Engaging place(s)/engaging culture(s)

HGSO Annual Conference : Engaging place(s)/engaging culture(s)
5-8 November, 2008

Faculty of Humanities, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia

The Ninth Humanities Postgraduate Conference
What now are place and culture? Encompassing the themes of engaging place(s)/engaging culture(s), this interdisciplinary conference seeks to open spaces for the presentation and discussion of the full range of topics and methodologies through which Humanities postgraduate students now journey and interrogate worlds and texts: to provoke conversations about local spaces, diasporic spaces, sites of subjectivity, cultural knowledges, place as urban streets, as words on a page, as paint on a canvas; culture as translocal, transnational, multi-national, global, local ...


Conference Abstracts

My Abstract

Issues in applying western research methods to a non-western culture
This paper explores the practical difficulties of applying western research survey methods to close-knit communities in both an urban and rural setting in the small island developing state of the Maldives. The research project is an exploratory study of
information provision and access in this small island developing state, undertaken because an improvement in information service provision is considered necessary for its development. A survey questionnaire was chosen as one research component in the study and covered matters including level of information access, use, and awareness of information sources. The survey included participants from the urban island community, Malé, and a selected rural island community. It was planned to take a purposeful stratified random sample from both communities inviting both a male and a female from every fifth household from both communities with a target recruitment of fifty participants from each community. The practical difficulties in this approach were different in both communities ranging from the physical infrastructure, timing of the survey, and the mindset of the people. The implication of this outcome questions the
applicability of established western research methods to non-western cultures.