ZK

Initial plan

When I started this research, my idea was to explore the lives of orphans in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Nairobi, Kenya, and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I drew up a comparative, cross-cultural research design to examine the ways in which children respond to and cope with the experience of orphanhood. Exciting as it sounded, however, the proposal turned out to be over-ambitious. Planning the practicalities of fieldwork in Kenya as well as Ethiopia within the constraints of the resources and skills available led me to a realization that this could only be done at the expense of the depth and quality of the research. In order to gain children’s insights, it was also imperative that I use participatory research methods, which by their very nature require longer periods of time. Additionally, as discussed in Part One, not much is known as such about the lives of children and young people in Ethiopia.

Choosing field sites, redefining research questions

Having concluded that it would be more rewarding to carry out an intra-country, rural-urban comparison at this level than an inter-country comparative research, I chose the two contrasting settings of Addis Ababa as an urban area and Gedeo, a rural site in southern Ethiopia (Figure 3.). Although this shift was more processual, once I had chosen it, I found it suitable and have continued doing so for personal, practical and academic reasons. The latter

reason will be discussed separately under the ‘case study research design’. First, I have always been fascinated by the complex cultural, ecological,¹ social and political history of southern Ethiopia. Although I was born and raised in Addis Ababa, I have worked and lived in Awassa, the administrative capital of the Southern Regional State located eighty kilometres north of Dilla, the district capital of the Gedeo. I also know Gedeo as having one of the highest rural population densities in sub-Saharan Africa, with concerns about children from the family planning and demographic points of view (Abebe, 1997).

50 0 50 100 150 Km

5 0 5 10 15 Km

N

Gedeo

Addis Ababa

Figure 3. Map of the study areas

Secondly, my career experience in SOS Children’s Villages² has sparked many questions concerning orphanhood and childhood marginalization, its causes and its growing significance.

When I did post-graduate study (masters) in development studies, I carried out research into the quality of life of children who live in the Village on the one hand and those who work and partly live on the streets on the other (Abebe 2002a) by developing Child Well-being Indicators (Abebe, 2002b). I found out that, although the children in the former tend to be

1 I like the Gedeo countryside, especially the fact that it is lush and evergreen, with an interesting agro-forestry system of interspersed ensete and the ‘green-gold’– coffee and chat– vegetation.

2 I worked as a teacher and project coordinator of a community outreach programme known as Creativity, Action and Service (CAS). CAS is a self-initiated programme in which young people voluntarily participated in different income-generating and environmental conservation activities, both within and outside the village.

secure in terms of education, health and housing facilities; they lack peer-interaction and

‘social capital’ and are more dependent on the institution. Working street children, on the other hand, appear to have agency in making a contribution to their families. This research not only left numerous theoretical issues unanswered, it also became an inspiration for the current study into the spatiality and temporality of childhoods.

On another level, after taking up this PhD, my theoretical exposure to the burgeoning field of childhood studies made me understand the complexity of the issues I wanted to look at and began to shape the nature of the research itself. Being inspired by my readings in the methodology of grounded theory (Strauss and Corbins, 2005), I entered the field having only a general idea of what I would like to do and how I might go about looking at it, rather than well-established procedures to be applied. My intention in being open-minded about my research is to avoid being decided about what I would explore in the field (see Strauss and Corbin, 1998). The research design need not be fixed, since the research process itself is dynamic and flexible. As Gulløv and Højlund (2006 in Sørenssen 2007: 5) argue:

Research design can be compared to a puzzle, wherein method, theory and the analytical tools all operate as puzzle pieces, however there are some pieces that are constantly missing and those that are present don’t exactly have a perfect fit. It is a puzzle of making it as we go along…both versatile and flexible.

As Gulløv and Højlund (2006 in ibid.: 5) further argue, ‘because research is changeable in the fieldwork; because researchers, method, theory and field are wound up in each other; and because research statements are not fixed’, describing how the process went and how the fieldwork changed the research questions themselves is important. This methodology chapter should be seen as part of an attempt to reconstruct this process in order to fit the puzzle together.

While the fieldwork was in progress, I became more interested in the ways in which children were engaged in different livelihood strategies. Repeated observation and informal dialogues with them motivated me to explore the centrality of their economic activities in the livelihoods of families. Although, at this stage, my ideas on how to proceed with the study were less clear, I was open to learning more about their daily lives. However, I also knew that I was being sidetracked by my desire to ‘do geography’, that is, to adopt a spatial approach to

children’s livelihoods. Once in the field, I came to realise the transition in livelihoods that was taking place in Gedeo from subsistence agriculture to market-based production. This therefore became one of the many strands of questioning and analysing the ways in which the changing livelihoods trajectories of communities shape the working lives of children. I eventually redefined my research objectives and, in addition to orphanhood; focused on the role of children in household livelihoods and the complex ways in which they negotiate these in their daily lives.

