This section details the methods used to collect field data for this project. I focus on the use of participant observation, in-depth interviews, informal conversations, drama, essay writing, focus groups, key informant interviews and participatory diagramming activities
47
as ethnographic techniques applied in this research. The mix methods allowed data triangulation and corroboration allowing a more in-depth understanding of the research question (Valentine, 2001). Although these ethnographic approaches provide rich data, each technique has particular advantages and disadvantages in terms of being distressful for both the study informants and the researcher, and in addressing certain research questions and themes (see also Punch, 2001b).
Fig 2: Data Collection Techniques Employed
The research was conducted in six phases but it was impossible to avoid overlaps throughout the research process (see Fig 2; Table 8). The first stage involved administering a questionnaire (Appendix 5; Table 8) to the child heads. The questionnaire approach was not the main method used in this study as described in an earlier paragraph. However, methodologically the questionnaire was used to gather data about the socio- demographic characteristics of the household. Ethically it was easier to start with the more formal questionnaire approach. The questionnaire allowed certain issues to be followed up during the qualitative approaches. The second phase of the study was
Essay Writing Focus Group Discussions Questionnaire Participatory Diagramming Techniques Key Informant Interviews Life /History Interviews Participant Observation
participant observation (PO). PO provided a more in depth understanding of the informants as well the context in which they lived. Further, PO facilitated the establishment of rapport with the children, which proved useful for their active participation in all stages of the research. PO was a continuous method until the research ended. The third stage entailed in-depth interviews (Appendix 6) with the child headed households. The approach covered a range of topics some of which arose from participant observation. The detailed narrative interview with child heads provided accounts about how the children got to where they are and the strategies employed by the household to eke out a living, the support received from family members, community, etc (Table 8). This included a discussion of their “experiences” of being a household head and being a decision maker. The fourth stage involved the use of participatory diagramming techniques (Appendix 7) and this overlapped with focus groups (Appendix 8) and essay writing, stage five. It was not easy to group the children together for both the participatory diagramming techniques and the focus groups. Thus stage four and five were conducted on the same day. Participatory diagramming techniques provide data on the sources and social support networks for the children’s survival. The accounts and experiences reported by household members through use of participatory techniques also revealed the distribution of roles and responsibilities of household members and how these are negotiated since the deaths of parents. The last stage was the key informant interviews (Appendix 9). Interviews with professionals and community members provided data on the types of support they provide to the child headed households and their perceptions about the child headed households. Although the mixed method approach was important to maximise the understanding of the research questions, I remain concerned about the contradictory findings each methods produced (Valentine, 2001) as discussed in the following sections.
Table 8: Chart linking research questions and methods Research
question
Data sources and methods Justification What are the
socio- economic demographic characteristics of households?
Senior members of the household: Interview
A household questionnaire was used to provide the characteristics of CHHs in relation to their age, education, assets, sources of income and illness of parents. Methodologically this enabled the researcher to get quantitative data on the demography of the household. Ethically this formal approach made it easier to start the sensitive study.
How did the child headed household evolve?
Senior members of the household: Life history/interview
Detailed narrative account with senior members of the household provided data on the formation of the household. How do the children organise themselves in relation to household roles and responsibilitie s?
Senior members of the household; Interview. Siblings living with the child head: Participatory diagrammes.
Observation
Narrative account by senior members of the household and their capability to take up the responsibilities.
Participatory diagramming techniques revealed the distribution of roles and responsibilities of household members.
This involved a general observation (and
participation) of what happened in the household during the home visits.
How do the children organise themselves in relation to social networking to meet their needs?
Senior members of the household; Interview.
Participatory techniques including focus groups
Observation
Key informant interviews: Unstructured interview guide.
Narrative accounts with child head provided accounts about strategies household employ to eke out a living.
Group activities provided information on the sources of support, both current and expected, including their needs and support that they require outside assistance.
Home visits and hanging out in the village enabled the researcher to observe the interaction of the children with other members of the community.
Interviews with community leaders informed the researcher about the general attitudes of villagers and officials towards the CHH and what support they provided the households.
5.5.1 Participant observation
Participant observation (PO) is a labour-intensive and time-consuming ethnographic technique involving immersing with the community to understand the context of their everyday lives and experiences. Taking into account that what constitutes participant observation varies, this research adopted overt roles as a ‘partial’ participant and observer (Cook, 1997). As will be discussed in this section PO allowed a broader understanding of the community in which the children lived and their relationships within it (Valentine, 2001). Therefore PO was carried at two levels: the community and the household level in which the later involved spending full days and nights with the CHHs. This approach involved making notes about events, activities and the interaction of the study informants. Like any field data collection method, PO required considerable thought and planning that ranged from negotiating access and establishing rapport with the study informants to becoming immersed in the community.
