Monday, May 21, 2007
I went back and read over the last sections of Murder in Amsterdam, and what I found the most intriguing was the discussion of Mohammed's life and motivation to kill Van Gogh. Mohammed claims that he kills out of faith, not for personal reasons, yet when old friends talked about him, they stated that he never really went to mosque, he was a leftist and he watched Belgian TV instead of from Al Jazeera and Moroccan TV. He claimed that he didn't kill Van Gogh because he was Dutch, and that he was not at all motivated by race, yet Buruma presents accounts of Mohommad becoming angry and violent as a result of what he claimed were "racist" acts. Many of these were simply acts in which traditional Islamic customs such as building a desirable kitchen where women could go in and out unseen were not honored by the Dutch, and this angered Mohommad for some reason even though he wasn't actively practicing. I just found the contradiction between how Mohammed explained his actions and his everyday behavior interesting.
Interview
Setting: Cafe on Roosevelt; busy Sunday morning and couples and families are arriving for breakfast
Interviewee:
~Age: 55
~Sex: Male
~Relationship: He is my boss's husband who I have met briefly but I know that he moved to the US from Iran when he was in college so he may have some valuable insight into our topic.
Q: Good morning, thank you for meeting with us!
A: Of course, nice to see you again.
Q: Shall we get started?
A: Go for it
Q: Alright, well we were wondering if you could just tell us a little about your experience moving to the states.
A: Well I left Iran in 1979 to come here for college- I was going to the UW. My parents were staying back home, so I had to live in the dorms, I was in McMahon. So anyway, I spoke English already so I didn't have a terribly hard time communicating. I changed my name because I was told that mine would be hard for people to say, so within a week of being here, I had a new name and a social security number.
Q: Wow, so were you also able to get health insurance right away, or was it difficult?
A: Oh, so easy, all you need is a SSN and pay your bills and they don't care who you are. It's a lot different here than in other countries because our health care isn't socialized, and the government doesn't have to pay for your care, so pretty much everyone can get [care].
Q: That's a good point. So I haven't done too much traveling and neither Jana or I have never really done this kind of research into health care issues, but since you travel a lot for your job, how do you think other country's health care systems compare to that of the US?
A: Well, I don't know that you could ever really compare two systems because you will always look at it from your own perspective and draw conclusions about human rights and other issues when the difference isn't really a "care" issue it is simply a reflection of different outlooks on health care from country to country. For example, many human rights groups here in the states attack "inhumane" practices in Chinese hospitals because after a certain number of visits or a certain severity of condition, doctors can administer drugs that will kill these patients. Now you may look at this as being cruel and unusual coming from the US, yet in China, health care is free to individuals, but because of this, hospitals can't afford to keep treating the same person over and over again, and it is seen as more kind to give them something to stop the suffering than to let them die in pain.
Q: So you think it's dangerous to compare health care systems then?
A: Well in a way yes, I would say it is dangerous because to many moral issues are tied up in health care, and so you can't actually understand the inner workings of the system until you understand the religious and cultural factors on which it was built, and that could take a lifetime. If you were to study it in any other way, I believe you would simply be drawing false conclusions.
Q: That's very good advice, thank you.
A: Hopefully I'm not being to blunt.
Q: Not at all. You have been incredibly informative, and I don't think we have any more questions at this point, but would it be possible to meet with you again as our project progresses and we have new questions?
A: Of course, you have my number, just give me a call and I'd be happy to help.
In Summary: We wanted to make the interview a little more comfortable for all of us so we planned on approaching it as a conversation instead of a structured question answer session. Going into the interview we wanted to find out what obstacles/troubles immigrants face when entering the country and trying to get health care, but we didn't anticipate there being NO problems, so we were curious to just simply learn about what our interviewee had to say about analyzing health care systems, which was very helpful. I guess our next step is to devise a way to conduct our research in a way that does not impose our own morals and understandings of what is right on a world that we don't understand.
