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eaches you, and it can also cause for a more stop-and-start conversation whereeverything has to be translated before one can move on to follow-up questions or newquestions. During our resource person interviews and focus group discussions weonly relied on meticulous research notes as we felt the tape recorder made ourparticipants uneasy. The notes were then used in transcribing the interviews the firstchance we got, which then allowed us to build on the new knowledge for the rest ofour data collection within each village, and gain back some of the cross-referencepossibility which our limited time prevented us to do.As stated, we made use of research assistants when in the field, given our workloadand in order to maximize the efficiency of our data collection. The use of assistants,although it made it possible to cover more ground in a shorter period of time,increased the risk of misinterpretation or loss of details. The reasons for this could bebecause they were not as familiar with the aims and objectives of the research, mightnot have made as many follow up questions where needed, or tried to clarifyinconsistencies and been as persistent in reformulating questions to get theinformation needed, as we might have been. However, by keeping an open dialoguebetween us we tried to minimize this risk.On this note, we find it important to remember the role of the researcher and researchparticipant. As Webb et al. (1966:13) points out, when a person is taking part in ascholarly search, and is aware of this fact, it might result in what they call the“reactive measurement effect” which might affect the responses given and the datacollected (Bryman 2008, p.266.). These responses might include: the guinea pig effectwhere the research participants answers and behaves in a way he or she would notnormally do because they want to create a good impression; role selection where theymight answer in accordance to what they think the researcher wants to hear; ormeasurement as a change agent where their behaviour might be affected by the solepresence of having a researcher or “outsider” in their presence. The fourth componentis what they call response sets, where the respondent consistently agrees or disagreeswith the questions being asked regardless of the meaning or clear contradiction toprevious answers (Ibid).66