Innovating Research Tools

Being completely alien to the language is not a very good idea if you are going on a survey. More than the difficulty to explain my questions to them I felt distanced and every intervention was more of an intrusion.
This survey didn’t have any form to fill. People didn’t have to answer questions about how much they earn or how much they spend. So I wanted to use a tool which didn’t make them feel embarrassed and helped them interact with me .

Coming up with the tool
The first thing that struck me after starting this assignment was that what should come first between what tool I choose or what do I want to know. For a while I couldn’t decide that should I first decide that what do I specifically want to know or should I come up with a tool and then see what information comes out of it.
But I realized that probably its neither of them and both of them at the same time.
My approach to find a tool then was to come up with something they can connect to on simplest of levels and something which would help me know much more than the most obvious things that I could get out of their answers.

Tool
I put in front of them 7 pictures – house, car, mobile phone, water, livestock, tools for their work, family. I asked them to put then in order of importance in their life. and I got some really interesting answers. My idea of using these particular images was to understand what are their desires and what they think is more important for them.

House

Car

Mobile

Water

Livestock

Tools

Results
I got pretty interesting results after using these tools.
It was surprising but in most of the cases family was last on the priority list.
Most of the women chose livestock as their first priority.
The men chose house to be the most important for them.
Some two old men said they wanted family prosperity
And very few people opted for some three things out of all the images.







Conclusion:
family being the last on the list can mean two things. One that they don't really consider it that important or the more plausible one that they take it for granted that their family is with them always and they don't need to choose it specially.

The women probably want to work with the livestock which would also mean that they could give more time at home and attend to their children.

I think there is nothing surprising in the men wanting a house. But what is surprising is that none of them wanted the tools to improve their efficiency and toys.

Also there were people who didn't want to have everything , after they made a choice for a certain things they just returned the other things to me. Like this person called 'Tayngalaiya' just wanted a house , family and livestock and he just refused to take anything else saying he doesnt need it.

It was interesting to see that how all these people of different age groups and gender had different priorities inspite of the fact that they all collectively work on the same thing all their life.

Revisiting the exercise:
I feel I should have probably added the “5 WHY” concept to it. Probably asking them why they chose one image over the other would have given me a better insight about what they think and at the same time it would have made them think a little more about what is actually important for them.

Including children in my study would have probably given me a larger picture as I would have known about what changes might come in the village depending on the needs and priorities of the younger generation.

I could have added choices like girl education just to see how practical and open they are about such issues.

by and large it was much deeper and much more informal than the previous one but I think again somewhere I restricted myself just to the tool and didn't try to get more than that.