Field Plans and Procedures

The researcher implemented the research design in two ways: firstly, by developing a good relationship with the institutions that I had to deal with for ethical approval and consents prior to data collection; and secondly by preparing field instruments, selecting research sites, and describing demographic and social characteristics of participants

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needed for collecting data. Firstly, in order to obtain ethical approvals from ethics committees a good relationship with research participants and the organizations working in the field of HIV would have to be established. Because of the political and social environment, this process proved to be more complex than expected, and is explained below in section 4.4.

I then developed an implementation plan using a flexible research design. This design included preparing a semi-structured interview questionnaire, choosing a wide range of research sites, and developing as wide an age range as possible to include a wide variety of participants, irrespective of gender, caste, class and sexual orientation. I developed a semi-structured interview schedule to be asked with research participants in my field work (see Appendix 3). The semi-structured interview tool encouraged openness, allowing new ideas to be brought up as a result of what research participants said during interviews with them. This further provided me with a way to develop additional questions based on participant responses. The ‘structured’ part of the interview tool prevented participants from going too far beyond my research objectives, and the research questions were constructed in a way that focused on the process of identity reconstruction (Wengraf, 2001).

A field plan was prepared to recruit research participants through a snowball sampling method with the help of community support groups located in the Kathmandu and Pokhara urban areas. This method makes it a little easier to find participants for this HIV- sensitive topic, benefitting from social networks and information provided by earlier participants in interviews. Many PLHIV do not want to disclose their own health status with other people beyond their own network. I already knew, to some extent,

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some friends working in the field of HIV in the course of doing my previous HIV research (Aryal et al., 2011) before coming to New Zealand for this study. I tried to develop a relationship for data collection using the references of contact persons from some community support groups which I already knew. From this perspective, I designed two ways of finding PLHIV as research participants: one was from snowball sampling through earlier participants to be interviewed for this study, and the other was networking from one organization to another based on the connections between various organizations.

I chose for research the Kathmandu and Pokhara Valleys, two of the largest regions most affected by HIV in Nepal. Both valleys are major urban centres of Nepal, known to have the most internal and international migrants. I chose these areas expecting that migrants are more vulnerable to health issues, particularly HIV and AIDS, than indigenous people (Brummer, 2002), although this study does not focus on any particular differences between migrants and non-migrants. The research sites consist of three districts, Kathmandu, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur from the Kathmandu Valley and three districts, Kaski, Syangja and Tanahu from the Pokhara Valley and its adjoining locations. Understanding the reluctance of people to discuss their HIV, I made an effort to cover a wide range of research sites, thinking that the wider the coverage, the more likely it would be to find research participants for data collection.

A research plan was prepared to collect data from PLHIV aged 18 years and above. The reason behind this was PLHIV are infected at sexually active ages as well as the ages most common for using drugs. Moreover, the basis for choosing this age range was that

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according to the prevailing laws of Nepal, the legal age for marriage, without the consent of parents, is 18 years for females (Aryal, 2007). After this age, female can have sex with her legal partner. However, younger people, aged down to 12 years, irrespective of gender, who were infected due to parental transmission or any other mode of transmission (blood transfusion) were also considered for data collection depending upon ethical approvals from the institutions concerned.

While participants’ real names were used to attest to their consent, they were invited to choose a pseudonym in order to protect their confidentiality; once consent was obtained pseudonyms were used throughout the interview and data analysis processes, including in this report. Likewise, organisations were arbitrarily assigned numbers (Organisation One, Organisation Two, and so on) in order to protect their confidentiality and integrity. Thus confidentiality of participants and organisations was obtained and protected.

Finally, I considered compensating research participants in one way or another. In the absence of funding for research participants, I could not provide them with costly things. However, I wanted to express my appreciation to them verbally in return for their time and the effort of sharing their experiences. Furthermore, I thought of offering a diary for literate research participants working in an organisation, and writing pads for the school-aged children of participants whose economic status was poor. I intended to give participants a choice of either the diary or writing pads as a token of appreciation.

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