CHAPTER 4: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
4.7 ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY .1 ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Prior to conducting the study, and after my proposal being approved by the Cluster and the School of Social Sciences Higher Degrees Committees, Research Ethical Clearance
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Application (together with the research proposal and all other required documents) was submitted to UKZN2 HSSRE3. In response to this application, HSSRE approved this research to be conducted by granting the researcher the Research Ethical Clearance Approval attached (check Appendices). Informed consent was gathered from the research participants. Informed consent, as Neuman (2000) states, means informing the research participants about the overall purpose of the investigation and the main features of the design, including any possible risks and benefits from participating in the research project. Informed consent involves getting voluntary participation of the subject and establishing her/his right to withdraw from the study at any time.
Written consent was collected from the participants. Permission was asked, and consent was given, by each participant before any of the interviews or focus groups were recorded.
Confidentiality was ensured which, according to Neuman (2000), means that no private information was or will be reported that may, in any way, identify the subjects.
4.7.2 LIMITATIONS
This study deals specifically with the perceptions of Congolese migrant women in Durban regarding the culture of preserving virginity before marriage. It did not consider perceptions regarding criminal acts involving sexual intercourse such as rape, or other sexual acts and behaviours that involve genital contact other than penile-vaginal penetration, such as oral- genital contact, or anal penile contact. Finally, it did not consider the perceptions of Congolese migrant women who live outside of the Durban Metropolitan Area.
This study was not supposed to include men’s perceptions and was supposed to have 20 participants but due to sensitivity of the topic, and people’s fear of engaging with South African institutions, most women even after explaining to them the aim and objectives of the study were not willing to share their perception about the practice of preserving virginity before marriage. The fear of engaging with South African institutions (in this case the university I was registered with), may have been since the wave of xenophobia migrants experienced in Durban in 2015 (Ebrahim 2015) and on other occasions. Other limitations are explained below.
2 UKZN refers to The University of KwaZulu-Natal
3 HSSRE refers to Humanities & Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee
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I spend three months trying to figure out how to gather participants for focus group discussions and in-depth interviews. This was due to the fact that those who wanted to participate were discouraged by their community. Most of the participant had been living in Durban for less than 4 years and depended most of migrants who have been in Durban for a long because the community presumes that they have experience on how things happen or are done in Durban.
Also, participants questioned the researcher’s trustworthiness on the topic.
4.7.2.2 THE CONSTRAINT OF FINANCE
It was very difficult to convince my participant that the research was self-funded, and was for academic purposes. Most of them believed that I received finance to do the project and they wanted a share. I understood the fact that participants could not leave their small businesses (hair salons) just to come and attend an interview session which would not even profit them. I did organise bus fare so that we could meet at the place of interview. This constrained me financially since I am not employed.
4.7.2.3 THE CONSTRAINT OF CULTURE
In the DRC, sexuality is a taboo topic that should not be discussed with a stranger. I only overcame this cultural limitation when I realised that my being able to speak many Congolese languages gave confidence to the participants. This is because a person feels more confident when you speak the same language. In Congo, it is easy to identify which part of the country a person come from, because names are linked to tribe and region.
4.7.2.4 THE CONSTRAINT OF SAMPLING
The research sample proposed 20 Congolese migrant women with 10 unmarried and 10 married who had been living in Durban for 3 years. However, when I was in the field I noticed that women (mainly the married ones) were not willing to share their sexual perceptions. For instance, even after signing a consent form, one participant asked for her interview and deleted the video recorded data before data analysis. Also even if it was after, I could not proceed using the participant’s data after requesting to be excluded from research irrespective that data was already obtained. This is in line with research ethics that as the researcher I committed myself and this research to. Also, as a DRC citizen, I am aware that publicly talking about sex and sexuality is taboo to many women who are perceived as “women of good morals or well raised women”. Therefore women are not supposed to publicly engage in sex topics. However, as
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researcher in this case and worried about shrinking research sample size, I ended up including available and willing to consent participants; in this case there were Congolese migrant men who, beside gender, met research requirements. It was in this capacity that this research study ended up including male participants who were originally not part of the target sampling population gender - women. This turned out to be an advantage as I managed to get men’s views on the perception of preserving virginity before marriage. It was interesting to discover the perceptions of those whose culture has privileged, and given advantages to.
4.7.3 RELIABILITY
The subject of sexual life is a taboo topic among Congolese women, and should not be discussed publicly, which is why Congolese women are very secretive concerning their sexual lives (Djamba 1995). As this was found to be a primary issue in previous studies by Djamba (1995) on Congolese women, it was expected to be a reliability concern here. In order to overcome this problem, Djamba (1995) used an indirect approach to gather data relating to premarital sexual practices. For example, instead of asking whether women had engaged in sexual intercourse before marriage, the questionnaire asked for information on “age at first marriage” before asking about the “age at first sexual intercourse” (Djamba 1995: 459). A similar approach was taken in this study to extract information in an indirect manner, in order to extract the maximum possible truthful information.
4.7.4 VALIDITY
The research approach and the sampling method were effectively assessed to verify for validity. Validity is concerned with the meaningfulness of research components (Drost 2011). The main concern is whether the researcher is measuring what he/she intends to measure, and that the appropriate methods are used. Kumar (2011) states that validity is a concept of appropriateness, accuracy and quality of the procedures adopted to obtain answers to the research questions.
The data collection methods and research methodology employed in this study were suitable for the purpose of gathering information that reflects the meaning of the concept under study, namely, “exploring the perception of Congolese migrant women in Durban toward the practice of preserving virginity before marriage”
4.7.5 CONCLUSION
This chapter outlined the qualitative research approach and the methods used for data collection, sampling and data analysis, and ethical considerations in order to study the
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perceptions of Congolese migrant women towards the practice of preserving virginity before marriage.
The following chapter describes and discusses the findings of the study.
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