Entering the field and the Recruitment of Study Participants

As I mentioned above, I was not born in the capital and my family lives in another city of Georgia. Because of this, I don’t have a house or a flat in Tbilisi, where I could live permanently. Thus, I have to rent a room every time I go to Georgia. Considering this, before leaving Bergen I had to find a flat. It was very hard since I needed it in the center of the city and only for three months and not many people are willing to lease for such short periods of time. For my research, living in the center was crucial, as I was looking for study participants from the middle class of society and most of them live in the center. Fortunately, I managed to

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find a suitable flat for three months and as I moved in I was ready to start searching for my study participants.

Initially, I planned to search for my study participants using the snowballing method through “Facebook”. First of all I would conduct interviews with fathers from the younger generation and, once done, I would proceed to interview more elderly people. In between of these two phases I planned to conduct Focus Group Discussions (FGD) and participant observations. Thus, upon my arrival I published a Facebook status saying that I was looking for young fathers, who wished to volunteer and participate in my study. Unfortunately, while I gathered a lot of “likes”, no one expressed the desire to devote time and get involved in my research. Therefore, I changed my strategy. I decided to use my personal social network. Considering the fact that my friends are more or less of the same age as me, they found young fathers for me with ease. Before the end of June, I was able to finish all my eight (8) planned interviews with younger dads. My quick success of an efficient recruitment of study participants was not only thanks to my social network, but also due to the right time period. To be more specific, in summer most people go on holidays. In Tbilisi, people start going for vacations in the middle of July and vacation time reaches its peak in the middle of August. Thus, later on, when I started struggling with finding study participants I realized that the time period of the research played a huge role for finding potential interviewees.

In first days of July, I started to plan young people’s Focus Group Discussions (see below). For the younger group of mixed gender, I aimed at an age range of 20-26. I invited my friends and friends of friends’ to participate in my FGD. Being in the same age range, made it easy for me to find participants for FGD. The fact that, I was renting a separate room for living provided favorable conditions for the study. Young people seemed to be very eager to participate in FGDs as it was an unofficial gathering place and they approached it as more of a social place to get to know new people and interact with each other. In addition to this, when asking for participation, I promised snacks and drinks. I think all those mentioned elements played a crucial role in my successful recruitment of young people for my focus group. However, things didn’t go without small challenges. During my first FGD, I was excited and nervous, and although they were my friends and I wasn’t afraid of judgment, I still felt an enormous responsibility. I also became relatively stressed when some people refused to come at the very last moment, while others, who came quite late, made the rest of the participants wait for them. Fortunately, due to the informal environment the waiting tension and stress were easily outweighed by fun conversations.

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After I had finished FGDs, I started searching for fathers from elder generation and also mothers for my last two focus groups (see below). It is worth mentioning, that for this time, it was already middle of July and people started to on vacations. So, at the end of July the Tbilisi was very empty. I started to organize mothers’ FGDs. I was calling my ex-coworkers and mothers of my friends, as well as asking my young father interviewees to encourage their wives to participate. However, most of them have left for summer, or were too busy or “could not promise anything” – as they said. I had planned to conduct two mothers’ FGDs and I was unable to get even one. Also, it should be mentioned that at this time it was unbearably hot in Tbilisi and people wanted to simply hide away from the heat and avoid any other obligations. Thus, my plan to conduct mothers FGDs failed. However, the information from mothers was important for my research materials. Therefore, I decided to change my strategy and decided to organize interviews instead of focus groups. My decision turned out to be much more effective. Because of the flexibility of time and place, women gave me informed consent with ease. Mostly, I was visiting them at home or at work. Besides this, I carried my voice recorder everywhere, which was quite useful at some times. For example, once I went to a beauty salon just to fix my hair, with no planned interviews, and I was able to interview three mothers. Eventually, I have managed to collect eight interviews, which I considered to be enough. While doing interviews with women, I was also searching for elder fathers. Recruitment of those became the most challenging fieldwork experience for me. First of all, as mentioned above, people were leaving for holidays. Secondly, it was hard to find men who met all the eligibility criteria: to have higher education, be above 35 and to have at least one 18-year-old child (see below). Even if I was able to find such people, they were very hard to recruit because unlike young fathers, they were not very enthusiastic to participate in my research. I was afraid that I might not manage to find all eight elder fathers before the end of summer and so I decided to search for the study participants randomly. I went out and started searching for men who, based on my judgment, looked like fathers from the older generation. I went to the nearest hospitals, supermarkets, embassies. In such a way, I found three interviewees. Fortunately, in the end, I was able to manage all the eight interviews with elder fathers successfully. Additionally, it is worth noting that all the interviews and FGDs were taped using voice recorder.

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