This study has as its objective the land titling process that still is ongoing in PT and the value of a formal title for the inhabitants of the village. How has this land titling process affected the living conditions of the villagers and what kind of benefits and disadvantages can be said to arrive from such a process? In this regard we have chosen to divide the findings into three sections:
4.0 Methodology
This report is a result of a small scale fieldwork conducted in the Prachea Thom village from the 19th to the 30th of April 2006. The research was conducted by NPA staff researcher So Sucheat and Terje Smedsrud, a master degree student of Human Geography at the University of Oslo.
The research was done by conducting qualitative semi-structured interviews. The duration of the interviews was mostly between 1 ½ - 3 hours, with the interviews with members of the village authorities being somewhat longer. There were conduced a total of 28 interviews. Among these were 17 villagers, 9 members of the village authorities, including village and VDC chief and two members from the commune council. Also it was supposed to be conducted an interview at the district office of land management, but this didn’t get realised.
The questionnaires were mainly differentiated between the village authorities and the regular villagers, with the ones directed at the authorities having more open ended questions and thereby also the difference in time. The village authorities were asked mainly to comment on the land titling process and their opinions about issues regarding the villagers, but with a more general view. The villagers were asked to comment on their own experiences and their opinions about the situation in the area they were residing. Some of the cluster chiefs were however given the same questions as the other villagers. Of the villagers there were done interviews with both original beneficiaries in the village and also by inhabitants that had arrived at a later point. The selection of the informants has been done on a semi-randomly basis. The informants except the village authorities were picked on the spot when driving through the village. However we had some criteria’s as to the types of informants we wanted to get in touch with. These included as mentioned original beneficiaries and families who had acquired their land through buying and debt of others. Also a selection of women and men were selected and most clusters are represented in the study as we tried to take a different one each day.
Because of the time limit set for the research which had to be conducted in no more than two weeks, the inquiry could not be both statistically relevant and also provide in depth information. In order to reach the objectives of the research it seemed most appropriate to conduct semi-structured interviews for getting more in-depth information. The informants were anyway asked to give their opinions on the area they were living in. This way it was thought that it could maybe be obtained some indications on the extent of the issues we were interested in exploring as well. They provide however no statistically valid data.
The interviews were conducted with one asking the initial question and the other as a translator and the one who could ask for more specific details in the stories of the informants. Even if we crosschecked our understandings of the stories we heard there are always possibilities for mistakes in the translation and interpreting of the stories both from informant to researcher and between the researchers. Also it was not uncommon to meet inconsistency in the answers given. But for most part we could after some follow-up questions come down to what we thought was the most plausible answer in agreement with the informant.
The fact that we were representing NPA can also have been an interfering factor on the part of the informants. Since people in large part had been given the land by NPA and with regards to the questions of the regulations that was perceived to have been set up by NPA, people might have reacted differently to some of the questions compared to if the interviewers had been representing an organisation which hadn’t been involved in the resettlement site before.
Because of the nature of the family and living conditions to the people of Prachea Thom the interviews were seldom conducted with the original informant only. Often there were relatives and neighbours also present and sometimes there could at different stages in the interview be over ten people present. This also can have affected the informant’s willingness to respond to some of the questions, especially the more sensitive ones. However, this could also be a strength in some situations were the main respondent could not remember or we wanted more general information from a larger area. We think that anyway the data in our research is reliable, but for a small research like this with limited respondents they only speak for themselves and the observations of more general character (other than themselves) can only be taken as their opinions but still can give some indication about the extend of a certain phenomenon seemed in the context of others.
- The land titling process: how has the process developed and what is the involved actors’ perception of it?
- The value of the formal title for the inhabitants of the village: what is the perception of the villagers on the value and use of a formal title?
- Land transferring in the village: how is people’s ownership of the land developing? Can there be seen a certain pattern of development in the village? And have the land titling process affected the living conditions of the inhabitants in any significant way?
4.0 Methodology
This report is a result of a small scale fieldwork conducted in the Prachea Thom village from the 19th to the 30th of April 2006. The research was conducted by NPA staff researcher So Sucheat and Terje Smedsrud, a master degree student of Human Geography at the University of Oslo.
The research was done by conducting qualitative semi-structured interviews. The duration of the interviews was mostly between 1 ½ - 3 hours, with the interviews with members of the village authorities being somewhat longer. There were conduced a total of 28 interviews. Among these were 17 villagers, 9 members of the village authorities, including village and VDC chief and two members from the commune council. Also it was supposed to be conducted an interview at the district office of land management, but this didn’t get realised.
The questionnaires were mainly differentiated between the village authorities and the regular villagers, with the ones directed at the authorities having more open ended questions and thereby also the difference in time. The village authorities were asked mainly to comment on the land titling process and their opinions about issues regarding the villagers, but with a more general view. The villagers were asked to comment on their own experiences and their opinions about the situation in the area they were residing. Some of the cluster chiefs were however given the same questions as the other villagers. Of the villagers there were done interviews with both original beneficiaries in the village and also by inhabitants that had arrived at a later point. The selection of the informants has been done on a semi-randomly basis. The informants except the village authorities were picked on the spot when driving through the village. However we had some criteria’s as to the types of informants we wanted to get in touch with. These included as mentioned original beneficiaries and families who had acquired their land through buying and debt of others. Also a selection of women and men were selected and most clusters are represented in the study as we tried to take a different one each day.
Because of the time limit set for the research which had to be conducted in no more than two weeks, the inquiry could not be both statistically relevant and also provide in depth information. In order to reach the objectives of the research it seemed most appropriate to conduct semi-structured interviews for getting more in-depth information. The informants were anyway asked to give their opinions on the area they were living in. This way it was thought that it could maybe be obtained some indications on the extent of the issues we were interested in exploring as well. They provide however no statistically valid data.
The interviews were conducted with one asking the initial question and the other as a translator and the one who could ask for more specific details in the stories of the informants. Even if we crosschecked our understandings of the stories we heard there are always possibilities for mistakes in the translation and interpreting of the stories both from informant to researcher and between the researchers. Also it was not uncommon to meet inconsistency in the answers given. But for most part we could after some follow-up questions come down to what we thought was the most plausible answer in agreement with the informant.
The fact that we were representing NPA can also have been an interfering factor on the part of the informants. Since people in large part had been given the land by NPA and with regards to the questions of the regulations that was perceived to have been set up by NPA, people might have reacted differently to some of the questions compared to if the interviewers had been representing an organisation which hadn’t been involved in the resettlement site before.
Because of the nature of the family and living conditions to the people of Prachea Thom the interviews were seldom conducted with the original informant only. Often there were relatives and neighbours also present and sometimes there could at different stages in the interview be over ten people present. This also can have affected the informant’s willingness to respond to some of the questions, especially the more sensitive ones. However, this could also be a strength in some situations were the main respondent could not remember or we wanted more general information from a larger area. We think that anyway the data in our research is reliable, but for a small research like this with limited respondents they only speak for themselves and the observations of more general character (other than themselves) can only be taken as their opinions but still can give some indication about the extend of a certain phenomenon seemed in the context of others.