Day 11

Trying to complete the transcribing today was extremely frustrating because the participants on the recording were so muffled, I had to keep replaying the same segment for 20 minutes to suss out what the speakers are all saying. This is both due to the quality of the recording itself (it being very echoy and participants not being equidistant from the recorder) and also my earphones - which are not of very good quality. Oddly enough this is making me appreciate my older pair of earphones which had a very clear sound. Although this is not actually related to social work at all.

The good thing is that I am almost done transcribing the first FGD. And slowly I am beginning to appreciate how difficult it is to be a transcriber. The most difficult thing to do is to decipher what the different "layers" of people are saying, because so often there are multiple people speaking at once. Then you need to figure out who is merely chit chatting, who is adding important information to the dialogue, and who is actually answering the question. While it would be much easier for me if we made them take turns or signal before they spoke during the discussion, that would obviously be problematic and create too much cumbersome structure to the FGD, which would affect how much information and opinions are generated during the discussion itself. In fact I feel that the more interactive the group is amongst themselves (without the facilitator intruding) the better, because then they are more likely to bounce ideas off each other, build on those ideas, and there's a greater sense of which opinions are shared amongst the group and which are personal (and possibility minority) opinions.

One thing that I have taken note of though is how my supervisor conducts the FGD. Being able to review the tapes allows me to pay closer attention to the soft skills used (as opposed to during the discussion itself when I am scrambling to take down notes). I realised that it's almost like a "mass counselling" session, in the sense that each participant is attended to individually and allowed to carry on for a bit before being pulled back to the main line of discussion. This happens even if the discussion goes seemingly off-tangent for a while, so that the dicussion still flows but the structure still does remain (but it's more flexible). I also realised that by doing this, we managed to discover quite a few things that we would not have if we had stayed entirely strictly to the few questions given. By following the participants on their train of thought, we managed to discover new points that we initially did not plan on picking up (for example the idea of the lack of awareness and publicity with regards to counselling), and it actually helped us to realise that the focus of the review needed to be tweaked (or at least put on the back-burner while other issues needed to be dealt with first).

This illustrates very clearly to me the gap that often exists between the perceived needs of clients (as dictated by the "experts" in the industry) and the real/felt needs of the service users/clients themselves. So often we assume that because we can see how certain services/programmes are useful/efficacious in dealing with certain issues/problems, that the existence of these issues/problems dictates that we must introduce these programmes/services immediately. However, so often we do this without doing a needs assessment, or having a dialogue with the service users to find out what they feel is the issue that must be dealt with or addressed first. For example, this review was intended to ascertain the effectiveness of counselling and whether service users would use such services - yet what we found out is that they weren't aware of such a service, and that they did not even understand what "counselling" is about. In such a case, the effectiveness of counselling can then be considered irrelevant, or at least not of immediate concern, because the service itself is not even understood. If something is not understood, clients cannot possibly discern how such a service could benefit them, and would thus not utilise the service.

Tying in with my previous post where I discussed thinking about the client as a customer instead, we need to understand what the clients want and what they understand as being what they want before we can provide services that they will utilise and find useful. To tie this in with our position as knowing what could benefit clients without clients realising it at all, what we can do is find out what the clients want (e.g. emotional relief, financial aid, problem resolution), then match it up with specific services/programmes which we know would fit the bill and help them resolve their issues, and explain to the clients how these services will help. We cannot continue to merely prescribe programmes and services and expect clients to be positively affected by them, as people tend to be more resistant towards things they do not understand. We need to begin to think of clients as thinking and opinionated individuals, and "demystify" what the services provided are.