MANUAL DE BUENA CONVIVENCIA ESCOLAR

From the above review, it could be said that participant observation plays a vital role in ethnographic research. However, the interview itself is also considered as an important data collecting technique, due to the fact that respondents can provide explanations for what the ethnographer sees and experiences (Fetterman, 2010).Thus, this study used in-depth interviews to supplement conversations and observations to explore residents’, visitors’ and officials’ attitudes and perceptions of tourism impacts at Mt Qiyun. According to Hess-Biber

& Leavy (2011, p.103), there are three kinds of interviews based on the research questions Figure 4.3 Sample2 of participation observation field note used in current research Date : 3/3/2012

Site: Taisu Palace Start time: 10:10 am End time: 10:40 am

Descriptions: today is the birthday of Zhenwu god, which is the most important day for those pilgrims. They normally, arrived at mountain one day or two days ago, and have a vegetable diet to wait today’s events. They prepared lots of candles and incenses at home. Pilgrims not like the visitors, brought incense on the mountain. I ask one pilgrim that how many of them came to the mountain at this time. She told me: “nearly 150 villagers in my village come to the mountain for this pray; this is a traditional event for their village every year. I come to this mountain for 7 years at present…”

Photography:

Note: many pilgrims pray in the temple Note: author was talking with a pilgrim

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and goals of the study. They are the: “highly structured interview, semi structured interview, or low-structured interviews”. In the case of Mt Qiyun, the highly structured interview lacked flexibility, because it requires the researcher to ask the same questions for all participants, including various visitors and residents from different villages; while unstructured interviews had the problem of generating vast amounts of data that sometimes were unrelated to the research topic.

As a result, semi-structured interviewing was adopted for this research. Semi-structured interviewing has been used either as part of a structured or unstructured interview because it combines the flexibility of the open-ended interview and the agenda of the structured interview (Burns, 2000), along with the objectives of clarifying the central factors in the study, developing preliminary hypotheses, and then developing a qualitative base for designing an ethnographic survey (Schensul, Schensul, & LeCompte, 1999). These interviews should start with a prepared holistic interview guide, which is an informal “group of topics and questions that the interviewer can ask in different ways for different participants”

(Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p.195). The reasons for use of this method in the Mt Qiyun study were as follows: first, there is little existing information to describe the local population as there only a very small number of studies of Mt Qiyun and second, interview questions need to change from respondents to respondents due to their diverse job roles and occupations on the mountain, which would affect their perceptions and attitudes to the tourism impacts (Proctor & Vu, 2005, p.308). The advantages of applying semi-structured interview that emerged included:

i. Topic and Questions can prepared previously, making the interviewer more confident (Cohen & Crabtree, 2006)

ii. Increase the reliability and comparability of qualitative data (Flick, 1998; Cohen &

Crabtree, 2006 )

iii. Help bridge the gap between simply qualitative ethnographic research and simply quantitative hypotheses-testing research ( Angrosino , 2005)

iv. Give interviewees more freedom to explain their views, be questioned in greater depth, resolve apparent contradictions(Horton, Macve & Struyven, 2004)

v. Responders’ perceptions are provided rather than the perspective of the interviewer being imposed (Burns, 2000, p.425).

vi. The participant had equal status to the researcher in the dialogue (Burns, 2000, p.425).

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Semi-structured interview design

Consequently, a semi-structured interview technique was the major qualitative research method author used in this research. This method is employed to explore: 1) stakeholders’

satisfaction of current tourism development, 2) their perception and attitude of tourism impacts, 3) their suggestion to the better development. Based on those themes, different interview questions are designed for four groups, including residents on the mountain, residents below the mountain, visitors, and government officials.

Table 4.5 Semi-structured interview themes

Respondents Interview themes

Governmental officials

 Evaluate the current tourism development stage

 Discuss the main problems which will obstruct the Qiyun Mountain development

 Summarise the most significant positive and negative impacts of tourism at Mt Qiyun

 Evaluate the external investors

 Evaluate the role of different stakeholders in tourism planning

 The answer to question “residents can have share or not”

Residents (two

 Their satisfaction of current development

 The significant tourism impact from economic, social-culture and environment aspects

 Their participation in tourism decision making

 Their work status

 Their evaluation of external investor come to the local area

 Their suggestion to further tourism development

visitors

 The motivation they choose to visit here

 They satisfaction or not after visiting mountain

 Any problem they discovered which may obstruct the mountain develop

 The significant tourism impact from economic, social-culture and environment aspects

 Their suggestion to further development

Brief description of the interview research process

During the first two weeks after arriving at the destination, the author mainly look around the entire village to see changes since a prior visit as well as renew acquaintance with residents.

This time, author felt there was quite a difference in the residents’ attitude toward her arrival.

