Emotional and Ethical Challenges for Field Research in Africa

The Story Behind the Findings

S. Thomson, A. Ansoms, J. Murison, S. Thomson, A. Ansoms, J. Murison

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781137263742
• eBook ISBN: 9781137263759
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Academic literature rarely gives an account of the ethical challenges and emotional pitfalls the researcher is confronted with before, during and after being in the field. Giving personal accounts, the authors explore some of the challenges one can face when engaging in local-level research in difficult situations.

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Introduction: Why Stories Behind the Findings?

Susan Thomson, An Ansoms and Jude Murison

Academic literature rarely gives an account of the ‘story behind the findings’, meaning the ethical challenges and emotional pitfalls that you, the researcher, are confronted with before, during and after the field experience. These quagmires have a potentially profound impact upon both the research process and its findings. They deserve proper attention, not only to fathom the inevitable bias in researchers’ position in the field and to assess the quality of the research findings, but also to illustrate that the façade of ‘scientific validity and neutrality’ often hides a pragmatic approach that has shaped the empirical research process. As Wilkinson writes, ‘both as social scientists and as human beings, we have a responsibility to “tell it as it happened,” rather than how we would have liked it to be’ (2008, p. 60). Acknowledging this does not degrade the quality and value of empirical data; instead, it places the results of field research into broader socio-political context regardless of the academic discipline that produced the findings.

Our purpose in producing this co-edited volume is to share our knowledge of collecting data. To do so, we gathered together writing that covers a broad spectrum of research themes and individual experiences. The book contains case studies from doctoral research in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), collectively known as the Great Lakes Region (GLR). The themes analysed are not unique – topics such as ethics, anticipating government control and surveillance, working with conflict-impacted communities, managing the expectations of your informants, gaining trust, interpreting lies and disinformation, and building meaningful research relationships are applicable to locales in Africa and elsewhere. Whether you are a new researcher or a seasoned one, the stories in this volume will resonate. If you are organising your first research or study trip, the chapters will elicit ideas and techniques that you might not have considered adopting in your own research design, and if you find yourself encountering similar challenges in the field, then you can remind yourself that these events are not unique to you, they have been managed and overcome a thousand times over by others in a similar position. This volume will help you anticipate, then mitigate, the emotional and ethical ups-and-downs of field research.

Why our explicit focus on the Great Lakes Region? In the past two decades there has been an explosion of researchers working in the region – undergraduates and graduates in pursuit of degrees, interns and volunteers in pursuit of an ‘African experience’, development and policy practitioners who do field research as part of their everyday work, and study tours sponsored with organisations such as The School for International Training in Rwanda. Our volume represents the combined knowledge of 11 scholars from seven disciplines (agronomy, anthropology, conflict studies, development economics, history, sociology, and political science). All of them have completed their PhDs in the last five years, and all have spent at least three months in the field; others have spent several years researching the region. The average among our authors is 11 months on the ground. Our volume shares the story behind the formal research experience with a broader audience doing similar research, whether in the GLR or elsewhere.

This volume is dedicated to the emotional and intellectual challenges of local-level field research. Certainly in conflict-prone environments like those of Africa’s Great Lakes, the culmination of methodological, ethical and emotional challenges may be intimidating to researchers of any academic discipline or background. This collection fills a crucial gap in the existing methodological literature in providing valuable lessons to scholars and practitioners engaging in research in conflict-affected and highly politicised environments. It demonstrates how doubt and uncertainty are part of the research process by offering others our reflections and providing them with a set of necessary and useful guidelines grounded in our own field experiences. All of the chapters collected here analyse different aspects of lessons gleaned from analysis of the stories behind the findings:

1. Know how and when to roll with it. Sometimes it is not about planning, it is about circumstances, seizing opportunities, and adapting to local realities.
2. It is not difficult to acquire data, but gaining the trust and respect of local actors that result in quality data takes time.
3. Things will be tough. You will face emotional challenges that cannot be planned for and anticipated. Accepting that this is inevitable is one part of finding a solution to the problem and to turning challenges into opportunities to deepen your analysis.

Rolling with it: Adaptability, flexibility and patience

This first piece of advice is not a cliché about the stereotype that life is slower in Africa, and that somehow as a researcher you should adapt to it. Rather, it is a realisation that the systems and processes do not work the same as back home, and nor should they. Any person who has worked in Africa can produce an anecdote about how they went from office to office in search of an administrative signature or similar. Nigel Barley, in his famous work, The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut (1983) estimated that 99 per cent of his time in the field was spent ‘on logistics, being ill, being sociable, arranging things, getting from place to place, and above all, waiting’ (cited in Devereux and Hoddinott, 1992b, p. xi). The remaining one per cent was spent on conducting his research.

