By Christine
During
the last weeks the Rwandan research team conducted more than 1100 interviews in
the Northern Province of Rwanda. This is
a big step not only for the Rwandan team but also for the whole FATE-project. Before
we were able to focus on the actual fieldwork - the interviews - all sorts of
preparations had to be made. First, the questionnaire had to be adapted to the
Rwandan context. This was done in an intensive exchange between the team
members here in Kigali.
The
next labour and time intensive step was sampling. Rwanda is divided into
different administrative units: province, district, sector, cell and village.
In our research region, the northern province of the country three districts
were selected, out of those 21 villages have been selected at random. From
every village we met the responsible village chiefs and so were given access to
the names and employment of individual households. So we sampled 2,500
households, out of which 560 were randomly selected for the interviews.
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Sampling activities in the Northern
Province. Source: Bigler Christine 2015.
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Sampling activities in the Northern
Province. Source: Bigler Christine 2015.
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The
first test run has been found, that the questionnaire has got too long, so we
had to divide the questionnaire into two parts. Next,
it was time to training the enumerators. For the interviews 14 Rwandans were
engaged, which were first made familiar on two-day training in Kigali with the
questionnaires and the tablets used for the interviews. A particular challenge
was the translation of the questionnaire into the national language Kinyarwanda.
The always interesting discussions about the correct understanding of English
terms, the enumerators showed extremely dedicated and resourceful. It
was followed by another day of practice in the field, where the new knowledge could
be applied directly and we have analyzed existing problems to be fixed.
After
two more days of training in Kigali, we could finally start with the interviews. In
two teams of seven people the enumerators conducted the interviews in two
passes. They not only braved the bad weather (it is currently rainy season),
but also the sometimes very poor road conditions and wide paths on foot from
one household to another. Likewise, some households had to be repeatedly
visited, there was nobody at home, and especially the men are always on the
move in order to pursue their cross-border transactions. Finally,
we have concluded successfully the two interview passages and now have a large
data set, to its processing we will argue in the next few weeks.
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Impression from the field. Source: Bigler
Christine 2015.
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Impression from the field. Source: Bigler
Christine 2015.
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Part of the research team: Source: Bigler
Christine 2015.
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