Methodological limitations

I now have a little over 2 weeks left in my field visit, and hence have started to feel a sense of heightened urgency to get work done. This temporality – not getting much done explicitly at the beginning of the trip, then rushing to get lots of ‘data’ towards the end – is quite familiar to me. It was certainly the basic pattern of my two previous visits here in 2006 and 2007. In some ways the early weeks can be frustrating, because it doesn’t seem like you’re doing much. However, I try to remind myself that these weeks are important too – both in terms of orientating oneself to the context one finds oneself in, and also ‘presencing’ oneself in that context: becoming known, familiar, and hence (hopefully) becoming less unknown/threatening/strange.

This act of ‘presencing’ oneself in the space of research has been particularly important this summer, because my primary sampling strategy – snowball sampling – has to all intents and purposes not worked. Snowball sampling, which I intended to use to generate interview participants, involves getting to know a few people, and then using their social networks to generate further research participants. In more concrete terms and in the context of my research, this would involve interviewing people, and then asking if they know other people who might be able and willing to help with my study. This is a useful method in contexts where a researcher doesn’t know many people themselves, and where time (and particularly the time to establish relations of trust) is limited. It can also give a sense of what social networks exist in a particular place and how they are maintained.

This method worked well in my previous project because the social networks were quite dense in the locality where I conducted research. However, in Umm alshariya, this method doesn’t have the same efficacy. While I was hoping – perhaps naively, perhaps generalizing too much from my previous research – that even in ‘migrant neighbourhoods’ some reasonably durable social ties would exist, this doesn't seem to be the case. In fact, the people I have talked to celebrate the fact that they are free from social ties and obligations. They embrace – to a certain extent – a more anonymous lifestyle where one doesn’t interfere with ones neighbours, and they treat you in a similar way.

Simply put, the sampling method I have chosen is inappropriate for the social practices and spaces that I wish to study. In this situation, I have had to rely on my own ability to ‘make relations’, which is harder and takes longer. Thankfully my ‘presencing’ is paying some dividends in this regard, and thus revealing the value of those early weeks where it seems like nothing much is happening.