Page 79 - PAPER PRESENTATION 2ND

PAPER PRESENTATION 2019

AcTiviTy IDENTIFYING PARTS OF RESEARCH METHODS
1

Pair work. With your partner, identify parts of the following research methods that

show research design, research instruments, participants, procedures, and data
analysis by underlining them. Example is provided for you.

This qualitative study was based on the analysis on in-depth Research
interviews conducted in 2002-2003 with second generation Design
Ethiopians living in Washington, D.C. and its inner suburbs in
Virginia and Maryland. In total, twelve women and eight men were
interviewed. The respondents ranged in age from eighteen to
twenty-seven years at the time of the interviews. With the exception
of one Muslim, all those interviewed reported their religion as
Christian, mostly Orthodox. Four of the respondents were high
school students, nine were undergraduates at local colleges or
universities, and seven had full-time jobs. Most of the students
worked part-time while they pursued their studies.
To explore the participants’ ethnic and racial identities as
immigrants, both closed-ended and open-ended questions were
employed. Interviewees were asked open- ended questions related
age, race, ethnicity, education, and length of stay in the United
States. The close-ended questions, on the other hand, focused on
interviewee’s racial and ethnic identification. They were asked about
their preferred form of self-identification, whether there were
situations in which they adopted nomenclatures different from the
ones they originally gave, and the reasons for their varying answers.
Inquiries about friendship and dating were used to arrive at a better
understanding of interactions with people from other races and
ethnicities, as well as latent preferences and prejudices. When
respondents offered "Ethiopian" or "Ethiopian American" as a
principal identifier, they were asked why this categorization was
important to them.
To identify the respondents of this study, I initially used
referrals from acquaintances in the Ethiopian community in the
Washington area. I then used the technique of "snowballing" to
contact other respondents. Face-to-face and telephone conversation
were mostly utilized to elicit their responses towards the questions.
The interviews took 60-90 minutes to complete. Face-to-face
interviews were tape- recorded and later transcribed, whereas
responses to phone interviews were recorded in shorthand. Drawing
on these in-depth interviews with young immigrants of Ethiopian
descent, ways in which they negotiate their identities in varied
settings and at different periods in their lives could be revealed by
analyzing several themes in accordance with their racial and ethnic
identification.

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