4.1.3 “Javanese” Psychologies 6
5.4 Example of a Cultural-Psychological Research Project
5.4.2 Research Dynamics: Changing Aims and Methods
In our case study on Java described in Chap. 4, we used qualitative interviews (narrative and guideline-supported interviews), focus group discussions, participant observations, and, in the final period, participatory research. Ongoing field stays of about 2 weeks were complemented by multiple short field visits, which provided information on the hamlets. Later, feedback sessions at the hamlet and regional lev-els provided an additional set of data that were analyzed as new data in the overall research cycle. We interviewed villagers and observed their daily lives, discussed issues with them, and equipped them with cameras so that they could record what they perceived as important to describe their own behavior. In addition, in the last phase of research in 2011, villagers themselves collected data and presented their results in various forums (see Chap. 8).
The research project was based on a long-term collaboration between the two main research applicants, Prof. Manfred Zaumseil of the International Academy for Innovative Pedagogy, Psychology and Economics gGmbH (INA) in Berlin and Prof. Johana Prawitasari-Hadiyono of the Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yo-gyakarta, as well as Dr. Gavin Sullivan, formerly of Monash University, Melbourne and currently working at Leeds Metropolitan University. Funding was granted by the German Thyssen Foundation with financial responsibility for the research resting with the German team. Prof. Prawitasari-Hadiyono was responsible for implement-ing the research project in the field. From the beginnimplement-ing, there was close cooperation with the local NGO Institute of Community Behavioral Change (ICBC), a practice and research institution associated with Prof. Prawitasari-Hadiyono. The ICBC al-ready had well-established field contacts that were developed during the delivery of the Ford Foundation recovery program (see Chap. 16) and as a result of an attached participatory project using traditional forms of theater that was conducted at the setting (see Prawitasari-Hadiyono et al.2009).
Data were collected in the local language (Javanese) or the national language (Bahasa Indonesia) mainly by Indonesian researchers (due to their language skills), while the German researchers were mostly responsible for the analysis (due to their greater time resources, since the Thyssen Foundation financially supported two part-time positions for German research assistants). However, throughout the research process, shifts in roles and a process of mutual learning occurred. In the beginning, the international research team held joint workshops on techniques of data collection and analysis in culturally diverse contexts. The goal was to find out how to adapt the methods mentioned above to local conditions and the local forms of conduct. A close cooperation unfolded through role-play exercises, and a process of mutual learning helped the foreign researchers tune in to local ways of feeling und understanding.
For example, it was essential for the German researchers to grasp the meaning and importance of the community embeddedness of coping. We discussed at length issues of field access and research ethics, as well as criteria for a theoretical sampling of the villages (see Sect. 4.3) and the persons to be interviewed (see later).
In the first research period, from 2008 to 2009, data collection was predominately carried out by the Indonesian team while the German team focused on the preliminary data analysis. German researchers often accompanied the Indonesian interviewers in the hamlets in order to familiarize themselves with the reality of village life.5It was paramount to immediately share and discuss preliminary data analyses in joint team meetings, in order to become aware of culturally bound interpretations and worldviews. This can be described as a mutual process of transformation in which the German researchers aimed to get closer to the villagers’ habitus and local mean-ings, and the Indonesian researchers aimed to look at what seemed to be usual and familiar from the perspective of an unfamiliar gaze. Later, in 2010, the Indonesian re-searchers developed their own research questions, collected relevant additional data, and presented their results at the conference of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology in Australia and other conferences in Indonesia. Mean-while, the German team continued analyzing the data and compiling results. During the participatory research period in 2011, the Indonesian research team was responsi-ble for the overall implementation, while the German researchers were availaresponsi-ble for reflection and planning sessions. The project culminated in a visit by the Indonesian researchers to Berlin to present the participatory research project in a joint workshop at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB; Berlin Social Re-search Center). This book constitutes a collaborative report of the funded reRe-search, although the distribution of authorship reflects the structural research imbalances indicated earlier.
Overall, the 3 years of research represented a process of mutual change in views, conceptualizations, and methods, resulting in a transformation to a more participa-tory approach. The transformation included the researchers on a personal level, the
5The data analyzed in Chap. 16 were collected by Silke Schwarz over the course of her dissertation research, for which she also conducted field stays.
organization of responsibilities and distribution of tasks and funds, as well as the representation of the project in local and international forums.6
From 2008 to 2010, 167 interviews and 19 focus group discussions took place.7 The research team used digital voice recorders to record each interview and group discussion in its entirety. Recorded interviews and group discussions lasted approx-imately 60–90 min each. Some villagers (that is, those who might offer theoretically interesting insights) were interviewed several times in order to achieve a more com-prehensive understanding. The main criterion in selecting our sample referred to the interviewee’s current place of residence within the boundaries of a given hamlet. Our sample portrays the diversity of village inhabitants and purposive sampling maxi-mized participant variation for age, marital status, gender, occupation, money and other possessions, and educational background. The vast majority of our intervie-wees originated from Central Java, with only a few having migrated from other parts of Indonesia, mostly after marriage. Almost all villagers officially endorsed Islam;
only a very few Christians were living in the rural area and could be involved in our research. We interviewed formal and informal hamlet leaders who were designated
“key persons” because they could provide detailed accounts on communal life and dynamics, both before and after the earthquake. Examples were hamlet and neigh-borhood leaders or the leader of a PKK8group as well as influential and respected village figures like kyais (that is, villagers with expert knowledge of Islam). Col-lective representations of stories about the hamlet were also elicited by conducting focus group discussions with ordinary villagers (Morgan1997).
