GRSS Funding Received!

17 April 2008

Dear Monkey,

I am pleased to inform you that your application to the above scheme has been approved with the following budgetary allocations:

Overseas Travel - $3000

The amount approved is the maximum limit for Masters student.

Yay hurray! I can start my fieldwork in peace now. However I am still hoping my supplementary funding will come in as this is seriously not enough. What more I am now recruiting field assistants.

So far, I have gotten several geography undergrads who are very keen and I'm so glad. 2 confirmed. 2 more not. 1 nakedhermitcrab keen on coming as well. We'll see how this goes. Glad I don't have to be up in the north alone.

Now I just need to get enough people for the survey in Singapore. A teacher friend of mine in NJC said the research sounds interesting and will send it to the students who need CIP project. Let's hope somebody respond favorably!

On other news, I need to seriously get in touch with the vehicle person in Cameron and hopefully Mr Chua will confirm with my query for June accommodations favorably.

I am actually disturbed by something in the funding letter but cannot write about it.

Methodology Ideas

Yesterday we got word that a new PhD student from Royal Holloway is come and while reading up on her, I found that she's using an unique methodology of getting her respondents to take photos. This technique is quite commonly used for landscape perception or any kind of perception study in tourism and other landscape studies. She's using it for migration but looking at perception of what is important to the respondent. ok, very interest.

How do I incorporate something like that for my project? What is a way to truly understand how a farmer thinks? No point asking him to take picture. I can't do an ethnographic and be the farmer either. There hopefully will not be any calamity when I am doing my research, for their sake.

So I thought ok maybe I should come up with a scenario and ask how all of them would react to this scenario. but how's that different from just asking them questions? The scenario must be very special. and several things happening at the same time. So then they have to rank which one they will address first. Maybe draw in a mindmap and show them and ask them to circle the one they would address first. Followed by... etc

Ok so now how do I find out if other people have used similar methods?