Day 7

Today was a continuation of the transcribing work I started yesterday on the first FGD from SAGE. It isn't proving to be as easy as I thought it would be - in fact it's not easy at all - but I must persevere. I have to admit that while I want to do a "perfect" job of transcribing and get every translation right (from Chinese to English), I'm beginning to realise that to do so is exceedingly difficult for a few reasons.

Firstly being able to encapsulate the meaning of certain Chinese words in English is almost impossible - I often have to translate a single Chinese word into two or more English words just to fully express what the speaker was attempting to say, and even then it feels at times like specific nuances are lacking. Secondly, there is the issue of not being able to hear the speakers properly, due to their voices being muffled, mumbling, and of course when the voices overlap (which happens unfortunately very often). It becomes literally impossible to pick apart what anyone is saying, at which case I have to unfortunately depend on my notes, which are unfortunately not necessarily 100% word-for-word of what the participants said.

Lastly, at times it feels a lot simpler to simply paraphrase what they are saying, or ignore the lengthy examples or irrelevant parts of the conversations. However I am not sure how ethical that would be in the scale of a proper research project. For now I am doing that due to time constraints and trying to suss out the important information from the chatter. I am aware though that for full on research projects this is probably not advisable - makes me wonder how researchers actually accomplish that, what with so many interviews and focus groups they would have to transcribe during a limited period, and particularly if there are language and audio clarity issues like there are in my case.

Aside from transcribing, I'm in the middle of reading a lengthy research article on Chinese belief systems - about whether local Singaporean Chinese are more inclined to use and believe in the Western models of psychotherapy etc. or if they are more inclined towards indigenous models, such as feng shui and dang ki. They include a lot of variables such as educational background, whether they are therapists/clients/non-clients (of counselling), socio-economic status, religion, and so on. While I have yet to finish the article, I'm beginning to think if this study should be replicated amongst the minority ethnic groups as well, as I am sure that the Indians and the Malays have their own indigenous beliefs which could be preferred to the Western psychotherapeutic models as well. If this is the case I wonder if the findings from such findings would be similar to those from this particular study.