Choosing a Research Site

As I said in my last posting, the free lists are my first phase and interviews are my second. I’ll use the information from the first two phases to construct a survey in the third phase. I’ll write more about that as it gets closer, but I took the chance on Friday to do some preparation for distributing that survey.

I’m going to be distributing the surveys country-wide. I want to make sure I get people from lots of different backgrounds and with different experiences to better ensure that my findings cover most of the important differences in the country. To do that, I’m going to target people of different economic environments (urban/rural), different ethnicities (Kyrgyz/Russian/Uzbek/other), different genders (male/female), and different ages.

I’m dividing the ages into three groups: those born between 1980 and 1992, those born between 1945 and 1980, and those born before 1945. I chose those dates for specific reasons. The early 1980s marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. That time period corresponds with the liberalization of the Soviet government under Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost’ policies. I chose 1992 as the cutoff point because anyone born after that if going to be under 17 and therefore less likely to be an active participant in the large-scale social activities that are the focus of my research. People born during this time period essentially came of age after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and their worlds have essentially been post-Soviet for most of their lives. I choose 1945 as the cutoff date for the next group because it corresponds to the end of WWII, which was a devastating time for the Soviet Union. People born this time period were all fully-grown when the Soviet Union dissolved, making that a major event in their lives. People in the third group, born before 1945, still often act as if the Soviet Union still existed. They have a very different outlook on life than people in the other two groups.

If you take all of the possible combinations of economic environment, ethnicity, gender, and age group, you get 48 combinations. That means, in a best-case scenario, I will be able to survey 48 people to get an example of every combination of the factors that are important to me. I’m sure I won’t be able to get all of those in every province (I highly doubt I will be able to find a rural Russian of any gender or age in Naryn province, for instance), but I’m going to try. I raised the number to 50 just to make it prettier.

So, I need 50 people per survey site. That leaves the question of where I am going to survey. I already know I want to survey each of the seven provinces, but there are a lot of differences in the provinces themselves. For example, in Issyk Kol province, the northern shore of the lake has a more temperate climate, a larger Russian population, and is normally considered more economically well-off. So I want to have at least one site on the north shore and one site on the south. Also, there are two major cities--Balykchy and Karakol--on the western and northern corners of the lake, respectively. People have often commented that there are big differences between those cities. Other provinces have different kinds of divisions.

That is where Friday’s activities came into the picture. AUCA has students from all over the country. After a student filled out a survey, I asked him or her what province he or she was from. I then asked something to the effect of, “If I was traveling to your province, and I wanted to see the most different places--especially places where the people were different from one another--what places should I got to?” I tried to get at least four places out of each of them.

I took the results and tallied them up. Interestingly, the Issyk Kol divisions I mentioned above held true in these students’ perceptions. Most of them seemed to think that four different locations embodied all of the major differences in the province. In most of the other provinces, two or three different locations stood out. To make it more even, and to try to make sure I don’t miss anything too important, I’ve decided to survey 50 people in four locations in each of the seven provinces. That makes for 1400 surveys total. I’m going to survey an additional 50 people in both Bishkek and Osh--the two major cities in the country--to bring the total up 1500. I think that’s a respectable number for a survey of a country of this size.

I feel good about choosing the sites based on what people say rather than just looking at statistics for each of the cities concerning population size and demographics and stuff like that. It just seems to make more sense to go with what the local people say.