Data management, coding and analysis

For field research in the village, I used a tape-recorder to record most of the interviews with local people. When I got back to my host family in the village, I took note of the interesting points from the interview and my field observations in my field journal. I also re-listened to the interview and ranked the interview based on its importance, with the most important ones to be fully transcribed. The less important interviews fell into one of three categoriess: (1) a short chat with a respondent; (2) the respondent was not interested in talking to me; or (3) the interview was too similar to previous ones. In these three cases, I would not transcribe the recording files, but relied on my notes taken after the interview. In total, I transcribed sixty-six interviews and took note of seven interviews. For the pho- tovoice project, I took note of my interviews with participants about the photos and at the same time, had them tape-recorded. I relied on my notes of interview with participants about the photos to supplement data from in-depth and life history interviews. Photos taken by photovoice participants were used to guide the interview and some are included in the thesis (Chapter 7). For field research at the national and provincial level, I used three different sources: tape-recording files (for recorded interviews), field notes (for non- recorded interviews and policy fora observation) as well as any extra documents (reports, meeting minute, or correspondences with respondents).

The next step was to digitally archive my data. The data from the field journal was typed and transferred to my computer as .doc files. Interview transcriptions of tape- recorded interviews and notes taken from interviews without recording files were also typed and transferred to my computer as .doc files. With the photovoice project, the pho- tos were transferred to a separate folder together with the typed notes on the photos, all

stored in my computer. All of my interviews and field notes were in Vietnamese. Having completed my fieldwork, I compiled an Excel file with information about the name of respondents, date of interview, interesting points from the interviews and the main themes that emerged from the interviews. I categorised my list of respondents by level of analy- sis, and I came up with three Excel sheets. The summarised version of respondents’ pro- files was done in English, but each interview then was linked to the detailed files (either interview transcription or interview notes) in Vietnamese. Respondents were anony- mised, coded and numbered in different categories, such as GO1 (government officers), NGO2 (non-government organisations practitioners), LH3 (life history respondents), PV4 (photovoice participants), or ID5 (in-depth interview respondents).

When coding my empirical data, I employed a coding process comprising two steps. At first, I read the Vietnamese interview transcription or interview note files, iden- tified common themes/sub-themes, underlined the texts and grouped the texts with the same themes/sub-themes together. The themes/sub-themes were recorded in English since it was easier for me to refer back to them during the writing process. Having com- pleted the first round of coding with all the interview, I imported the common themes/sub- themes in the Excel file (in English). The theme codes are often generic and short, while the sub-theme codes can be more specific and longer. After that, I compared the sub- themes codes across gender, age group and between lay people and local authorities. This was especially crucial in this research since I worked with a nested case study encom- passing multiple levels of governance. It was useful for me to compare individual or household perspectives within a level (mostly at the local level) since it gave me an idea of how each social identity such as gender, age group, social class (including economic status and political influence) contributes to differentiating my respondents’ access to land and forest and to what extent gender plays a role in this process. I then compared individual perspectives across different levels (mostly between national and provincial levels, and national and local levels) to address connections and how far the view from above tallied with my understanding of what was going on below. For example, a useful thing I discovered was the invisibility of REDD+ as it was understood by policy-makers at the village level. Comparing individual perspectives also enabled me to capture the dynamics and nuances of claims made by various social actors regarding resource access and governance, such as who should have rights to access to what and why. One, for example, might claim that s/he had rights to access a certain plot of forested land because

it had been abandoned by the Forest Company for a while and they invested labour con- verting it into a coffee plantation, while others might argue that the same plot was re- served for afforestation and not to be encroached on in any way.

It is worth acknowledging the analytical framework that informed my data collec- tion. In this research, I was interested in two frameworks: a discourse analysis and a nar- rative analysis. As part of this proposed research involves collecting data on gender-re- lated debates at the national, provincial and local levels, I found discourse analysis useful to understand how and why different social actors talked differently and where these dis- cursive terms came from. Narrative analysis, meanwhile, helped to make sense of the way ordinary people in the village crafted their ‘selves’ (Kondo 1990) and organised their life course through the stories they told as well as the multiple layers of meaning revealed within my interviews with them.

During data coding, I employed mostly thematic analysis to identify the themes that emerged from, or were silent in, the data. Discourse analysis and narrative analysis, in my data analysis process, came at a later stage. In most cases, thematic and narrative analysis were overlapping, but the latter was more useful in dealing with life history in- terviews and the former more suitable for in-depth interviews. When comparing individ- ual perspectives across levels, discourse analysis was most efficient as it helped to con- textualise and conceptualise these individual experiences within my research inquiry. Ap- parently, certain discourses were translated from global policy texts of REDD+ into the context of Vietnam, such as the universal call for women’s participation in REDD+, but it was also down to the grassroots actors to decide how and to what extent these discourses would be adopted in policy and in practice.

There were several challenges for me to operationalise my theoretical interests in gender, for example, to come up with questions that might allow me to analyse or see gender in the data collected. Initially, during the first few interviews, I found it hard to see how gender elements manifested in my respondents’ perceptions. For them, women’s and men’s rights and responsibilities in relation to land and forest were not distinct. This, then, contradicted my presumption about clear-cut gender divisions of labour in forest communities in Asia and the Central Highlands of Vietnam in particular. At the end of my field trip, especially after my photovoice project with both male and female partici- pants was over, I had the chance to compare individual perspectives and started to trace the gendered relations in and across all the areas of my enquiry. Apparently, gender was not as easily captured by thematic analysis as everything else. Instead, I found that I needed to make a gender-sensitive analysis of local narratives of land and forest claims

as well as national discourses of gender considerations in REDD+. More importantly, it was not gender per se that led my data analysis or my final presentation of this research. Rather, my analysis and interpretation were led by critical concern over how and to what extent accounts of resource access and governance were gendered and socially differen- tiated and how these in turn related to contemporary political processes and historical experiences of the relations between the community and the state in this specific area.