstly, I am from South Asia and studying how community radios operate in that region would also help me widen my regional knowledge on the different aspects of running a community radio in the region. Secondly, studying the regional radio stations was the best option given the fact there were no community radio stations in the Maldives, my home country, at the time I began this study in mid- 2007. Thirdly, I have also encountered some critics of the selected two cases who believed that the two South Asian stations I had chosen were not true community radio stations. This being the case, by selecting the two radio stations, it gave me the opportunity to study the stations and get answers from their management as to why critics call them not very community participatory radio stations.

I included a station from New Zealand because I was studying in New Zealand. The station I chose was SCR which broadcast in the Samoan language and was focused on the country of Samoa, Samoan issues, Samoan culture and interests and on the life of Samoans in New

Zealand. Selecting this radio station, which was focused on an immigrant community that had come to New Zealand from a developing country, was in many respects, like selecting a radio station from Samoa.

I had originally planned to study two radio stations from each country. However, having analysed the practicality of studying more radio stations as well as my financial constraints and the time available for me to complete the study, I had limited this study to three radio stations, one from each country. When there are more cases to study, it also means there is less time to spend on each case and hence the smaller the chance of each case getting an equal level of in-depth study (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995:37-44). In this sense fewer cases meant doing a better and focused study. If I had chosen cases from a single country, it could have provided me a more representative sample of cases and hence the better the findings would be as far as radio stations in the chosen country were concerned. No representative cases also mean there is less room for a wider cross-case analysis, something that could have added more strength to the research findings (Gerring, 2007:43).

The three different stations that I have chosen from three different countries are three unique stations that are independent and have three different types of radio ownership; one an NGO- owned, the other government-owned and the third, community-owned. Hence, ownership- wise, they are very different and can be classified as three unrepresentative cases. Being unrepresentative, I have studied each case independently as a single case, dealing with each of them in its own environment and presenting the findings separately in the way they unfolded individually. Hence, I have not done any cross-case analysis.

Although the three cases I have chosen are singular and not representative of each other and my findings could not be used as a basis to make a definitive generalisation or a conclusion on all types of community radios, I believe the individual results can be used to compare and contrast with findings from other similar or representative cases or used as a basis to “develop a working hypothesis”. In this sense, as Cronbach suggests “when we give proper weight to local conditions, any generalisation is a working hypothesis, not a conclusion”

(Cronbach, 1975:124; Linclon and Guba, 2000). Lincoln and Guba (2000) suggest that working hypotheses that are formed from one case study can be used to understand other similar cases. “The degree of transferability is a direct function of the similarity between the two contexts, what we shall call ‘fittingness’. Fittingness is defined as the degree of congruence between sending and receiving contexts. If Context A and Context B are ‘sufficiently’ congruent, then working hypothesis from the sending originating context may be applicable in the receiving context” (Lincoln and Guba, 2000:40). Hence, as “conclusions derived in one context might be relevant to another context”, (Lincoln and Guba, 2000:38) I believe the findings in this study can be used to understand how they ‘fit’ to other similar cases.

I should also note here that there are researchers who do not support the ideas of generalising cases. For example, Stake (2000) sees each case as a bounded and separate system and hence he proposes that each case should be studied separately as studying cases together and generalising them may not do justice to each case, as generalisations may not show up the unique features embedded in each case. Stake suggests that in investigating a case, we should treat cases individually instead of opting to generalise the findings with other cases. The issues I have chosen as the topic of my study is the same for all three cases and the idea of the study was rather than doing a pure comparison between the three, to show a wide-angled view of the three stations showing how each case was enabling their communities to access and participate in the radio. Hence, this study should be viewed as a collection of three single cases which shows how the same issue prevails in three different and single cases.

One might say that, being an economically developed country, I could not compare a community radio from New Zealand with two community radio stations from the developing world. I do believe that there is a socio-economic disparity between New Zealand and South Asia. However, given the careful consideration I put in to choosing a station from New Zealand, I do not believe that my choice of stations will have a negative effect on the study on grounds of socio-economic differences. I should also emphasise here that this study is not a comparison of socio economic aspects of New Zealand, Sri Lanka and Nepal. This is a study about three radio stations and the chosen three stations have many similar

characteristics. As I stated earlier, SCR, the New Zealand station I chose was focused on information dissemination to the Samoan community in New Zealand. The radio belonged to a Samoan community trust and is located in Wellington, a region which is home to a lot of first generation Samoans living in New Zealand. The language of radio was Samoan. The station programmes were aired in Samoan and not understood by any other Kiwis if they had no knowledge of Samoan. It was therefore, a Samoan window opened in New Zealand to experience and appreciate and feel all aspects Samoan while in NZ. Being a radio that promoted Samoan culture; that promoted Samoan citizenship as cultural citizens living in new Zealand, the radio was in many aspects very much a ‘slice’ of Samoa in New Zealand. Many of its listeners were first generation Samoans in NZ and parents and family of Samoan Kiwis who had poor knowledge of English. Many of them were just like their counterparts in Samoa, in need of knowledge in areas such as education, health and lifestyle issues and life in NZ in general. Hence, in these aspects, the radio was more than a middle-of-the-road New Zealand community radio station, it was a special ethnic community radio that was broadcasting to a small ‘cultural nation’- a slice of Samoa-rooted within multi-cultural New Zealand.

Therefore, viewing from a purely socio-economic aspect, I believe South Asia, as a region of developing countries, have similar characteristics with Samoa and with other countries in the developing Pacific, and given the above reasons for choosing SCR, I also firmly believe that it was a choice that had merit.