PhD thesis final - Royal Holloway, University of London

Chapter 3- Research contexts and methodologiesYangtze River Delta, China as a suitable research site by elaborating its significance indrawing Taiwanese highly-skilled migration as a result of the intensive cross-Straiteconomic and social links and the shared ethnicity and language between the twocountries. Moreover, the political antagonism as well as the different socialdevelopment of two countries have also made national and cultural identity animportant issue in Taiwanese expatriates‘ belonging.With regard to my research methods, I argued that qualitative research methods areuseful in providing contextual and in-depth understandings of my research questions.Thus, I elaborated the reason I chose to carry out in-depth interviews and take part inmy informants‘ daily and social lives as well as their online interactions as an embodiedparticipant observer in order to gain the knowledge of their lived experiences. Giventhat being reflexive is a useful strategy for this (Rose 1997), I also described my shiftingpositionalities and the creation of the inter-subjectivity between my informants and mein the field as well as the ways in which they affected my fieldwork process. Myembodied experiences resembling a newly-arrived expatriate and the fieldworkdynamics not merely allowed me to enter and experience my research participants‘ livedworld in natural settings, but also allowed their lived experiences to be revealed bythemselves in this collaborative research process. Moreover, they had also shaped myunderstanding and knowledge of migration and belonging as constituted throughspecific perspectives and my locations. In this sense, these qualitative research methodsenabled me to gather empirical research data and contributed to theoreticaladvancements of the everyday‘ grounded experiences of transnational migrants‘belonging. These theoretical advancements will be fleshed out in the remainder of thisthesis.103