Sunday, December 13, 2009

Two dozen interviews down...dozens to go


Between the two of us my research assistant and I have conducted about two dozen interviews over the past month. (When all is said and done, we hope to have a sample of around 80 women, some of whom we will interview more than once, so a ballpark grand total of about 160 interviews).

There are of course many pros and cons to using interviews as a research strategy. On the plus side, if you have worked hard on your questions, and you continue to refine them over the course of your field work period, you are able to ask direct questions that get at exactly what you want to know. On the down side, interviews are a very artificial form of communication. No matter how much you try to put a person at ease, it is just not a normal style of conversation when one person is asking all the questions and recording everything.

Another down side, and one that we are struggling with, is that people are often unwilling or unable to give full, truthful answers to our questions. (Hence the importance of field notes in which you write down what people actually do and say in more informal interactions, instead of relying solely on their own accounts of their actions).

In this first round we are interviewing a lot of people we know, so we have a pretty good idea of what they are omitting. By far the most difficult thing is for unmarried women to admit that they have had sex. The "good girl" ideology is so powerful here (and good girls, of course, don't have sex before marriage) that even girls who we know have multiple boyfriends who they use for different things (money, going to clubs, eating in restaurants) are still unable to discuss sex directly. They will tell us that they think about 80% of young women sleep with their boyfriends, but not them of course. I haven't decided what to do about this methodological conundrum. The interviews in which women have actually recounted their sexual experiences, and there are several, are worth their weight in gold.

We are still polishing our interview guides, but we have a few gems among our questions. Among my favorites: What advice would you give to a friend who was about to get married? This question brings out all kinds of answers that touch on what kinds of behavior society expects from married women, but also the inevitable disappointments that marriage brings and how to cope with them.

Questions about polygamy and relations among co-wives also generate a lot of interesting responses. Some women are convinced that polygamy never works, while others contend that it is no big deal as long as you have confidence in yourself and your own relationship with your husband. As one woman reasoned, "no woman is the second wife in the bedroom." Words to live by, if you find yourself with a co-wife that is.

2 comments:

  1. i like that quote - interesting stuff.

    though perhaps its too late to start this, are you also doing a quantitative piece in your interviews.. for instance, giving an anonymous survey interviewees can take in private and return to you at a later date? it would be interesting to compare the survey data to interview data. or is this less culturally viable for some reason?

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  2. There is a big NGO here with its own research wing and we have been talking about collaborating on expanding the research. They thought about adding a quantitative piece, but now they think it might be more interesting to expand to include men. One problem with survey is that lots of our interviewees are not literate in any language.

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