My PhD Field Work At Zanzibar
My PhD Field Work At Zanzibar My PhD on globalisation in higher education provided an exciting field trip to Zanzibar in January 2016. My research looks at how globalisation has impacted on an emerging university in the developing world. I interviewed the staff at the State University of Zanzibar (SUZA). It gave me two lessons. First, I am a Malaysian student of Chinese descent studying in New Zealand, and the trip widened my cultural horizon on East Africa. Second, I learnt the skills of data collection as a social scientist and it is these that I am sharing in this blog post. In my field trip, I learned to distinguish formal data, such as interviews, from my informal data, such as my field notes. For the former, I conducted semi-structured interviews that were recorded and transcribed. During interviews, I kept notes that highlighted potential key topics for further probing with in-depth questions. By conducting the interviews, I had on-field training on how to bui...