Research is a series of positive and negative emotions – delight, frustration, anxiety, joy, anger, relief, panic and sadness, to name but a few – that will be experienced daily. You will spend more time than expected on nearly every task you have planned (or not planned, as the case may be). The people you rely upon to facilitate your access to your research subjects or field site may be the primary source of your frustration. It can be difficult for a researcher to adjust to any new research setting, particularly in a research setting that is distinctly more impoverished than the norms to which the researcher is accustomed. Devereux and Hoddinott observe this point succinctly when they write, ‘The seminars, lectures and conferences, the obligatory number-crunching and report writing, the elaborate theoretical models, the recently published papers, journals and books – all seemed not just meaningless, but positively bizarre, next to the stark realities of life in a Third World community’ (1992a, p. 23).

The difference between the research setting and the setting from which the researcher has come is difficult to reconcile. In Chapter 5 of this collection on post-war Burundi, Judith Vorrath shares the strategies she employed as a young researcher with no previous experience working in a conflict-impacted context to navigate her research environment. She suggests that we plan our research carefully, advocating for at least two field trips, one to field test the feasibility of the research design and to familiarise oneself with the research environment, and one to actually gather the core data.

In the research setting we are in a very privileged position. Indeed, for the first time in our lives, we may be in a position of power over our research subjects because of our race, gender, relative socio-economic advantage and so on. In Chapter 4 of this volume on working in rural Rwanda, An Ansoms reminds us that leaving the field is sometimes more difficult than settling in. She notes that when we leave, we leave behind people who have had an instrumental impact upon our lives, while we leave them in the same social conditions to continue their daily struggles. In a similar way, Christina Clark-Kazak’s Chapter 8 in this volume on working with young Congolese refugees resident in Kampala reflects upon the importance of managing research participants’ expectations, but with specific suggestions for working in urban areas with vulnerable populations who expect much more than the researcher can possibly provide in return. Clark-Kazak’s chapter teaches us that managing the expectations of our research subjects is something that requires more than our empathy. Both chapters consider it critical that researchers think through how to mitigate some of the pitfalls that arise when we are tempted to emotionally engage in the lives of our subjects. They remind us that our primary responsibility is to uphold the ethical imperative of doing no harm, and, if we can, to do some good for the men and women who share so much of themselves with us in our pursuit of academic knowledge.

Throughout the research process our role, position and identity change. As a researcher we are a ‘plurality of selves’ combining aspects of gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, marital status, age, cultural background, and so on (Mollinga, 2008). Furthermore, people’s image of a researcher’s identity and agenda may shift throughout the empirical research process. Nilan (2002, p. 368) acknowledges how ‘the researcher as human subject is […] in flux, dealing constantly with shifting realities and contradictions’. The way that we answer the questions that our research subjects have about us, as outsiders, have professional, personal and ethical implications. We must also accept that we will operate within a public and private sphere as we oscillate between ‘on-duty’ researcher and ‘off-duty’ human being (Brown, 2009, p. 216). Thinking through all these dilemmas and considering the trade-offs may at times be extremely challenging. As Vorrath notes in Chapter 5 in this volume, different attributes might impact a researcher’s work in converse ways. In her case, a certain privileged access to informants and information due to her cultural background was accompanied by difficulties arising from the higher social status of her respondents, as political elites. Ansoms succinctly sums up these trade-offs where she discusses the impact of local communities’ interpretation of the identity of the researcher and the utility of the research interpreted. She finds that there is not one way to manage the expectations of local actors, arguing instead for researchers to commit to long-term engagement with research subjects and sites so that meaningful reciprocal relationships can develop to manage their expectations over time. In the third chapter in this collection, Lino Owor Ogora takes this important insight one step further. He stresses that those of us researching mass atrocity – genocide, crimes against humanity – and other forms of political violence that characterise the Great Lakes Region must find a way to produce balanced policy and academic reports of the crimes committed by all offending parties, not just rebels or government soldiers.