Case study research design

Case study is a well-established research tradition (Yin, 1994; Bassey, 1999; Stake, 2005) and an important approach in geographical inquiry. It involves focusing on a particular case thematically and/or the entirety of a case regionally (Aase, 1991). It could be used to explain an individual phenomenon (single case study) or several phenomena (multiple case studies) separately or in a comparative perspective (Yin, 1994). Yin wrote that a case study is:

an empirical enquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real life context especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident. (1994: 13)

Case study is not a methodology because it is defined by interest in the case rather than by the method of inquiry used (Stake, 2005). The term ‘case study’ draws attention to the question of what specifically can be learned from a particular case. As a research strategy, case studies are both a process of learning about cases and the product of learning (Stake 2005). Because they are studies of particularities, the suggestion that the findings that derive from them may be applied more widely may seem somewhat contradictory, if not invalid (Sikes, 1999). A common question in case study research design is that of generalisability, i.e. whether it is possible to generalise results from a small sample or cases to a larger one. However, ensuring reliability (whether the findings of a study can be trusted) and validity (the extent to which the methods investigate what they intend to investigate, and how the material from the field are fairly represented in the research) are also core issues in qualitative (case) studies (Bryman, 1995, Kvale, 1996).

Mark (1996: 213) argues that theories generated through case studies may or may not apply more widely than the case studied and must of necessity be more ‘tentative’. In terms of generalising in order to create theory, Yin (1994: 30) refers to ‘statistical generalisation’

(which is unsuitable for case studies) and ‘analytical generalisation’ (which can be appropriate). Yin argues that analytical generalisation is the appropriate method of generating theory from case studies. By this he means ‘a previously developed theory is used as template with which to compare empirical results of a case study. If two or more cases are shown to support the same theory replication may be claimed’ (Yin 1994: 31). Likewise, Stake (2005), although he warns us against generalising; emphasises the contextualisation of knowledge produced from particular cases. In this regard, he identifies two types of case study, intrinsic and instrumental. As opposed to intrinsic case studies, in which the cases themselves are regarded as of sufficient interest to merit investigation, instrumental case studies look in-depth at the contexts of cases because they help us pursue external interest. As Stake (2005) argues, in instrumental case studies, the cases are chosen because understanding them will lead to a better understanding, and perhaps better theorising, about still larger groups of cases.

Applied to my research, the case studies on orphanhood, children’s work and livelihoods in Gedeo and Addis Ababa are meant to be instrumental for understanding young people’s lives.

In applying them, I focus on the children themselves and the social, cultural, economic and political contexts in which they live. I also discuss the contrasting and common contours of children’s lives in the two study areas, keeping in mind the implications of these for theorising childhoods in Ethiopia. As Table1 shows, I use case study design as an analytical strategy to “situate” the cases and contextualise and view them holistically through the use of plurality of methods, perspectives and voices (Gasper, 2000). This allows me to explore structural dis/similarities between rural and urban areas about children’s everyday lives and livelihoods, based on which common ground for social action could be framed (Katz, 2004).

Table 1. Case study research design

Case Broad framework Immediate context

Place Ethiopia Rural (Gedeo) and Urban (Addis Ababa)

Subjects of research

Children and young people Orphans, working children, families in the context of HIV/AIDS and poverty Phenomenon Working childhood and

orphanhood

Daily and generational re-production, i.e.

work, care, livelihoods and familial relations

Katz (2004: xiii-xiv) calls the approach of generating geographical knowledge about particular places ‘topographic descriptions’. On the other hand, she refers to the method of describing and theorising about disparate places affected by similar processes, as well as trying to produce abstract knowledge of spatial connections (and comparisons), as ‘counter-topographies’. In other words, whereas topographies are ways of producing ‘thick descriptions’ of social relations and processes about a particular geography, counter-topographies are ways of exposing common threads of social processes that are common to two or more different places. These methodologies are operationalized in my study from the viewpoint of first producing knowledge on, and secondly analysing the similar effects of;

poverty, the impacts of HIV/AIDS and the wider national development strategies in the two study areas. I examine how contrasting rural and urban environments influence children’s work experiences and their growing up within (extended) family households. In doing so, I describe the ‘topographies’ of orphanhood and working childhoods, situating them in their local, national and global contexts. Further, I explore the differentiations and commonalities of the contexts as well as of the lives of children to produce counter-topographic descriptions of childhoods in Ethiopia.