Economic Effects of Sustainable Sanitation - SuSanA

Methods
the sanitation or agricultural situation or the situation regarding private service providers in
the field of sanitation (depending on the type of interviewee). The question usually triggered
an answer with a narrative character. The ongoing interview consisted of a mixture of
―primary‖ and ―secondary‖ questions (Dunn, 2005, p. 83). The primary questions served as
opening questions for different topics such as ―What can you tell me about the property
situation in the slums?‖ or ―How are sanitation facilities in the slums financed?‖ (experts);
―What is the size of your farm?‖, ―What are you growing‖, ―What do you do with the crops
you grow?‖ or ―Would you be willing to use human excreta as fertiliser?‖ (Farmers); ―What
kind of business are you running‖, ―What can you tell me about your market environment‖ or
―How is your technical infrastructure like?‖ (private service providers). Secondary questions
were used to specify mentioned issues and redirect the interview according to the desired
outcome. The interviews were closed by thanking the interviewee and asking for questions
from his side (Dunn, 2005, p. 94). The average duration of the interviews belonging to the
participant level was one hour. The expert interviews usually took 1.5 hours.
5.3 Focus group discussions
In general, focus group discussions are a method of discussing certain issues in small groups
of preferably five to twelve people (cf. Cameron, 2005, p. 116; Lamnek, 2005, p. 435). The
idea behind focus group discussions is to induce interaction between the group members
rather than between the interviewee and the researcher. Hence, different perspectives are
expressed informing both the researcher and other group members thereby not only
generating data for research purposes, but also triggering a learning process within the group
or even the creation of new knowledge (cf. Cameron, 2005, p. 119). The role of the researcher
should thereby ideally be the one of the moderator, promoting interactions, encouraging
reluctant members or curbing others and redirecting the situation when being off-track (cf.
Cameron, 2005, p. 124). Furthermore, Cameron (cf. 2005, p. 117) characterises group
discussions as dynamic and energetic processes that generate much more information than
other research methods.
However, the application of focus group discussions is not confined to the above mentioned
applications. Alternative use cases are combinations with questionnaires to test the findings in
a bigger sample to enable generalisability, to develop targeted questions for a new survey or
to refine or interpret survey findings (cf. Cameron, 2005, pp. 119).
In the present thesis, focus group discussions were conducted with residents and landlords
from four slum areas in Kampala (cf. Figure 12). Comparable to the semi-structured
interviews a guideline had been compiled. The objectives were to elicit information about the
sanitation situation and the attitude towards sustainable sanitation solutions, including the
reuse idea of human excreta. Apart from gathering direct information comparable to those
derived from the semi-structured interviews, the objective was to induce dynamic discussions
about the problems caused by bad sanitation, the importance of proper sanitation, the desired
sanitation situation, the willingness to pay for proper sanitation and discussions about the
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