Limitations of the Study and Suggestions for Future Research

My study has a number of limitations that might impact how the results are interpreted. First, in terms of sampling method, I was not able to conduct a focus group

with live-in domestic workers. As explained in chapter 3, due to difficulties in scheduling, uncooperative weather conditions and a religious full-moon festival when many domestic workers returned home for a week to devote themselves to rituals and offerings, this focus group discussion never happened. Individual interviews I conducted with the live-in workers and other research findings suggest that different patterns of networks, such as neighbourhood-based networks instead of shared origin or kinship- based networks may be more common among women doing this type of domestic services. A focus group with live-in workers may have provided additional nuance and insight into the ways in which networks are gendered, and helped draw comparison with live-out workers and how different forms of networks impact different groups of domestic workers.

A second limitation of the sample is that I could not interview families of the migrant women, especially the husbands. Given the focus of my study is on gender roles and how these roles are complied with and contested, excluding the men’s voice leaves many conclusions rather one-sided. As presented in the last chapter, the men were described by their wives in an overwhelmingly negative light. As Nguyễn Thị Nguyệt Minh (2014) and Hoang & Yeoh (2011) demonstrate in their respective studies, in households whose members migrate for work, care arrangement shifts to accommodate the changes. Concepts such as ―translocal householding‖ or ―doing family‖ imply that changes in gender roles involve men as much as, if not more than, women. Leaving out the husbands’ voices prevents a more complete understanding of changes to gender roles taking place in migrant households.

A third limitation concerns locale. My study was set in the capital city of Vietnam and all participants came from nearby provinces in the North. Including domestic workers in other regions of the country would likely yield additional insights. The Southern part of Vietnam has a much shorter exposure to socialism and a different historical development. Furthermore, a few participants mentioned that domestic workers enjoy more egalitarian treatment, more respectful employer-employee relationships and, in general, are less subjected to stereotypes and condescending attitudes in the south. Available studies on Vietnamese domestic workers mostly focus on women in the North. Geographical and cultural diversity in the sample would have certainly revealed new and interesting findings.

The fourth limitation is the operationalization of my main variables. Gender roles and gender norms are very broad constructs that could be interpreted in many different ways. To assess what these concepts mean to the participants was not easy, and to find out whether being a migrant and a domestic worker influences the ways they perform their gender roles was even more challenging. It is not possible for one single study to exhaust all different interpretations of gender roles. Therefore, in my study, I broke down gender roles into several sub-variables, i.e. power in decision-making at the household level, control of family budget, relationship with spouse and children, care arrangement and domestic tasks typically fulfilled by women, and financial or labour contribution to household production and communal activities. Other aspects of gender roles and gender equality that have been studied by other researchers but were not included in my study such as relationships with other relatives (e.g. mother and daughter-in-law), access to capital through kinship-based networks (Nguyễn Tuấn Anh, 2010), daughters’ ability to

reject marriage proposals and remain single (Belanger & Khuất, 2002) and political participation (Werner, 2009). It should be noted that while these studies examine diverse elements of gender equality, they do not focus on migrant women. Their samples typically consist of non-migrant women. Therefore future studies that consider the intersection between migration and gender equality should pay attention to different aspects of gender relations.

Due to the limited scope of this research, it is harder to draw conclusions pertaining to macro forces such as globalization and capitalism. The participants’ stories suggest a possible parallel between the situation of transnational domestic workers and those of internal migrants in Vietnam. While capitalism and globalization have often been used to account for the flow of labour migrants from developing countries to more developed ones (Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2002), it is rather astonishing that similar findings emerge from this research, which was conducted with rural-to-urban migrants in a country that has not yet openly embraced capitalism and the free market. My study shows that the global chain of care might be absent, but similar processes are active at the national level. Instead of the market, Vietnamese women are under pressure from the state to be productive and financially sufficient citizens. The process of globalization may not operate within one country, but there is rampant social inequality between rural and urban areas to create the same effects. These are interesting processes taking place at the local level that should be examined further. A study with a larger sample and more diverse methods may be able to shed light on this potential connection.

Lastly, because spoken words were the only form of data I collected, there are certain ambiguities in how the data can be interpreted. Specifically, when probed about

how their new earning power influenced their positions in the family, most participants replied with a culturally appropriate answer: namely, that despite their incomes, they still respected their husbands and all important decisions were discussed between husband and wife until a consensus could be reached. However, a follow-up hypothetical question that asked whether the husbands could buy something without the wives’ approval revealed that the women indeed had more say in financial decisions. Because I had to rely on what I was told, it is unclear whether the participants really were not aware of their new power, or whether they were not comfortable voicing it aloud for fear of judgement. In other words, this disparity between what actually happened and what they said happened could be explained as a lack of available gender discourses that the women can use to make sense of their situations, or an effort to bridge the gap between reality and ideals of femininity. The women might sincerely not know about the changes, or be familiar with a culturally appropriate way to describe them. Perhaps they might be perfectly aware of the adjustments, but brush them aside so they could appear to me, a stranger, as virtuous women who live according to cultural expectations of humble and respectful wives. The feminist standpoint theory argues that researchers should always assume the standpoint of their informants, instead of searching for an objective reality that does not exist (Harding, 2004). This position ultimately suggests plenty of room for speculation, because it is not always clear how researchers are supposed to interpret what they were told. Stories are motivated by multiple emotions and cultural scripts that are available to story-tellers and these motivations can be obscured from researchers, even a partial insider like myself. Had I been able to collect different forms of data, such as

participant observation, or quantitative measurements in a survey, cross-checking could have been a possibility, thus increasing the study’s rigour and credibility.