Collecting data from young people

Scholars working on children/youth and development have raised concerns on the difficulty to gather data from young people. Several methods have been devised with the bias on using fun-based methods. Creativity is expected to help young people tell their stories. In this blog post, I wish to share some insights on some methods I’ve tried during my thesis, and with my teammates in implementing the infomediary campaign. 

• Mobility mapping. When I was doing my thesis, I thought it would be smart to show an example so my research participants can just take off from it. It did facilitate the process. Many of them creatively drew their own mobility maps. For some, however, they ended up copying my example. All of the items I listed were the same stuff that appeared in their mobility maps. During our data collection for the infomediary campaign, we again encountered the same issue. There are several ways to deal with it. First, you can ask the participant to redraw. To some, this will be very easy. But I have to admit that this requires a lot of skills so the participant does not get offended. Second, you can just make do with what s/he has, but make sure to ask many probing questions. Remember that this method is just a prop for your data collection. It will just aid you in collecting data from your research participants. So once the participants are done making their drawings, ask them to present their outputs in a group so you and other members of the group can ask questions that will enable you to gather rich and high quality data.

 

• Time transect. This is a good method to peek on the activities of the research participants for a given time period. We did have a lot of “A-ha!” moments when we did this in our data collection. Instantly, you can see which activities eat up most of their time, which will help you come up with follow on questions. Once the participants are done doing their time transects, divide them into smaller groups and ask them to present their respective outputs. Data validation also happens during group presentation. The facilitator must be very good at asking follow on questions as the data can be limitless once the participants start to present their outputs. New themes can actually emerge in this process.

• Photovoice. In my thesis, I asked my research participants (high school and university students) to take photos of something that will help represent their dreams. I lent them digital cameras. They went out of the venue. I just asked them to go back after 20-30 minutes. I loaded their photos in my laptop. I asked them several questions while we were reviewing the photos together. I think that this method is good in gathering data that may be glossed over if one will just do plain interviewing (well I can also say this with the other methods). In another research, not with young people, I used this method to document the activities of my research participants. It went well. I had the chance to get a detailed account of their activities. 

•  Peer interviewing. We did this in our data gathering in Tacurong. We suspected that the students might not be very comfortable sharing their stories with us. What we did was to pick some students whom we thought can serve as interviewers. We gave them a list of questions and briefed them on the aims of the activity. We also lent them digital recorders to document the process. One of us in the team clandestinely took photos of the process. It went well! The students did enjoy sharing a lot of stories, many unedited stories! They also had so much fun in the process. A lot of giggles were noted. 

Alright, as I pointed out earlier these methods will just aid you in collecting data with young people. You may drop them when your research participants are already comfortable sharing their stories with you. The quality and beauty of the data you will collect will largely depend on how creative you are as a facilitator in gaining their trust so they will share their narratives with you.

 

Reflections from our infomediary project

I wish to share some reflections  after almost a year of campaign implementation in Aurora:  

• As a development professional, I have validated in this campaign that there indeed is no one recipe for development. Our campaign was implemented in two sites in the same municipality but highly general recommendations are simply inappropriate, although we have the same goal: to mobilise high school students to search for information for their parents.  The contexts are just so different from each other that any one size fits all recommendations are bound to fail. This theoretical validation is very important for me, and must be considered by most development practitioners, policymakers and their cohorts.

• You have to be there. In several occasions we received advice from people, literature regarding favoured ways of doing things. Take note that I am using favoured over proper as it is fairly difficult to find that proper way of delivering development work. We can only learn so much from books, but once you are in the area you need to play it by ear. You need to consider what will work, what won’t by having a good grasp of the social realities in the community. Hence, at some point the team found it hard to follow advice from people who have not seen the area. There are no shortcuts! If you want to recommend something, you have to be there!

• There will be delays, but take note: they are a part of the game. You cannot rush things. I am pretty sure most young development communicators are eager to see change happening right infront of them. That may (most likely not) happen. It will take a lot of time before an impact is felt. There will be hints that the community is getting into the development process, but to say that significant change has happened, you’ll have to wait a bit longer.

• Be very reflective. During the course of our implementation, there were plenty of occasions when I wanted to just stop the implementation or some aspects of it. There were events that were difficult to understand from my end. And so another theoretical validation happened: not everybody subscribes to development. Or, the people in the community may have other priorities—and that we can be a noise in the social shaping going on. We need to be very reflective, lest we don’t factor in some important realizations owing to our bias—the thought that we are bringing something good and so they should take it.

• Don’t talk much. I realized much of the things that I learned in the process were due from observations when we were there. I did have observed several social phenomena that invited several questions on my part. Those observations facilitated asking more and more research questions, which made the whole experience interesting—and thrilling if you like.

