CONTACTOS JÚPITER-SATURNO

As mentioned, I conducted participant observation by accompanying the sample CEFs for two weeks as they conducted their normal fieldwork at their four assigned villages. I went to the field with them without the research assistant for the first week, because such an assistant was of limited use in participant observation (Bujra, 2006) and I wanted to build rapport directly with the CEFs and PPs. My basic grasp of the

Cambodian language and knowledge of Cambodian rural culture enabled me to capture daily conversations and people’s non-verbal behaviour to a satisfactory extent. The research assistant joined me for the second week of participant observation. This was to facilitate the rapport-building between him and the PPs (Bujra, 2006), and enable his

smooth transition into the fieldwork. When he joined the participant observation, I followed up things that I did not understand by asking the CEFs through his translation.

I treated the sample CEFs as local informants because of their extensive knowledge of PPs as well as project villages through their working experiences there, whilst I was fully aware and thus needed to consider that their views were still those of outsiders, generally of a higher status and possibly with the organisational bias of LWD. To further strengthen my observation, I partly relied on the observation by the research assistant, who had better language and cultural understanding as a native Cambodian. In addition to observing PPs by accompanying the CEFs, I also observed some key events such as RBA training for LWD staff and PPs and the child rights public forum with local government.

Observed PPs included members of various community-based organisations (CBOs)—such as VDCs, farmer field schools (FFSs) and women’s groups, ordinary villagers, the most vulnerable households (such as female-headed households) to which the LWD gives special assistance, village leaders, deputy village leaders, and village secretaries. Commune councillors were also observed in such an event as the commune disaster preparedness meeting.

One drawback of my accompanying the CEFs was that I was looked on as part of LWD or even its donor (from Japan). This encouraged some PPs to show ‘donor answers,’ only positive aspects, or conversely ‘the list of things that they wanted,’ during observation and subsequent interviews. To minimise this, I verbally

communicated to them, whenever possible and appropriate, that I was not part of either LWD or its donors. However, there were a few incidents where research participants were obviously conscious of me and exhibited donor-oriented answers or performance (See Box 1 below). Thus, I reflexively noted and analysed the influence of my act of accompanying the CEFs on observation and subsequent research activities during the fieldwork and data analysis.

Box 1: Incident where Enhanced Outsiders’ Identity Amplified ‘Donor Answers’

In the middle of the FFS meeting at the community centre in the first research site, the sample CEF left for the field-level office to take care of the urgent business of submitting the report and left the facilitation task to one of the VDC members. Without knowing what to do, this VDC member asked participants about what they needed. As a consequence, the participants listed all kinds of items such vegetable seeds and livestock. This kind of question and the participants’ response to it is indicative of their dependency on LWD. After a while, he had no ideas as to what they should do next in the meeting. The research assistant, who knew what to do next because of his

observation of the FFS meeting in the other village the previous week and had a background in rural development, was about to suggest to the participants the next thing to do, which was to share agriculture-related problems and to discuss among themselves how to resolve them. I stopped him from doing so since it would

‘influence’ participant observation. But then I reconsidered my decision and judged that it was ‘ethical’ to suggest what to do next, as otherwise they would waste their time until the CEF came back. Thus I allowed him to suggest the next step to the participants. I think that part of me as a former NGO worker made me make that decision.

Following that, one of the participants came forward and presented her experience of, for example, organic vaccination for livestock, which she had learned from another NGO. But after a while I noticed that she was staring at and paying attention to us (the research assistant and myself) rather than the participants. We actually prompted her to address the FFS participants rather than us. Next, another member came forward to share her experience. She was more explicit in paying attention to us rather than to the participants. Eventually she presented how LWD had been helping the village by reading the report that she had brought. That time I understood that we had definitely influenced this meeting.

In summary, our identity as outsiders was accidentally enhanced. As a result, their performance of ‘donor answers’ was amplified.

I used the data from participant observation primarily to compensate for the unreliability of self-reporting data generated through interviews (Bryman, 2008) or because “the data from each can be used to illuminate the other” (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, p. 102), namely triangulation. My two week presence in each research site during participant observation also helped me build a rapport with the PPs for the subsequent FG interviews and individual interviews (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). Furthermore, knowledge and insights gained through participant observation were incorporated into the modification of the questions for FG and individual interviews as well as into the quasi-theoretical sampling.

Saiki-Craighill (2010) recommends the production of good observation notes by adding missing information and elaborating it for precise coding during GT analysis. To generate such quality notes, I added missing information, typed each note, and then revised it twice for better readability.