5.5.1.1 Walking/talking in the community
This stage involved “hanging out” in the villages to gain an understanding of the context of the environment in which the children lived. Hanging out in the villages entailed talking to villagers and also participating in village activities such as visiting the sick. Usually hanging out was conducted on our way to visit the children. The process was stressful both physically and emotionally. The physical stress arose as a result of the physical environment in which we worked, the distances between respondents’ houses and the lack of transport. My research assistant and I were housed at Chivero Clinic and from there we made visits to the children’s households. The farthest household, Tendai was about 5 kms from Chivero Clinic and the nearest was Chemai household, which was less than a kilometre. Sometimes we walked over 15 kms a day. I felt vulnerable as we walked through the forests. I feared to be robbed given the incidences of household break-ins and cattle rustling in the community. I was also scared of snakes and vicious dogs, all this raising ethical issues regarding health and safety. The fear I had made me reflect on how the young children of these vulnerable CHHs must feel, especially at
The villagers often questioned why we walked and did not use a car or bicycle. They really felt sorry that we had to walk such long distance we are not accustomed to. I had disregarded use of a car for three reasons: the first reason was practical and logistical. I simply did not have adequate funds to hire a car and fuel crisis further complicated the issue. However, a second reason was more social/academic: driving in the villages and visiting the poor children would widen the class and power differences between my field assistant and myself and our respondents. I felt that the children would think I was there to exploit them. On the other hand I felt that this would create a barrier to communication because they would have seen me as superior elite that they could not relate to. A third reason was that although use of car would have made the research process logistically easier I felt it would result in my missing a lot of what was happening in the villages that would help to contextualise the children’s survival strategies. For example, it was through “hanging out” in the community and around the community service area and daily walks around the community that we encountered and visited several households with terminally ill people mostly young adults from the urban areas. We realised that the community spent a lot of time attending funerals or memorial services. For example, we witnessed a household [neighbour to Chenjerai’s house] distributing the deceased’s property. We passed through another homestead where the father showed us the kitchen household goods he had taken after the daughter passed away. We observed that many children (including those with surviving parents) missed school because they were too weak from hunger to make it to school or were simply absent because the parents would have gone to work on the nearby farms48. We observed the villagers coming from the farms including women with babies on their backs. We also discovered the community members who were concerned about the welfare of orphaned children and who showed their African hospitality when we visited orphaned children. The villagers offered us hospitality because we were important visitors and as a result the children were helped too. Some of the villagers were already helping the children before our arrival and others
48 There were several households (of single and mostly widowed women) who left their children whilst
they went to work on the farms. Some commuted daily to the farms but others lived there and came back at weekends. We witnessed cases where a 5 year old was left to babysit two siblings whilst the mother went to work.
were prompted to help when we arrived. Some villagers felt bad and ashamed by the orphans that they could not offer us food, so they provided us something to eat. We ate the food because we always felt hungry and because it would have been culturally inappropriate to refuse such hospitality. We gave these households nothing to reciprocate although the community would not have expected this. This method yielded key insights into how CHHs are viewed and positioned in the community, mostly that CHH are poverty stricken.
“We saw you come. We have left food for you because these orphans have no food to provide you”.(Neighbour to Chenjerai household, 5 July, 2005)
Our daily walks enabled us to talk to the villagers as we walked past their homesteads. Most of them bemoaned the drought, mourned the deaths of the many people coming from the towns to die in the villages, and complained about the rising cost of living and their struggle to survive. We also talked to children we met on the way though it was difficult because children are not expected to talk to strangers, although children are culturally expected to greet people wherever they are. We learned from some children how they cannot attend school because have no stationery or uniforms. They told us about the absent teachers who take days off to engage in cross border activities or are ill.
While walking was a very successful field method it also involved a lot of physical strain (despite catching malaria, I was as fit as a fiddle by the end of the research). It was challenging to sit down to discuss and write notes at the end of the day for we were always physically exhausted and besides we had to cook as well. In the end we decided to write notes in the middle of the night after having slept for a couple of hours. Sometimes we left it until the following morning, but we always made sure that we completed the task before the next home visit.
