Abstract
This study is based on a total of 11months of research which I conducted in Cape Town on recurrent visits between January 2015 and December 2017. During my time in the field and at home in Hamburg I applied different qualitative and quantitative methods to collect and analyse my data and realigned my research design and outlook with every step of my research. In this chapter I will give a detailed description of my field site, of why I chose Cape Town and the implications of fieldwork in an urban setting, followed by an overview of my research periods.
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Notes
- 1.
Johannesburg has around 4,4 Million inhabitants and Cape Town around 3,7 Million (SAJBD 2016).
- 2.
See also the debate on the length of field research between Marcus and Okely (2007).
- 3.
This questionaire is available as appendix B in the electronic supplemantary material.
- 4.
Day zero was repeatedly moved and then postponed indefinitely in 2018.
- 5.
Unfortunately, I did not systematically collect data on my interlocutor’s marital and family status and on the number and age of their children.
- 6.
In South Africa, where most city centres, except for Cape Town, were not residential areas for most of the time, most citizens live on the outskirts, either in townships, or more affluent suburbs further away from the centre. This might be the reason, why neighbourhoods, district, but also residential areas connected to but remote from the centre, are all called suburbs interchangeably.
- 7.
They were also above an age of 60 which was another reason for not interviewing them, because I was looking for more young informants to fill gaps in this age bracket.
- 8.
I changed the question “who would you ask when in need of financial support?” to “who would you ask for advice?” because in the first interviews the first question did not generate names.
- 9.
For a discussion on computerised interview versus paper-based, see Herz, Andreas/Gamper, Markus (2011): 57–88. espec.: 77 ff.
- 10.
I decided to approach my interlocutors with the term giving or voluntary giving, which includes different modes and descriptions of giving, e.g. charity, philanthropy and donations. I chose this term based on the survey „Patterns of Giving in South Africa“, conducted by Everatt/Habib/Maharaj/Nyar (2005), who used the all- encompassing term giving. Although my addition voluntary contradicts most scholarship on gift giving, I used it to specify what I was talking about. I did not want to use the phrase charitable giving, which I use throughout this study, in the interviews because I observed the term charity to be negatively connotated in public discourse.
- 11.
Although my focus on gender does not equal that on charitable giving and belonging, it is taxonomically on the same level as the other two dimensions.
- 12.
On VennMaker see Gamper, Markus/Kronenwett, Michael/Schönhuth, Michael (2012).
- 13.
Waltraud Kokot notices that in the academic field of diaspora and transnationalism, most authors themselves have „Erfahrungen mit den komplexen diasporischen Identitätsstrukturen“ connected to their research (Kokot 2002: 95).
- 14.
When Cape Town social anthropologist kindly gave me a ride to my next interview, she also gave me the advice to rather study Germans in South Africa, assuming that my entry as a German into that community would be easier and my insights more valuable.
- 15.
Additionally, I have made the experience that while the interest in my Jewish or non-Jewish identity was the same in South Africa and Germany. South Africans tended to ask directly, while among Germans I encountered an additional awkwardness around talking about Jews and a sort of anxiousness of using the wrong words or posing the wrong questions.
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Denk, L. (2023). Methods and Research Design. In: Jubuntu . J.B. Metzler, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66887-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66887-0_3
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