Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 3.2
Food consumption recall survey, Rio Muni, Equatorial Guinea.
Photo © Nöelle Kümpel.
security but in order to avoid inconveniencing and potentially endangering your
colleagues and hosts. They remain answerable for your behaviour after you have
gone, and you can put them in a great deal of difficulty through careless behaviour,
either in terms of health and safety or in terms of alienating or offending people.
You will almost certainly also be required by your organisation to fill in a risk assess-
ment form before you set out for your fieldwork, but if not you should do one
anyway (Winser 2004).
You also need a full understanding in advance of the
political and cultural sen-
sitivities
that may be involved in your work, and to have acted to minimise these.
You will have to develop appropriate relationships not only with the people from
whom you are collecting data, but also with your local colleagues, partner organi-
sations and officials in the relevant Ministries. This takes time and sensitivity, par-
ticularly as each of these interest groups will have different expectations of your
research, which may not align completely with yours. Don't underestimate the
importance of the differences in culture and attitude that exist between you and
others, and be sure to reflect upon your own behaviour and how you can change it
to ensure that you are viewed positively. You need actively to
manage your rela-
tionships
with all the people you interact with, so that you have reasonable expec-
tations of each other's part in the research. We come back to these themes in
Section 7.2. All these issues are also present for biological studies (Chapter 2),
despite there being fewer direct interactions with local people.