In order to formulate research questions on the level of “cases” (rather than using individuals as units of analysis, even though an affected person might be the central figure of interest), it was important to determine what constituted a case. We con-sidered a case to be dependent on the life situation of the affected individual, which presents a definable, micro-social context that includes family members, neighbors, and significant others. It was useful to extrapolate the structure of a “case” from the multiple perspectives of different persons.9We included “cases” of people and their families who were bereaved as a result of the loss of a significant other or long-term impairments resulting from earthquake-related injuries. We also interviewed
6International examples were: 19th International Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP), Bremen, Germany; 20th International Congress of the Interna-tional Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP), Melbourne, Australia; 1st InternaInterna-tional Conference of Indigenous and Cultural Psychology, Yogyakarta, Indonesia; 2nd International Con-ference of Indigenous and Cultural Psychology, Denpasar, Indonesia. Local forums included village celebrations or workshops and presentations at the Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta.
7Data were mainly collected by Lucia P. Novianti, Nindyah Rengganis, Tiara R. Widiastuti, Yohanes K. Herdiyanto, and Silke Schwarz, with support from Ratri Atmoko Benedictus, Budi Rahmat Riadi, David Hizkia Tobing, Christoph Uhle, Jeane A. Indradjaja and Mechthild von Vacano.
8PKK stands for Program Kesejahteraan Keluarga, the Program for Family Welfare that is a government program to improve family welfare within hamlets. PKK groups are governed by the wife of the hamlet, an arrangement that represents hierarchical structures in village life and reinforces a gender-separated distribution of tasks. All PKK participants are married women and their activities relate to increasing family income and improving health.
9In the context of another investigation on Java, Zaumseil (2006a) reported that it was useful to have eight narrating informants including the individual who was personally affected.
individuals and their families without such extreme coping challenges in order to provide a range of long-term perspectives on pre- and post-earthquake village life.
For Chap. 13, we sampled people who could be described as cases of “trauma” or similar long-term psychological effects, and included interviews with people who were close in terms of their social surroundings or network such as core and extended family members, as well as neighbors. For Chap. 14, the main sampling criterion was whether interviewees were involved in aid distribution processes as a distributor or receiver and her or his response of complaining or keeping silent about irregularities in the distribution process. Native speakers transcribed the interview data verbatim into MS-Word documents. During the participatory research phase in 2011, 50 vil-lagers organized into nine community groups were involved in developing interview guidelines and organizing group discussions to gather data.
For data analysis, the German research team used Clarke’s (2005) grounded theory approach to progress from a more descriptive analysis of the data and local concepts in the field to theory building.10We11used the computer program Atlas.ti developed by Thomas Muhr to support data evaluation and theory building. From the beginning, the process of building concepts and categories evolved in close dialogue between the research field and our disciplines. We used coding to search for theoretical con-cepts to describe the patterns of results emerging from the data and to identify units of meaning. Building on the results—and always maintaining close contact with the empirical data—we then searched systematically for new instances that refined the initial codes and provided rich examples of phenomena and their contexts, in order to identify larger units of meaning, categories, and interrelations within the cate-gories. This creative reconfiguration and rediscovery of theory by using theoretical sensitivity (Glaser1978) entailed an awareness of specialized scientific theories and concepts, but did not involve acceptance of or use of these models. Thus, theories such as those generated by quantitative methods formed part of an initial set of tools that could be critically deconstructed, ready to be used in new creative combinations (Zaumseil2007).
Initially, we developed situational maps closely based on the data. As described by Clarke (2005) these “lay out the major human, nonhuman, discursive, histori-cal, symbolic, political and other elements in the research situation of concern and provoke analysis of relations among them. These maps are intended to capture and discuss the messy complexities of the situation in their dense relations and per-mutations” (p. xxxv). In these maps, relations between the elements found in the situation were laid out and critically discussed. In a second step of theory building, the preliminary descriptive findings were mapped and linked to different theories
10For the implementation of practical research, Clarke (2005) developed a fruitful approach to the social scientific analysis of complex situations. Based on grounded theory and exceeding the bound-aries of that framework, Clarke’s approach creates links among disciplines and various scientific viewpoints.
11The impersonal “we” used hereinafter mainly refers to the German research team as analysts, while the Indonesian researchers’ perspectives were included through discussion and feedback rounds.
