Project Question. Monday, January 30, 2011

On Friday, we had a class discussion about each of our individual project questions and everything that we were thinking regarding that.
I was really intrigued by all of the different ideas that everybody had and the thought that they had put into it. Even though it is not that far into the semester, I think that most of us have a good idea of what we want to do while in the field. Yet, even when we have these good ideas or thoughts, it is difficult to formulate a question that can be concise and specifically target our objectives.
I started out with "Women Self-Perception in the village of Chavadi, Tamil Nadu, India". I want to be able to see how women feel about themselves there. Not necessarily with self-esteem, but mostly with their inward values and how they view themselves in society. More specifically, in their own village, then in their state and region of South India and eventually in the nation of India.
Our facilitator, Margaret made an interesting suggestion that got me thinking.
I am planning to interview many different women. I want to focus on three age groups so that I can get all of those different perspectives. So, I want to interview young teenage girls who are unmarried but look forward to it, middle aged women who have young children, and then older women who have been married for a long time.
Margaret brought up the point that I need to decide whether this will be an ethnographic study or not. If I do choose it to be an ethnographic observation, I would choose a smaller number of women to interview and then I would make the observations thorough and would make sure to really concentrate my studies on the small group of women.
I liked this idea because I want to take more of an anthropological approach to the study. I obviously want to have some general questions asked, like "how do you perceive yourself in our family?" but then I also want to dig deeper into the culture and ask more specific questions like "what is the most important principle in your opinion, that you can teach your children?". This answer is going to vary with age and with experience, so I would like to narrow it down to a fewer number of women, since I will not be able to make these answers seem "global" and a collective view of ALL of the women in Chavadi.
I am interested in observing the culture and seeing how things are done, as well as what they tell me. I might change my question to something like "What are the perspectives of rural village women living in Chavadi, Tamil Nadu, India". This isn't the final title, but I want to make this title be the foundation of what I will be doing later on.