Project Difficulties

After the first few in-depth interview sessions, our group was rather unsure about the data that we have collected. With uncertain cases and societal problems, we had difficulties in continuing with the directions that we were initially heading towards at the beginning of our project. We ultimately reached the extent of wanting to change the issue that we have been looking at and of abandoning the existing research findings before recess week. We felt quite lost and disheartened after weeks of efforts heading down to conduct rounds of interviews, receiving silent rejection from the participants by not replying to our requests, which ended up with uncertainties of our project direction unlike the initial phase.

We consulted Miss Raksha during class to guide us with our project directions. After sharing our findings from our participants with her, especially on the grey areas about poverty issues and problems whether we were able to use the two in-depth interviews that we had already conducted, we managed to sort out the directions that we are heading towards. At that point of time, it appeared to us that issues seem to be personal vices rather than societal problems that we were trying to tackle on. However, Miss Raksha led us to see a different perspective to normalize the interviewees’ behaviour and make meaning out of their behaviour in their perspectives. For example, gambling and smoking could actually be identified as prominent societal problems as seen from how there are many public campaigns combating such vices. It did not occur to us that these problems should not be neglected and shoved aside until then.

Likewise, we also realized the importance of interview techniques and learned how we should work on techniques to probe further and deconstruct seemingly-simple concepts rather than just touching on the surface of these issues. Through a more thorough interview with key probing questions, we should be able to garner more meaningful perspectives into the issues. As we shared our concerns of probing more about sensitive questions, Miss Raksha gave us examples on how we could further question our interviewees in specific situations. Interviews do not necessarily have to be formal, it can rather be informal to create a natural conversational style and comfortable environment for participants to share their situations. For example, the possible questions could be “What is your relationship with your children?” and “When is the last time you talk to them?”.

From the advice and consultation with our tutor, we proceeded with an in-depth interview session with one of our participants from the first preliminary door-to-door interview session.

Learning from Uncle Tay* (P3)

Following week, we conducted our third in-depth interview with Uncle Tay. We tried to contact him once more because he was a friendly and easy-going uncle who was willing to respond and offered us drinks during the preliminary interview. When we called him, he still remembered us even after few weeks and agreed unconditionally to our interview request upon calling him.

(Uncle Tay sharing stories)

The interview took one and a half hour since Uncle Tay was very enthusiastic to share his stories. Apart from that, we also noted down the main takeaway he mentioned and went back to the questions to probe thoroughly, although the questions might be sensitive. As a result, we managed to get in-depth insights and better understanding of of his issues and conditions. The main takeaway we gained from Uncle Tay’s interview is to remain optimistic in life despite having many obstacles throughout the process in life, and never take things for granted, especially health.

(Uncle Tay and Interviewers)

He said that he was grateful with us for spending our time to talk to him and that he felt “paiseh” (embarrassed) for accepting food as our token of appreciation for him. Realising that some interviewees did not respond to our texts, not because they were silently rejecting our requests but they could not reply us such as being overseas or did not receive the texts, we decided to give our contacts a call once more to schedule the interview sessions.

Li Ting, one of the researchers said, “Through my volunteering experiences, I’ve come across the idea of strength perspective whereby beneficiaries can be empowered such that volunteers find that they are not only giving, but also at the receiving end where they find themselves learning a lot more from the beneficiaries.” Similarly in our project interviews, we have come to realize that instead of us spending time listening to their stories for our project findings, we are actually benefiting more from them by learning from their experiences. Indeed, wisdom sure comes with one’s age as we find ourselves continuously learning and gaining many meaningful insights from their wise words.

*name has been modified for anonymity purposes

#stories #takeaway #difficulties