Research and Relationships

On Sunday, my day off, I started and finished the book "Gang Leader for a Day" by Sudhir Venkatesh. It's a pretty amazing book--if you haven't read it, you should. It's about a naive UChicago sociology grad school student who goes into a low-income housing project area called Robert Taylor to get subjects to answer a multiple choice survey that his professors have assigned him. He ends up being held hostage at gunpoint by a gang leader and then becoming friends with him. He gets much more out of the relationships he builds while talking to tenants and gang members living in these project areas than he would have gotten by simply having them answer survey questions. He ends up receiving a Harvard Fellowship and is now a professor at Columbia. An englightening, true story, it's a great book to read, especially for someone foraying into the world of development research for the first time.

Here are a couple quotes/excerpts that especially stuck with me, as feelings that I'm experiencing to some degree:

"No one back at the U of C had prepared me to feel such strong emtional connections to the people I studied. None of the ethnographic studies I'd read offered much guidance about the relationships a researcher formed during fieldwork and how to manage them. The books talked about the right way to ask a question or address a respondent during an interview, but little about managing relationships with the people you hung out with" (43-44).

"People who knew nothing about me nevertheless took me inside their wrld, talked to me with such openness, and offered me the food that they had probably budgeted for their own children" (43).

This last quote is just as true as it is surprising, even in India. If a person has invited me into their home, whether it be a bungalow, a flat, or a tent made out of tarp, he or she always offers me food and tea. Ajaybhai, who is one of the staff members at Manav Sadhna who lives in a nearby slum area, invited me to his home, where I met his mother and sister. I sat with them for about an hour, and looked through an entire album of his 22 year old sister's wedding, which happened a couple months ago. The openness with which him, his family, and everyone that I've met at Manav Sadhna share their lives with me is astounding. I don't think that many people experience the kind of genuineness that I've experienced in the past couple summers.

Of course, not every research subject is open or willing to answer questions--yesterday, I went into a slum area that government and NGO implementers do not frequent very often, and slumdwellers don't get or aren't aware of many services that other slumdwellers living closer to an NGO get and are aware of. As a result, many of those slumdwellers were not very keen on answering any of the questions that I had. When I asked them about who they go to for help with certain needs and services, they started talking in raised voices, crowding around me while I tried to interview one of them, and kept pushing my arm to make a point--"people like you come around here all the time, to study poor people like us, asking us questions, and writing our names down. But no one actually helps us. Some people come and take money from us so that we can fill out forms. What are YOU doing? Are YOU actually going to help us? No, you'll just 'study' us, write your report for college, write our names, and never come back." It's useless to try to explain to them that their responses could help form policies that could then help other people in the future. And of course it's useless--why would people who live day to day, not knowing if they will have food to eat the next day, want to spend their time answering questions that probably will not even directly help them?

Sudhir Venkatesh wrote: "I, meanwhile, grew evasive and withdrawn--in large part out of guilt. Within just a few months at Harvard, I began making a name for myself in academia by talking about the inner workings of street gangs. While I hoped to contribute to the national discussion on poverty, I was not so foolish as to believe that my research would specifically benefit J.T. or the tenant families from whom I'd learned so much" (277).

By volunteering with Manav Sadhna, the NGO with whom I'm working closely and who is helping me get subjects to interview in the slums, I feel like I'm at least giving a little bit back to the community. I teach English to a staff member and to some 20 7th-9th grade slum children. Sudhir Venkatesh says in his book that he started a writing program for women living in Robert Taylor to try to cope with the guilt of not being able to directly help the tenants.

In the end, I don't really know how to solve the dilemma of knowing that the subjects that I am interviewing will never actually directly reap any benefits that may come from the results of my research. But maybe, just maybe, the next generation of people living in this slum area will have access to better services because government departments and NGOs working in them will be able to create more effective development project models.