In 2010, it seemed that many residents were unwilling to talk openly and indeed many just keep asking her to buy their products. Some residents did not trust the author, thinking she

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was a journalist. After the initial two weeks, the major daily task for the author was to spend time with different residents as long as possible, do something for them, and keep chatting with those residents. For example, author stayed with some souvenir shop owner and helped them by taking care of their shop, and chatted with them for several hours; the author stay with some old “grandmas” who sell incense sticks, helping them to approach visitors. Over time it seemed that those residents were quite enjoying with the author’s involvement with their lives, and they were pleased to tell her something new when an opportunity arose. Thus, after several such approaches the author then began her formal semi-structure interviews on the mountain. At the same time, author also went down the mountain 3 times each week. The core purpose was for author to become familiar with the villages below the mountain.

Because the cable car ticket becomes quite expensive if used daily the author normally climbed the mountain on foot. This took 2.5-3 hours for the return trip. Additionally, with the experience of previously getting to know the residents, the author had more confidence than before. Moreover, many residents on the mountain also helped the author to get to know other villagers (because some resident below the mountain are relatives and friends of those living on the mountain). In consequence the author kept walking to and within the four villages located at the foot of the mountain (Dongting village, Tantou village, Yanjiao village, Yanqian village) hoping to find opportunities to chat with residents. Generally, on finding someone working on the farm or washing clothes near the river, it became obvious that they were willing to tell you something about their place, especially as the author became a more familiar figure and one who came to be trusted. This process took nearly 2 months, was time consuming, but generated rich data and new insights. In addition detailed semi-structure interviews were held, and residents below the mountain were generous in showing documentation to her, including materials relating to actions that residents took against the government when their farmlands were being compulsorily sold to external investors. On the other hand there were negative aspects because a village leader reported to the local government that there was a person from outside doing her research in Qiyun area, and that many residents were providing criticisms of official policies, which was deemed to threaten the stability of their society. Thus, the researcher was invited to a meeting by the Qiyun government and was told to stop my research. This issue was solved with the help of the village headman (Mr Chen). His three children worked in the local government, and thus he had quite close relationship with local officials. The incident turned out for the best because the researcher became well known to the government officials and could directly go to every

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office frequently to chat with them, especially about visitors to the area. These conversations were also aided by the researcher living with the head men’s family, who operated the biggest accommodation on the mountain, and thus in addition the researcher had easy access to tourists staying overnight in the village. Although at times the numbers were limited, there were usually at least one or two visitors staying with whom it was possible to have long conversations. This was especially true at night for there are no activities for those visitors to do, and so they were more willing to give time to the author. The total number of interviews from 4 different stakeholders reached 124 respondents, with 36 respondents from residents below the mountain, 28 respondents from residents on the mountain, 40 respondents from visitors, and 20 respondents from government officials.

Photo 4.1 Photography of semi-structure interview conducting

a: Resident on the mountain b & c: residents below the mountain d: visitor

Analysing semi-structured interview data

Aronson (1994) suggested that thematic analysis is one useful way to analyse kinds of qualitative data, such as ethnographic interviews. Indeed, several scholars like Daly, Kellehear & Gliksman (1997), and Tuckett (2005) have already pointed out the importance of thematic analysis. They agree that thematic analysis should be considered as a foundational method for qualitative analysis to search for important themes. Braun and Clark (2006)

a b c d

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concluded that thematic analysis technique is flexible, aids new qualitative researchers to access results, and is useful for working within the participatory research paradigm. Thus in current research, thematic analysis technique is employed to analyse the qualitative data. In addition, the software package CATPAC™ is used to provide some help to identify themes.

There are 6 important phases of thematic analysis identified by Braun and Clark (2006, p.87), namely

1) Familiarizing yourself with data

How: firstly, the author kept reading and re-reading the data collected from semi-structure interview, and participation field notes (first-hand information), looking the photography, watching videos and reading collected documents (second-hand information) and providing comments or key words when reading those materials.

1) Generating initial codes

How: in this phase the author coded important features of the data as noted in the first phase, such as: lose farmland, high price, visitor increase, unfair development…

2) Searching for themes

How: in this phase, the author began to sort those codes into potential themes, like economic benefits, social cost, environment benefits…

3) Reviewing themes

How: in this phase the author checked whether the themes are related to the codes, and provided a summary of main themes and sub-themes mapping

4) Defining and naming themes

How: After carefully reviewing the thematic map many times, author could generate clear definitions and names for each theme.

5) Writing report

In the second stage, in order to increase the reliability of themes, the author used CATPAC software to examine the result. CATPAC II is a ”self-organizing artificial neural network optimized for reading, used to identify themes, and provide relationships between concepts evaluated by word counts, frequency rankings, hierarchical cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling (MDS)” (Woelfel, 1998, p. 11). The author can also generate perceptual maps from the MDS in CatPac, and display them in both 2d and 3d to make data more vivid (Samkin& Schneider, 2008).

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