Part 3 Summary of Findings, Conclusions and
5.3 Sampling Strategies and Methods of Data Collection
5.3.1 Participant Observation and Autoethnography: Sampling Settings, Sampling Incidents, and Collecting Field Notes
The participant observation and autoethnographic component of the study was initially planned around one prospective research site but in the wake of the May 2008 pogroms, I added a second research site before I even started my fieldwork at the first site. I begin by explicating the sampling process in respect of both sites, where I developed and applied an overlapping set of sampling, observation, and note taking strategies, which I discuss thereafter.
I identified one of the study’s two research sites during the proposal stage of the study: a formal welfare organisation providing services to refugees. This was done through a combination of purposive and convenience sampling (Kelly 2006a; Gobo 2008). My two criteria for selecting the site were that the agency should employ professional social workers and render direct services to cross-border migrants. At the time of study, there was only one such organisation in Durban: an ‘implementing partner’ for the UNHCR, mandated to render social services to asylum seekers and refugees (UNHCR 2011b). The organisation is situated in the inner city of Durban where there is a high concentration of cross-border migrants. At the time, it employed four social workers (including the director), three community development workers, one communications officer and three administrative staff. As the director explained then, the organisation’s services were intended to promote ‘self-reliant integration into South African society’, family reunification, and resettlement or voluntary repatriation of migrants. Specific interventions, she said, were concerned with child protection, couple counselling, assistance in cases of sexual and gender-based violence, interpretation services to statutory service providers, material assistance, skills training, and job placements. In total, the agency serviced over 400 individuals and families, with the majority of migrants receiving services on a short-term basis. In addition, there were group- and community-based services including lobbying and advocacy work, HIV/AIDS prevention,
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and English classes. Informal negotiations for entry commenced in 2007, and the director granted formal permission to conduct the study at a meeting on 9 July 2008 (see Section 5.5.2) when she invited me to fill a vacant social work position for a period of three to four months.
Figure 5.1 depicts the organisational space.
Figure 5.1: Research Site One – Office Space of the Refugee Services Provider
The second research site was an unplanned, convenience sample (Kelly 2006a; Gobo 2008).
During the May 2008 xenophobic violence, many foreigners in Durban left their homes and sought shelter at the Durban Cathedral, an inner city park, the City Hall, and outside the US Consulate, among other places. Through a concerted civil society effort, they were
‘distributed’ to different shelters across the city. In the process, a group of twelve families with a total of 24 adults from Burundi, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, all with either refugee or asylum seeker status, were allocated to the church that my children and I attend, and on 27 May 2008, began moving into the church hall. A large group of volunteers – that is, members of the receiving community – began to assist immediately in a number of ways, with eleven volunteers entering relationships with some of the displaced refugees, which extended beyond the initial crisis of displacement.
Waiting area
Reception
Store room
Admin. 1 1 Director Com Dev worker Intake
worker 1
Case worker 3
Intake worker 2 Intake worker 3
Case worker 2:
Dorothee Kitchen
Case worker 1
Admin. 2 1 Main
entrance
Garden with path and trees
Staircase to main entrance
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The refugee families could not stay indefinitely and needed to move out again; yet several of them had given up their homes, lost their employment, and generally expressed an unwillingness to return to the inner city areas from where they had been displaced. Funding from Oxfam was to assist their ‘reintegration’ into the community, and I was asked to co- ordinate a response. I agreed and requested permission to collect data on the period of the refugees’ stay and involvement with the church. The senior pastor conveyed this request to the church leadership, and it was granted. Image 5.1 depicts the church and church hall.
Image 5.1: Research Site Two – Church and Church Hall
The adults of the displaced families, and the practitioners of care and volunteers from the receiving community made up the study participants in this additional site. The two groups were distinctly different from one another with regard to race, residence status, educational qualification, employment status, field of work (prior to displacement), family size, and standard of living (as suggested by accommodation type prior to displacement). In addition, there were internal divisions along important socio-economic markers (see Appendix 1.1.1, which visualises and compares identity markers of the eleven practitioners of care and volunteers from the receiving community, and the 24 adults of the displaced families).
However, given the prevailing context of South Africa’s historically grown, overlapping racial
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and class stratifications, and the recent xenophobic violence, many of the other socio- economic divisions became somewhat subsumed under the categories of race, class, and citizenship, which dominated the unfolding perceptions and relationships (see Chapters 8 and 9).