Thinking about when and where to publish one’s research is an important consideration for all researchers. In writing up research, senior academics and dissertation committee members advise younger researchers to adhere to standard academic publishing protocols. This usually means adopting methodologies that demonstrate that what we did was planned every step of the way, from design to ethics approval to entering and exiting the field, to the exact location of the field site, to who we conducted interviews with or from whom we collected data. In reality, the research experience is uneven at best, highlighting the need for us to be able to roll with the ups-and-downs of research. Wilkinson sums up this sentiment well: ‘I want to start with a confession: my research is the product of circumstance, of serendipity and coincidence, of contingency, of interpretations and being interpreted’ (2008, p. 47). All of the chapters in our volume embody this spirit of flexibility and adaptability. Two in particular stand out. First, Luca Jourdan’s contribution in Chapter 2 is specifically dedicated to this theme. He writes of the importance of an attitude of ‘getting by’ in difficult research settings. Jourdan conducted doctoral work in Congo’s North Kivu region, an area beset by civil war and resource plunder by various military and government actors. The ability to fly under the radar of authorities, whether legitimate or not, is an important personal attribute when doing research that seeks to understand war and conflict. Ogora’s chapter also speaks to ‘getting by’ as a necessary personal attribute when working with war-impacted individuals, but with an important distinction: Ogora is from the region of northern Uganda that he researches, making ‘getting by’ more difficult, if not impossible. Although he was the lead researcher, Ogora reminds us to appreciate that our local research partners (research assistants, translators, partner organisations, etc) are also subject to a variety of challenges in the research process that we need to allow for in our own planning.

Data collection: Quality over quantity

Anyone can go to the field, observe, conduct interviews, and gather evidence. Collecting ‘data’ per se is not difficult. The more challenging aspect of research is to collect ‘good’ data. By this, we mean going beyond the ‘public transcript’, taking as much account of what is not vocalised as what is actually said. It is not a given that people will talk with us, nor is it a given that people will feel comfortable or have sufficient trust in us to share sensitive information. In this respect we must acknowledge two fundamental issues: we must gain trust and retain confidentiality, even when government officials are demanding our data, and the success of acquiring ‘good’ data is heavily dependent upon our research assistants and translators, who are also our ‘fixers’ in the local community. In Chapter 6 of this collection, Larissa Begley writes about the emotional pitfalls of working in northern Rwanda under the restrictive genocide ideology laws, and teaches an important lesson – fear and anxiety are a common feature of research, both on the part of the researcher and the researched. Begley offers essential advice in her chapter: we must recognise that our experience of these extreme emotions is just the tip of the iceberg compared with what our research subjects feel every day. In order to gain the trust and assure the confidence of the men and women whose stories are our ‘data’, acknowledging and understanding their fears and anxiety is a critical research strategy.

Gaining trust in contexts characterised by fear and insecurity is often a matter of getting behind the ‘façade of normalcy’ that is characterised by silence, secrecy and self-censorship (Green, 1995). As researchers we cannot expect people to respond to us with openness, nor expect that they will tell us their real opinions and experiences when they have just met us. This is equally true for someone in a high-ranking government or rebel position as it is for someone in a remote rural area or someone meeting you in the centre of town. Why would anyone divulge sensitive information, that if known beyond the confines of your interview could get them into trouble with neighbours and local authorities alike? This is why building trust takes time. It cannot be instantly gained. We must demonstrate that we can be trusted, that we respect our research subjects, and that we have a genuine interest in their lives and livelihoods. It also means that you may have to embargo your own data, or delay its publication if using it brings risks to your informants.

This connects to Nordstrom’s argument that the louder the story in a context of violence and war, ‘the less representative […] the lived experience’ whereas ‘silenced stories at war’s epicenters are generally the most authentic’ (1995, p. 139). Silence may be circumvented through the adoption of disguised strategies: myths, jokes and songs may be ‘palimpsests of meaning’ in discourses on war and violence. Scott (1990) refers to ‘hidden transcripts’ that allow subordinate population groups to express their dissent in ‘disguised’ ways. These hidden transcripts allow insiders to convey resistance in seemingly meaningless ways for those not in the know. But researchers are often among the latter group; it takes time and effort from the researcher in building up trust to move beyond this phase. Begley’s chapter rightfully confronts the importance of being able to distinguish between the hidden and public transcript, noting that researchers need to develop strategies to avoid the suspicion of government authorities as a means to enable research subjects to speak to the hidden transcript rather than the officially sanctioned public one. In the ninth chapter of this collection, Yolande Bouka shares strategies that researchers can successfully employ to uncover narratives that threaten regime-imposed hegemony. Specifically, she alerts us to the various ways in which her research subjects – imprisoned men and women accused of acts of genocide – covertly relay their thoughts, feelings and expressions on justice processes in Rwanda in ways that do not breach the public transcript.