(for example, the appraisal-based model of coping). Third, we tried to map the re-sults of the descriptive analysis onto other theoretical models, such as the Crunch and Access-to-Resources Model (Wisner et al.2004), to see what was missing and what needed to be fleshed out. In this way, we brought various insular disciplinary approaches into contact with one another. Using a critical analytical stance, we fo-cused on the limitations of existing theories by identifying any untenable universalist assumptions and looking for where an account of social dimensions would improve our understanding. This flexible attitude toward existing disaster and coping theories helped us advance the theoretical structure by highlighting what needed to change in order to be compatible with the data, and where the model did not yet fit. We critically questioned the usefulness of the various coping models, and debated the implicit assumptions hidden in the models in order to suggest further theoretical developments (see Chaps. 3 and 17) warranted by our findings (see Chaps. 9–16).
The theories presented in Chaps. 1 and 2 were used to determine how to decode the data and to offset the potential for multiple, plausible interpretations within different frameworks with different theoretical assumptions. With this attention to theoretical sensitization, a four-dimensional framework for coping with disasters (Chaps. 9–12) was formulated. A range of themes found in the interviews and the field observation data were identified and grouped with the dimensions. We consider this structure of themes to be congruent with the data because the villagers spontaneously focused on specific topics and wanted to discuss them in detail. Research participants were, of course, positioned by our ways of posing questions as well as directing the interviews and focus groups, but the research team was also vigilant for signs of resistance to this agenda and variations that disconfirmed emerging themes (but still needed to be incorporated and explained).
The research project was free of any intention to initiate an intervention based on the results. Rather, it is a documentary description of coping with the consequences of a disaster on the level of daily practices and related discourses. It aimed to de-velop categories that could grasp locally specific details as well as categories that could transcend the case study and may be—at least partially—transferable to other contexts. Due to the shortcomings in theory thus far (see Chaps. 1–3), we wanted to examine the cultural specificities of coping with a disaster.12How did affected people make sense of the event in the long term, and how did they interpret the experienced disaster aid and the resulting social changes and social conflicts created in their ham-lets? Which emotions were evident in the discursive practices and narratives of the people involved? Furthermore, we were interested in the emotions, expectations, in-terpretations, and behaviors that might be connected to disaster-related threats in the future. Another focus centered on the relationship between the meanings and feelings shared by communities and the meanings and feelings experienced by individuals and families.
With regard to coping, it is important to note that our criteria for distinguishing be-tween “successful” and “unsuccessful” coping were not based on appraisal-orientated
12More detailed research questions can be found in the relevant empirical chapters.
stress theories (for a critique, see Zaumseil2006a), but rather followed resource-orientated theories (see Hobfoll2001) supplemented by the addition of emotional coping. In this regard, the criteria for “successful” and “unsuccessful” coping cor-respond to the everyday concepts of a “happy” and “unhappy fate” of each affected person and family. Criteria for both were developed on a case-by-case basis, accord-ing to the principal of theoretical samplaccord-ing alternataccord-ing with data analysis throughout the research process (see also Chap. 13).
Overall, we evaluate our applied methodological approach as a partially successful dialogic process of mutual exchange between the Indonesian and German researchers as well as between the researchers and the research field. This process only became more balanced after a certain level of trust had been established. However, we argue that an equality of perspectives and related legitimacy claims was only partially achieved in the end. During field visits, for example, the researchers—especially those from Germany—continuously had to reiterate our inability to provide money or, for instance, a tractor that a group of farmers in Sido Kabul repeatedly requested.
We were further forced into the position of experts when villagers asked for social assessments and evaluations and urged us to present risk reduction methods or ways for the community to achieve gender justice. Further reflections on our joint research process, such as issues of informed consent and ethics, are dealt with in Chaps. 6–8.
The German researchers reformulated the villagers’ perspectives, transcending and partially restructuring their voices, probably even violating emic experiences at times. We counterbalanced a stark culture-bound perspective through feedback rounds in the hamlets, during which we crosschecked whether our analysis offered deeper insights about their lives and worlds. Another strategy entailed intense discus-sions within the international research team. Yet, an actual balance between German and Indonesian perspectives was limited by structural power imbalances within the research design because the German research team had access to greater financial and time resources.
Drawing on a social constructionist version of grounded theory, we did not aim to develop a model of causal links for further testing but rather to reconstruct emic perspectives. The huge amount of data gathered over time contained a diversity and large quantity of positions, adding merit to our claims made in the empirical chapters of this book (Chaps. 9–16). We linked our arguments to direct quotations as much as possible to increase credibility, highlighted liminal and unstable, taken-for-granted meanings, and deliberately employed a power-critical perspective in order to draw links between larger collectives or institutions and individual lives, when the data so indicated (see Charmaz2006). We were looking for fresh categories that offered new insights that could overcome the theoretical shortcomings identified in Chap. 3. The challenges that our multidimensional framework of coping poses to current ideas, concepts, and practices are summarized in the concluding remarks section of each empirical chapter and in the book’s conclusion (Chap. 17).