Walking with the members of the NGO staff provided an opportunity to discuss their programme activities. The informal discussion we held as we walked proved to be vital as a data collection technique. We learnt about the NGO and their programme activities,
villages and the rampant ‘commercial sex work’ on the farms. Although I had planned to have a formal interview with the NGO field officers I abandoned the idea because I had obtained most of the information I needed via informal walking/talking sessions. The information was so rich that I would not have obtained such data during the face-to-face interviews. No data was recorded and I relied on recall notes.
5.5.1.2 Living with the Orphaned headed Households
During the first phase of the PO at the household level, my research assistant and myself spent a full day with the child head, participating with whatever household tasks they were doing for that day. I got involved in the household domestic chores, cooking, sharing meals, going to the shops, washing plates, sweeping the yard, fetching water, watering the gardening and planting vegetables, ‘hanging’ around in the villages with the children where possible as well visiting their friends and relatives.
Originally, I had planned only to spend full days (excluding nights) with the children but I soon realised that I was missing a lot of what happened early in the morning and later in the evening when the siblings of household heads were back from school. I wanted to observe what happened at night when the siblings came back from school and early morning when they woke up but because it was winter and got dark very quickly it was risky for us to walk at night. Moreover it was evident that spending the night with the household was crucial to addressing the question related to the gendered distribution of roles and responsibilities and interactions between the children. I would have liked to stay overnight with all the households in my survey but was not able to due to lack of accommodation and fear for own security. Eventually I decided to spend a few nights at household Tererai and Tendai. The two households had adequate accommodation, having spare rooms unlike household Mufumi who lived in a single roomed hut. Although Mufumi cares for a sibling we failed to observe their interaction in detail because the sibling spent most of the time at school. We never felt very safe at Chenjerai household because the eldest brother was said to be a thief. In addition I also felt patronised by the many youths (male) who always visited the household during our presence.
We did not conduct interviews during the first few days we visited the children and only did so after we established the rapport with them. However, the days of establishing rapport were very much a part of the data collection process for we learnt a lot about the households during this stage. Being able to speak the native language, Shona, helped to establish rapport, as there were no language barriers. Most of the households were enthusiastic to participate in the research. Borrowing from feminist scholars, Taylor et al. (1984) suggests that field tactics such as running errands and doing favours facilitate the process of establishing rapport. Participating in household chores made it very easy to establish the much-needed rapport and trust with the children at the beginning and throughout the whole study. Active participation increased the depth of understanding through doingas well as observing(see Picture 2).It was useful to capture what children do in practice and not just what they children say they do (Punch 2001b). Chemai was threshing maize on the second day we visited her. They were five children including two- twin boys who had had come to play. It was difficult simply to start a conversation with the children so we first joined in the activity threshing the maize. We sat under the sun for 5 hours chatting. We talked about the harvest, the lack of rains, the high cost of foodstuffs, etc. By the time we left Chemai had provided us a synopsis of her life from parental illness to the present day.
Picture 2: Myself at Chemai Homestead
Participation facilitated rapport and trust with the children.
From left, Chigere, myself (Monica), Chemai and her friend49threshing maize at Chemai household
Despite spending a couple of days establishing rapport, the children were very reserved and they only opened up when their friends visited. The friends frequented the orphans mostly out of curiosity and also to hear what we talked about (although we never revealed what the research was about). We sat and joined in the conversation and laughed with them. Thus the friends’ visits were crucial at the beginning because they made the children open up and they would just laugh about their shared experiences. However, later, when we were making visits to the households specifically to conduct interviews, visits from these friends were more disruptive of the interviews and the process of recording the children’s life histories and forced us to stop the interviews. For example,
49The friend (aged 25) is married with 4 children. She is quite well off by rural standards. The husband
Chemai was reserved until a friend (see Picture 2) came to visit, after which she opened up. The friend joined in the work we were doing. We obtained a synopsis of the household’s history. We got information about Chemai’s family, education, and her struggle to get food and source of income, her work on the farms, her parents’ illness and subsequent deaths.
The way we conducted ourselves was crucial for the success of the research. For example, positioning ourselves at almost the same level with the informants reduced the power gradient the researched and myself as the researcher even though I felt uncomfortable at times (Scheyvens and Storey, 2003). The friend said that she liked us because we were not “showy” despite the fact that we lived in the UK! She (the friend) was amazed that we threshed maize and ate mangai (boiled maize grain) that Chemai served for lunch. We became part of orphaned children’s friends network and they also became our research informants as we interacted with the orphaned children. Orphans’ friends voluntarily became a key source of information and filled in the missing gaps and reminded the child heads of incidences about their daily struggles. Every time Chemai’s