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Research Methodology By Sita Venkateswar
This phase of the research was undertaken as a pilot study involving children employed in carpet factories in Nepal and those employed as domestic servants in middle class homes, using disposable cameras to document and recount their everyday lives.
While in Kathmandu, I made contact with a number of non-governmental organisations involved in working in a variety of contexts with children in need. The Child Development Society (CDS) has been involved in imparting literacy and non-formal education to children and their parents who work in carpet factories. On discussing my project with the CDS, they were very interested in integrating the research into their own ongoing programmes with the working children. The children who were involved in these programmes were also keen to participate in the project, as were their parents. Ten children and their parents were selected, based on their attendance at these programmes, and their degree of articulacy. The use of disposable cameras was included as one of CDS’ strategies for non-formal education for the subsequent months. The children’s narratives were extended by asking them also to write and illustrate any aspect of their lives by providing them with notebooks, pencils, erasers and colour pencils. The research methodology proved extremely successful in terms of the children’s involvement in it, the use of photography as a means for children to both compose and reflect on aspects of interest to them in their daily lives, as well as generating richly detailed narratives. CDS was very pleased with the outcome of the project and are keen to extend it beyond the pilot study.
A similar study was conducted with children who were formerly employed in carpet factories, but who had been removed from such employment and placed in shelters by a UNCEF funded effort to provide alternate livelihoods to such children. The shelter was also involved in both formal and non-formal education, and were willing to include my research in their ongoing programmes with the children. Here, no cameras were distributed, but the children were provided with writing and drawing material and asked to write stories about themselves and illustrate them. The outcome was a variety of beautifully illustrated and eloquent stories about the children’s daily lives, their experiences while at the carpet factories and their families.
I employed 3 research assistants/translators, based on their experience with similar research and their access to children employed as domestic servants, to work with me. In each case, the research assistants selected between 3-4 such children from within their own known circles of family and friends. A total of 10 children were interviewed by the research assistants to obtain initial general information about them, and were then given a disposable camera to use over a course of a week. Of the 3 research assistants employed, only one was able to follow through and conduct interviews with the children to discuss the photographs that they had taken. Hence, narratives were obtained from only 4 of the 10 children who had been given cameras to record their lives.
I extended the research into another sphere that was not anticipated in my original plan for the pilot study. Through my contacts with a residential school that was located outside the Kathmandu valley, I realised that I had access to women and children employed in breaking rocks and stones used for construction. As part of a social awareness programme, the school was interested in starting a project involving the children from classes 6 and 7 to work with the village community where the school was located. On my suggestion that the pilot study with the children who broke stones could be conducted by the children of the school, as a part of their own ongoing community participation work, the school showed great interest, and have commenced the programme at the beginning of this academic year. I have given 10 cameras to the school and will await the outcome of the research over the next few months.
The research methodology as developed during the pilot study proved successful, and confirms its potential for large-scale follow-up research.
The narratives that follow are a selection from the various contexts in which the pilot study was conducted. They speak for themselves and are a testament to the children’s courage and resilience, as they cope with the circumstances of their quotidian lives.
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Sita Venkateswar is a lecturer in social anthropology at Massey University
in New Zealand. She joined the program after completing her Ph.D. from
Rutgers University. Her Ph.D. research was conducted in the Andaman
Islands, made possible by a dissertation improvement grant from the
National Science Foundation. At present, she is exploring her longstanding interest
in visual anthropology and embarked on research in Nepal on a visual
documentation of child labor.