top of page

  As already indicated above, we adopted 3 research methods: interviews, online ethnography and participant-observation. Discussions as to how and why these were methods were used are seen below.

 

 

Why Participant-Observation in addition to interviews & online ethnography?

​

          In order to discover what might have not imagined when we were thinking about our research questions or during literature review, we decided to conduct a participant-observation methodology. We figured out that sometimes it is not always easy for participants to articulate their own behaviors and choices, and thus interviews alone would not help us much in understanding the phenomenon of lesbianism among migrant domestic workers. So, firstly interviews would be limited as what people say, what people do and what people say they do may not always be the same thing as one scholar, Margaret Mead, observed several decades ago. Secondly, though online ethnography is help us a great deal in understanding some of the things our subjects engages in, we had two limitations which we felt we would severely limit our understanding of lesbianism among our Indonesian participants.

 

         These two limitations were that there is a rather low usage of social media among the helpers, and after having suspected this could be what is going on, we conducted a mini-survey of 20 migrant workers in Victoria park to find literate they are in using social media and computer. 17 of them had absolutely no social media presence prior to coming to working abroad. The context being that Hong Kong tend to recruit migrant workers from rural Indonesia and there, social media isn’t something common. Now, we were faced with a difficulty of having to conduct an online ethnography on their cyberspace presence but they themselves aren’t active participants on the internet. So we figured conducting a traditional ethnography (participant-observation) would supplement our limited observation of the online phenomenon. In addition, we realized online presence is rather a space full of ‘performances’, we knew we were also interested in performativity of sexual identities, but we thought we could supplement these ‘shows’ with an observation of what they do in their everyday life, and thus participant observation was a clear candidate as one supplement method in helping us grasp the lesbian phenomenon among Indonesian migrant workers.

 

         How did we conduct this participant-observation? Indonesians tend to gather in Victoria Park on Sundays. So we had 2 Sundays where we spent six hours on the first one and then 8 hours on the second one. Then a 3rd Sunday was a bit casual, spent another 6 hours but what mostly came out this 3rd Sunday was the results of the mini-survey to help contextualize our difficulty with online ethnography. In these Sundays we would share and eat together, dance, engage in casual conversation which not only helped to build rapport but also helped to shed light in some of the things we discuss in our report as well as help us to modify our intended interview questions. On one of the Sundays, one of us later went to join a parade which was also done by mostly lesbian migrant workers and through joining this parade we also got some direction as to the way to conduct our online ethnography. The parade was long but we joined for the last 2 hours. The data is discussed in other parts of this report.

bottom of page