without assistance. Consequently, although I conducted many interviews myself, I also had the
assistance of three interviewers, two women and one man; all Turkish migrants and bilingual in
Turkish and English. One female interviewer was a university student in the Sociology
Department of La Trobe University and had interviewing experience. The others were
unemployed graduates, with interviewing experience, who had close contact with the Turkish community due to their previous working experience as welfare workers. In the first two weeks of February 1987, just prior to starting the interviews, I organized four training sessions for these interviewers. In addition, each interviewer conducted two pre-test interviews. All my efforts in the careful selection and training of the interviewers were aimed at avoiding a situation in which they could act as ordinary ‘market research’ type interviewers. There is no doubt that the role of the interviewers was quite important in the administration the particular survey questionnaire because they had to deal with several open-ended questions which required careful and patient effort Despite some particular shortcomings detected in their interviews, such as the acceptance of short and shallow responses to some open-ended questions, the work done by these interviewers was in general quite satisfactory.
Over a period of almost five months, from late March to early August of 1987, the three interviewers and I — forming teams of one female and one male — carried out the interviews primarily in the evening and at weekends at the respondents’ residences. The timing of interviews was usually arranged by telephone, but in some cases they were also face-to-face. Upon arrival at the sampled household, we first obtained the information required on the household record sheet by interviewing any adult member of the household. This was usually the head of the household or his/her spouse. Then, on the basis of the information on the household record sheet, the members of the household who were 18 and over at the time of arrival, were identified as eligible persons for the individual interview, and eventually they were interviewed. Since the majority of the sampled household included more than one individual respondent — usually consisting of husband and wife — the arrangement of the interviewing situation was important not only in relation to the intention of conducting each individual interview in private for as long as possible, but also because the purpose was to interview each eligible member in each sampled household. Mostly males were interviewed by males, and females by females considering the prevailing cultural situation in the Turkish community, which might not approve of a male interviewer talking to women respondents. However, whenever it was convenient, I tried to interview female respondents also, to get some idea of what differences and similarities existed between the experiences of male and female immigrants. On the other hand, to avoid a situation
where non-interviewing persons might answer for the respondent or interject with their own ideas and comments, every effort was made in each case to conduct the individual interview in privacy: in a separate room, or even at a different time. However, given various conditions, internal and external to the specification of the survey, it was not always possible to have such an ideal interviewing situation. For instance, in several cases, other household members, and even visitors, were present during the interviews, and these persons often attempted to add their responses and comments. The presence of others did not seem to suppress respondents, but for us as interviewers, it was essential to be satisfied that the responses recorded in the questionnaire were always those of the real sampled respondents, not those of outsiders.
The decision to interview all eligible adults - usually husband and wife - within a selected household was certainly useful in making the position of both migrant men and women more adequately known in the whole migratory process and reflected the concern of the study with a better understanding of the migratory process as a whole. It was one of the common shortcomings of many previous studies in the abundant literature that either the researchers tended to draw general conclusions from the surveys of only-male samples or they tended to limit their investigation to the female migrants, ignoring the coexistence and interaction of both male and female migrants in the migratory processes. In the present study, the decision to interview all eligible household members made it possible for me to speak about the similarities and differences between the various experiences and characteristics of migrant men and migrant women (see Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7). Nevertheless, one could argue that there would be some problems posed for the study by this type of interviewing procedure: husbands and wives shared several experiences and influenced each other’s views, and consequently they might duplicate certain results even when interviewed separately. The possible distortion of results by this interactive effect might occur when the earlier migrants, who were predominantly married couples on arrival, were compared with the later migrants among whom a higher proportion were single when they first arrived in Australia.
Any household in the sampled areas was considered to be a Turkish household if it had at least one Turkish member by ethnic origin who was born in Turkey and aged 18 and over on arrival in