Our infomediaries

After almost a year of working with young people, we are now about to end our campaign in Aurora. The campaign mobilises young individuals to serve as infomediaries for their parents. Infomediaries are people who facilitate access to information for those who are having difficulty accessing it. Our months of work in Aurora included classroom discussions coupled with activities such as the infomediary quiz bee, putting up of rice garden, and endless promotion of the extension platforms such as the PhilRice Text Center and the Pinoy Rice Knowledge Bank. 

The infomediary quiz bee was a huge activity. The students showcased their technical know-how on rice production, which really surprised us. The photo below shows the practical exam as part of the quiz bee. The task was for them to identify parts of a rice plant, and to differentiate rice plants from weedy rice.

Aside from the practical exam, the infomediary quiz bee also showcased their proficiency in using the offline version of the Pinoy Rice Knowledge Bank. PRKB is a platform that contains most information one has to know about rice farming in the Philippines. Hence, even if the students are not knowledgeable about rice farming and even if they don’t have Internet access in their area, they can still search for rice farming information through the offline version of the Pinoy Rice Knowledge Bank. The students were fast and accurate in searching through the offline version of the PRKB.

The rice garden gave the participants hands-on experience in managing a rice farm. We needed to do this to increase the confidence of the students in discussing rice farming information to their parents. Rice gardens in two participating high schools showcased varieties that can be planted in their respective areas. This way, the students can recommend to their parents the variety they see fit for their agroclimatic conditions.

After months of working with young people, we were so pleased when we had the chance to converse with them regarding the campaign. Not only did they relate to us experiences when they performed infomediary roles, they were also very comfortable telling their stories to us—something we did not see before. When we first came to Aurora, the students were rather timid. They would not say a word to us. It is a big thing for us that the students have developed the trust to tell their stories to us over the course of campaign implementation. Not only we have groomed new rice farming infomediaries, we have also gained new friends.   

  

What counts as data

I have attended several scientific conferences where the positivists and constructivists, often the minority, meet. Coming from a social science background, I have developed a strong appreciation of the qualitative line of inquiry, while not discounting the strengths of the quantitative measures. 

During my thesis, I used predominantly qualitative methods owing pretty much on the questions that I asked (methods used depend on questions asked). Hence, most of the papers that I am writing now are drawn from my thesis, and thus, qualitative in nature.

While it was very fulfilling pursuing my research questions, I oftentimes encounter people who frown on my method. They are those who “only believe in things that can be weighed and measured”, so to speak. The problem is even more confounded when my work is evaluated by someone coming from a related, but not similar field. In not one instance, my work was evaluated by people working in the area of regulations. While I appreciated the transdisciplinary encounter, we did have some issues on what we consider as data. Generalizability has always taken precedence over transferability, if the latter even exists in their vocabulary.

I happened to discuss this once with a known scholar in social science, and she told me that I just need to accept the fact that it’s a numbers game when it comes to regulation. She added that what I can do is to influence whenever I can, but numbers would always be attractive to policymakers.

While it really pays to know how things work in reality, this is frustrating for people who have developed strong appreciation for the narratives of those being researched. While numbers are oftentimes regarded as the so called hard evidence, the fact remains that there are cases when the numbers generated will be put to question. And these cases, minority or what, should likewise merit attention if the goal is greater social equity.

People should likewise recognize the rigour involved in generating qualitative data. Oftentimes, rigour is equated to coming up with sophisticated formula—the more complex, the more comprehensive. Hence, they are guilty of getting trapped in the language of obfuscation.

This post is not meant to provoke any discord between positivists and constructivists. I have earlier mentioned that they both have their strengths and limitations. This, however, wishes to emphasize that the complexities in explaining social phenomena require more nuanced methods, requires digging deeper into the lives of the research participants. Policymakers and laypeople alike should recognize that there are a lot of ways of knowing.

In closing, let me quote Albert Einstein: Not all that counts can be counted, and not all that can be counted counts. 

Infomediary ripple

It all started with a curious mind. One day of deep thinking: Do the farmers benefit from our ICT initiatives? That was in 2009. That was when I barely had knowledge on doing extensive research. All I had was that big question. With my colleagues and college academic adviser, we went out to do a survey “Assessment of e-readiness of the five top rice-producing provinces of the Philippines”.

We learned a lot from the survey. Farmers who underwent ICT training, but were hardly able to apply what they learned. The reasons were very simple: they did not have computer units in their household, most were computer illiterate and had difficulty understanding the English text, which is the dominant text in the Internet. From that survey we learned that farmers wanted their children to teach them how to use the computer—if it could be made possible. That was the birth of the infomediary concept in our work.

But then, it did not take off as expected. The campaign to mobilise the youth as infomediaries started in 2012 in Aurora province. We are now in the middle of our campaign in Aurora. We are blessed that our proposal has been approved for funding by the DA’s Regional Field Unit in Central Mindanao. So here we are replicating the campaign in Southern Philippines! We are in Apolinario S Bernardo Memorial High School in Tacurong City. The same breath of fresh air, positive energy and enthusiasm, but different social context. This will be very exciting.