Guaranteeing confidentiality and anonymity is a well-known practice in social research. But the practical implementation of these protocols is not always straightforward. Wood explains how she ‘disguised’ her collected field data when having to go through military checkpoints (2006). Sluka (1990) recounts how he took precautions when expecting a raid on his house by Security Forces towards the end of his fieldwork in Catholic ghettos in 1982 Belfast. Thomson (2009a) also took careful precautions to hide the identities of her respondents, something that she did successfully despite repeated government attempts to learn what her research subjects had shared with her. Vorraths’s chapter adds nuance to the strategies used by researchers in sharing her approach to interviewing political elites in post-war Burundi. She notes that field research is a constant juggling of preserving the standards of meaningful social research and our responsibility vis-à-vis our interview partners. Vorrath’s subtle point is that the characteristics of the group of respondents matter very much for aspects like confidentiality and anonymity protocols, and also for how interaction and relationships are established. Bouka reinforces this point, noting that working with socially stigmatised actors, like the individuals accused of acts of genocide in Rwanda that she consulted, requires a degree of flexibility throughout the project as the research context can shift rapidly from one where folks who were once willing to speak are no long willing or able to do so for myriad reasons. She stresses the importance of going beyond traditional confidentiality and anonymity protocols to safeguard the humanity of her research subjects throughout the interview process, and to recognise that their vulnerability shapes the stories they share with you in profound ways.

Moreover, basing trust merely upon consent procedures may be insufficient or even counterproductive when explicitly requested in a conflict-prone context where rules and agreements are frequently violated. Norman (2009) points to the importance of emotional trust, depending upon personal relations. Building up trust through intense and long-term personal involvement also enables the researcher to assess the physical and emotional risks with which informants may be confronted. Like Clark-Kazak’s chapter on managing the financial and emotional expectations of Congolese refugees in Uganda, Julie Van Damme’s chapter in this volume analyses similar considerations as she stresses the challenges of confronting the needs of subsistence farmers in the southern Kivu region of the DRC. In examining the relationship between researcher and researched, she highlights the ways in which we can become catalysts of socio-economic change for local communities as part and parcel of the process of building trust and lasting relationships with research subjects. She also makes an important point: the interests of the local population must always trump the need to gather ‘data’.

The next step in the research process is to interpret the information that our participants have shared with us. Fujii (2010) points to the artificial division between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’. She asserts that the value of a person’s narratives should not necessarily be judged in terms of truthfulness, but in terms of the underlying meaning that the person assigns to particular parts of reality. Fujii rightly assesses the made-up story of one of her respondents as a way ‘to make sense of her current situation’ and to recover her dignity, ‘not a story of what was, but rather, what should have been’ (2008, p. 13). In Chapter 10 of this volume, Lidewyde Berckmoes takes Fujii’s observation one step further by exa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Notes on the Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Why Stories Behind the Findings?
• Chapter 2 From Humanitarian to Anthropologist: Writing at the Margins of Ethnographic Research in the Democratic Republic of Congo
• Chapter 3 The Contested Fruits of Research in War-TornCountries: My Insider Experience in Northern Uganda
• Chapter 4 Dislodging Power Structures in Rural Rwanda: From ‘Disaster Tourist’ to ‘Transfer Gate’
• Chapter 5 Challenges of Interviewing Political Elites: A View from the Top in Post-War Burundi
• Chapter 6 The RPF Control Everything! Fear and Rumour under Rwanda’s Genocide Ideology Legislation
• Chapter 7 From Scientific Research to Action in Southern Kivu: Ethical Dilemmas and Practical Challenges
• Chapter 8 Research as ‘Social Work’ in Kampala? Managing Expectations, Compensation and Relationships in Research with Unassisted, Urban Refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo
• Chapter 9 Nacibazo, ‘No Problem’: Moving Behind the Official Discourse of Post-Genocide Justice in Rwanda
• Chapter 10 Dealing with Deceit: Fieldwork Encounters and Lies in Burundi
• Chapter 11 Academic Integrity and Ethical Responsibilities in Post-Genocide Rwanda: Working with Research Ethics Boards to Prepare for Fieldwork with ‘Human Subjects’
• Bibliography
• Index