Taking notes on observations is a form of data collection, but deciding what notes to take is better conceptualised as sampling (cf. Gobo 2008). How closely these two processes are intertwined with each other and with the process of data analysis, is illustrated by Barney Glaser’s (1992:101) notion of theoretical sampling which he defines as ‘the process of data collection for generating theory whereby the analyst jointly collects, codes and analyses his [sic] data and decides what data to collect next and where to find them’. Also important is Anselm Strauss’ and Juliet Corbin’s (1990:177) assertion that in theoretical sampling, ‘we sample incidents and not persons’. Thus, in the context of my participant observation in the two research sites, sampling meant to be alert to any incident that could provide pertinent information about, and insights into, people’s social positioning and perceptions, feelings and thoughts, relationships and interactions.
At the beginning stages of data collection, my sampling strategy was ‘open’ (Strauss and Corbin 1990:181) in that I sought to record anything deemed potentially relevant. This broad focus was guided by the first two sets of research objectives in that I sought to be attentive to anything that signified the social positioning of cross-border migrants, social workers, other practitioners of care and members of the receiving community, their perspectives on the contextual conditions of their lives and encounters, as well as the type, quality, and dynamics of their unfolding relationships. The approach generated large volumes of recordable data, placing me under considerable time constraints. In addition, I realised early on that there was a disjuncture between my actual emotional responses, thoughts, and interactions and what I expected myself to feel, think, and do. As I transferred my experiences into written notes, I felt the temptation to ‘beautify’ some of my affective, cognitive, and practical responses, which in turn alerted me to the risk of self-censorship, distortion and misrepresentation. To address these two concerns, I settled on writing very fast, with a view to producing field notes that were more intuitive than refined; descriptive rather than explanatory; as well as capturing immediate, sometimes only fleeting, and often sensory, impressions, rather than carefully considered observations. Appendix 1.1.2 contains an excerpt from the notes I took
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on 8 August 2008, my fifth day at Research Site One, the refugee services provider. It illustrates how my field notes in the open sampling phase stay close to the actual events, while at the same time pointing to the coincidence between contextual conditions, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, relationships and interactions between differently positioned research participants (including myself).
Out of this phase emerged what Strauss and Corbin (1990:185) refer to as the stage of
‘relational and variational sampling’. Here, researchers ‘find evidence of variation and process
… in terms of … condition, context, action/interaction, consequences … [and] find as many differences as possible at the dimensional level in the data’. Indeed within a few weeks of fieldwork, I became increasingly conscious of the ways in which my own and other study participants’ feelings, thoughts, and interactions had different qualities, depending on the particular contexts in which they occurred. The diary record contained in Appendix 1.1.3 is dated 25 September 2008 but also comprises two insertions dated 28 January and 11 April 2009, respectively. Compared with my field notes from the open coding phase, this second set of entries is considerably more detailed and complex. Its main storyline tells of a support group meeting held by the displaced refugees at the church, my second research site4. However, the recordings also contain mental images, similes, metaphors, some initial theoretical notes and repeatedly branch off into descriptions of related incidents, making comparisons across situations and sites, while tracing developments in relationships and changes in patterns of interaction across time. In other words, moving beyond merely sampling incidents, I began to interpret the responses of differently positioned people in relation to one another, to different kinds of situations, and to their changing set of circumstances across time. It was thus during relational and variational sampling, that my attention was drawn to issues relevant to the contextual conditions and relational processes by which broader structures of social injustice were enacted, reinforced, or subverted.
‘Theoretical saturation’ (Strauss and Corbin 1990:188) in the first research site, the formal welfare organisation, became increasingly evident by mid-October 2008. Appendix 1.1.4 contains a selection of field notes that signify the final phase of my stay as well as illustrating the process of my disengagement from the site. Due to the more complex dynamics of
4 Note that this support group served intermittently as a focus group as well. See Chapters 8.4 and 9.3 for details.
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relationships and interactions between members of the receiving community, the displaced refugees, and the practitioners of care employed by the church, data collection at the second site continued into 2009. My last record was dated 31 October 2009, even though saturation had not been reached; I simply had to stop at some point (cf. Charmaz 2003). However, from about December 2008, my diary entries increasingly adopted the character of memos, that is, ‘written records … related to the formulation of theory’ (Strauss and Corbin 1990:197).
Memo writing and the use of other adjunctive procedures are discussed in Section 5.4.3:
Adjunctive Procedures and Conceptual Development.