First Reflections on Research Questions

·       What kind of topics are you interested in researching?

·      I am interested in learning about how specific asylum policies impact refugees’ experiences of settlement in different contexts

·      I am also interested in learning about how government migration policies used to ‘develop’ underpopulated towns impact existing communities.

·       What initial research questions might be starting to emerge for you?

·      How do specific policies impact refugees’ settlement experiences?

·      How do specific migration policies impact existing communities?

·       What are you interested in researching - people, groups, communities, documents, images, organisations?

·      Communities and people but from a broad, comparative perspective

·       Do you have an initial ideas for the kinds of methods that might help you to gather useful knowledge in your area of interest?

·      Focus groups, interviews, surveys (and data analysis) social networks analysis

·       What initial questions do you have about those methods? What don't you understand yet?

·      At what point do I begin to use quantitative data analysis? How much research data do I need before this becomes useful? How do I translate data from qualitative methods into quantitative analysis?

·       Do you perceive any potential challenges in your initial ideas: either practical challenges, such as gaining access to the area you want to research, or the time it might take to gather data; or conceptual challenges; such as how the method you are interested in can produce 'facts', 'truths', or 'valuable knowledge' in your chosen area?

1.    Yes, for both projects I would need to gain access to people’s homes and community sites, and it is probably difficult to do this without an existing social network

2.    Focus groups and face to face interviews are time consuming; could I use surveys to speed up the process in order to gain lots of information? Why would people take the time to answer a survey?

3.    Ultimately, I want to know what policies are more or less ‘successful’; which ones create difficult circumstances for migrants and host communities (and why) and which ones promote opportunities and good social relations in communities (and why) – so I am not sure how to make a quantitatively robust project based on this interest