To conduct ethnographic research, ethnographers can and do employ a number of different methods and techniques such as participant-observation, interviews, focus group, and maps and charts.36At the stage of designing my ethnographic research, I planned interviews and focus group as the major methods. However, considering the sensitivity of my research topic, and some Filipino cultural values such as hiya or shame, I realized in my first focus group that it was not appropriate for me to collect personal information, experience, and story about powerlessness in the setting of a group discussion. Hence, for this study, I mainly chose to employ individual interviews as the major key method. This was the only thing that necessitated me to make a change. Murchison states, “Interviews and conversations are almost certainly a key component of a research design for historical recollections or personal perspectives.”37In other words, I collected data and gained insights about a sense of powerlessness of everyday people in the Philippines, through firsthand interviews and interactions with Filipino American Protestants who were born and raised in the Philippines and then immigrated to the United States.

Generally speaking, there are two types of interview: the formal and the informal.38For the informal interview, I attended a church retreat in order to build relationships with my informants, and also had meals with some key informants to help talk about their own stories in more flexible and comfortable settings. It was easy for me to start a conversation with my informants because Filipinos are well known as people who are hospitable, friendly, outgoing, and easy to befriend. I was confident that face-to-face personal interviews and conversations were the most effective way for me to collect data. Such methods operated well within Filipino contexts due to their strong “smooth interpersonal relations” (SIR). The formal interview may be either structured or unstructured. The structured interview “makes use of a prepared interview schedule, a series of questions to which the researcher requires specific answers.”39In an unstructured interview, it is usually best to “begin with the broadest, most open-ended questions, then fill in with specifics as one’s own knowledge of the topic grows.”40

For conducting my ethnographic interviews, 31participants were chosen out of two different Filipino American Churches in Texas (16participants in Dallas, and 15in Houston) with consideration given to gender and age. It is necessary to collect diverse voices regarding the research topics. By gender, 16women and 15men participated in this research. By age, they consisted of 1person in the 30s, 10in the 40s, 12in the 50s, 6in the 60s, and 2in the 70s. Most of my respondents were older because the majority of them had come to the United States during the earlier time of the fourth phase (from 1965to 2000s) of Filipino immigration to the States. See chapter 5for further information about this.

Considering the seriousness of the topic, I began most interviews with informal questions in casual conversation about their life story and immigration history, such as “How long have you stayed in the United States?” and “Why did you choose Texas as your destination?” Then, I slowly moved into combined unstructured and structured interviews with three main questions in addition to four or five sub-questions for clarifying and specifying their answers. Most of the questions make up a series of open-ended questions related to power: “What is the first impression when you hear the word power?” “What gives power to people?” “Who has power in your church?”

One of the primary goals of ethnography is “to access insiders’ perspectives.”41In other words, it is to see and understand the research topic through the eyes of the people being studied. In conversation and interviews, I was able to gain explicit knowledge, obtain detailed explanations and rationales as well as background information, and then ask for clarification or follow up on things observed or explained previously.42In this sense, “interviews were not just one-way interrogations, but interactions and conversations” which I was part of.43Furthermore, interviews were not only collecting the details of data, but also the process of testing the accuracy of details from multiple sources such as observations, and reading materials (books and articles). All formal interviews were recorded and later transcribed in full detail. At the same time, I took cursory notes on paper that would later be transcribed and highlighted in greater detail.

Analytical Framework

Once the data and insights from the interviews were collected, I analyzed them through four steps of Critical Contextualization: Phenomenological Analysis, Ontological Reflection, Critical Evaluation, and Missional Transformation.

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