Difficulties encountered

Rewinding the timeline for this project, the data collection is completed from the interviews but it wasn’t easy to get the participants/interviewees.

At the beginning of the project, the criteria of the participants have been listed by Prof Asha and the teaching assistants. It may seem that it was easy because the teaching team has narrowed down the specific population for us to approach and conduct the interview but it wasn’t at all. Our group has also decided to put ex-offenders as one of the requirements on top of the low-income criteria. This funnels down to an even smaller group of population. The pool of participants was restricted as it was a very targeted and specific group of people

We started off by approaching the different organizations including The Ashram, The Hiding Place, The Turning Point, Breakthrough Mission, The Helping Hand, Green Haven, Pertapis Halfway House and Jamiyah by contacting them via email and followed up with a call. After 2 weeks or so, we received responses from the following organizations and managed to get The Ashram and The Hiding Place to work with us.

One of our group members, Jermaine, is related to the management staff from The Hiding Place. We were lucky to have her relative who helped us make prior arrangements and ensured that the job gets done. The interviews conducted at The Hiding Place went smoothly. Nonetheless, the first problem emerged, when we realized that residents living at Ashram will only be free after 630pm. Our team is willing to accommodate as discussed initially during our meeting at the Ashram between our group members and the organization representatives. We sent a follow-up email after the meeting to keep things in check but there was slow response from the other side. We tried to call the representative to arrange a preferable timing for the interview with the residents. However, there was a communication breakdown at a point of time. It was worrying for our team as we have to get a total of five interviews done to meet the deadline and carry on with the next part of the project. Thankfully, the Ashram representative has finally dropped us a text to arrange two interviews with the residents the next day at 7pm. As it was very last minute and at a late timing, so only two of our group members, Xin Han and Max were available to go ahead and conduct the interviews.

The next problem encountered was unable to get the interview conducted even though it was agreed to in the first place. Valerie, one of our group member, managed to link up with a lady who was willing to share on her husband’s behalf (who fit our interview criteria). However, the response from that lady was difficult as she did not reply Valerie for a period of time, since texting was their main mode of communication. Eventually, we decided to send her a follow-up message and she did reply saying that she had some health issues and was away for a while. We concluded that the lady was unable to commit to the interview due to her health problems and we truly understand the situation.

We realized it was not easy to find a common time between our interviewees and our group members. We have to factor in response time for the organizations and potential interviewees to get back to us. Also, we have to accommodate to their requests since they are doing us a favour by helping us in our project. Our group has learnt to be flexible and open-minded at times, and look for alternate sources quickly to achieve the same end goal.