The Most Important Research Tool is the Power of Listening

We were up bright and early ready to tackle today’s interviews.  We met with local tour guides, hotel staff from Sunny Paradise Resort, shopkeepers, village elders and later had an evening meeting with a United Nations World Tourism Organization employee who was traveling through Myanmar surveying the area for tourism.  They were all ages, from all different backgrounds, and from all parts of Myanmar.  I had started to see a pattern develop already but I told myself not to get my hopes up and that it was only one day.  We had over ten long in-depth interviews and were exhausted by the end of the day.

Day #3 followed a similar pattern of long interviews with many different people – all fascinating.  We interviewed handicraft workers, restaurant owners, grocery store vendors, housewives, elders and the head of the village.  Although I cannot verify this for certain, I really felt that each person was genuine, honest, and open to sharing their story with us.

Going to School!  Meeting with a middle school teacher in Ngwe Saung

Being in a classroom surrounded with academics, certainly gives you a feeling of entitlement, power, and poise when it comes to researching.  You use “important” terms such as ‘conducting field research’ and ‘ethnographic interviews’ and it all sounds super exciting and important.  Getting to “THE FIELD” however – really made me realize how unimportant the researcher really is.  Hosana and I sat down with families, individual entrepreneurs, mothers, salesmen, and hopeful high school graduates and I listened.  Sure – you ask a few probing questions.  But your job out there is to LISTEN…and take notes as frantically as possible!  Leaving that classroom under of the label of ‘Researcher’ feels so important, yet when you get to your site, you realize that you have little to do with the success of the research – and the story, work and data lies in the people and their stories.