Migration Processes in Central and Eastern Europe - Multiple Choices

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Normative and Methodological Discussion of Migration and Integration
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individual respondents; the authors do not use the stories
to illuminate their broader interpretations or to compare
the respondents' stories with each other. Only two texts
work with citations in a more systemic manner: the study
of the Vietnamese community in the Czech Republic
(Brouček, 2003) and the study about the integration of
Arabs in selected Czech cities (Hošková, 2003).
While quotes from interviews do appear in the
analysed studies (but only sporadically), there are no
citations from the researchers' field diaries. It is clear from
the texts that authors were taking notes during the process
of doing research (their texts could not otherwise have
been written), but these notes are not shared with the
reader. A possible explanation for this can be found in
Hammersley and Atkinson (1995), who see field notes as
“invisible” because they are often considered to be private
documents. Researchers only exceptionally share such
notes with others and anthropologists (especially) perceive
their field notes as 'sacred' and untouchable.
Why is it so important for a research report to
contain quotations from recorded interviews and notes
from observations? Without such information, we can
only assume that the researcher's conclusions are based
on already-conducted or ongoing research, and therefore
her interpretations do not present us with a credible picture
of either the respondents or the researcher. If all that we
have available are fully-digested conclusions such as “most
students from Arab countries try to steer clear of conflicts
with the majority” (Derianová, 2003), “fairly often, Muslims
in Plzeň have steady and trouble-free marriages”
(Drápalová and Kolářová, 2003), or “contacts between
Bulgarians living in the Czech Republic are not very
frequent” (Otčenášek, 2003b), we do not know under
what circumstances the speakers responded, what they said
exactly, in what way their answers were similar to or
different from the answers of other speakers, or what
specific expressions or verbal formulations the respondents
used. Behind such generalised conclusions, we cannot
imagine the stories of individual people-the participants in
the research. But it is the interest in such people and their
experiences, as well as the attempt to understand them
that unites most qualitative researchers. The absence of
field notes in the texts is troubling-especially because they
always contain interpretations of the phenomena that are
observed by the researcher. Disman (1993) emphasises
that “the process of making notes is identical to the
process of interpreting” (312). If we are to trust the
findings of qualitative research, we must be allowed to see
the researcher herself.
CONCLUSION
Unlike colleagues involved in quantitative
research, the qualitative researcher has no standardised
methods to help her to enhance the credibility and reliability
of her research. For this reason, she is forced to underpin
the credibility and reliability of her findings in a different
way by elaborately explaining the individual steps of her
research, including the process of defining the research
question and the selected methodology. Qualitative
research is more credible when it reflects the life stories
and experiences of the respondents. Only then are the
readers capable of understanding the respondents' actions.
1 This text was supported by a grant from the Grant Agency of the
Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, no. B7104401 and
by a grant from the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the
Czech Republic, no. MSM0021620841. I would like to gratefully
acknowledge this support.
2 See Government Resolutions No. 1266/2000 and 1260/2001.
The aim of these studies was to allow policy-makers to gain
information about immigrant “communities” for the development
of the Governmental Concept of Integration of Foreigners.
Some of these were first studies on the subject relying on little
previous empirical research not conducted by experienced
researchers but rather fresh graduates.
Petra Klvačová
Petra Klvačová is a research fellow at the
Institute of Sociological Studies of the Faculty
of Social Sciences. She can be contacted at:
klvacova@fsv.cuni.cz
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Migration Processes in Central and Eastern Europe: Unpacking the Diversity