Interviewee:
~Age: 55
~Sex: Male
~Relationship: He is my boss's husband who I have met briefly but I know that he moved to the US from Iran when he was in college so he may have some valuable insight into our topic.
Q: Good morning, thank you for meeting with us!
A: Of course, nice to see you again.
Q: Shall we get started?
A: Go for it
Q: Alright, well we were wondering if you could just tell us a little about your experience moving to the states.
A: Well I left Iran in 1979 to come here for college- I was going to the UW. My parents were staying back home, so I had to live in the dorms, I was in McMahon. So anyway, I spoke English already so I didn't have a terribly hard time communicating. I changed my name because I was told that mine would be hard for people to say, so within a week of being here, I had a new name and a social security number.
Q: Wow, so were you also able to get health insurance right away, or was it difficult?
A: Oh, so easy, all you need is a SSN and pay your bills and they don't care who you are. It's a lot different here than in other countries because our health care isn't socialized, and the government doesn't have to pay for your care, so pretty much everyone can get [care].
Q: That's a good point. So I haven't done too much traveling and neither Jana or I have never really done this kind of research into health care issues, but since you travel a lot for your job, how do you think other country's health care systems compare to that of the US?
A: Well, I don't know that you could ever really compare two systems because you will always look at it from your own perspective and draw conclusions about human rights and other issues when the difference isn't really a "care" issue it is simply a reflection of different outlooks on health care from country to country. For example, many human rights groups here in the states attack "inhumane" practices in Chinese hospitals because after a certain number of visits or a certain severity of condition, doctors can administer drugs that will kill these patients. Now you may look at this as being cruel and unusual coming from the US, yet in China, health care is free to individuals, but because of this, hospitals can't afford to keep treating the same person over and over again, and it is seen as more kind to give them something to stop the suffering than to let them die in pain.
Q: So you think it's dangerous to compare health care systems then?
A: Well in a way yes, I would say it is dangerous because to many moral issues are tied up in health care, and so you can't actually understand the inner workings of the system until you understand the religious and cultural factors on which it was built, and that could take a lifetime. If you were to study it in any other way, I believe you would simply be drawing false conclusions.
Q: That's very good advice, thank you.
A: Hopefully I'm not being to blunt.
Q: Not at all. You have been incredibly informative, and I don't think we have any more questions at this point, but would it be possible to meet with you again as our project progresses and we have new questions?
A: Of course, you have my number, just give me a call and I'd be happy to help.
In Summary: We wanted to make the interview a little more comfortable for all of us so we planned on approaching it as a conversation instead of a structured question answer session. Going into the interview we wanted to find out what obstacles/troubles immigrants face when entering the country and trying to get health care, but we didn't anticipate there being NO problems, so we were curious to just simply learn about what our interviewee had to say about analyzing health care systems, which was very helpful. I guess our next step is to devise a way to conduct our research in a way that does not impose our own morals and understandings of what is right on a world that we don't understand.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Ethnography
Since our group is looking at health care for immigrants, we are anticipating a lot of difficulty surrounding the interviewing process, so we are trying to decide if interviews would be the most effective way of gathering information or if surveys and more of a focus on information availability for immigrants is the way to go. The main problems we anticipate are:
1. Finding Doctors to interview in the month of August. After talking to the health care group from last year's program we learned that in August pretty much everyone is on vacation, including doctors, and they had a hard time contacting anyone. If we cannot contact any health care providers, where should we turn for information?
2. Finding immigrants to interview. We are really excited about our research topic, but we still aren't sure how to go about contacting immigrants who will be willing to answer questions that we have because obviously we just can't walk up to any non-dutch speaking individual and ask them if they are immigrants. We were thinking about visiting cultural centers to find possible sources but we don't know where those are located in the city or how appropriate it would be for us to go there and try and ask such sensitive questions.
3. The third big problem kind of ties into the others, and that is how to formulate appropriate questions that can provide us with meaningful information/incite.
1. Finding Doctors to interview in the month of August. After talking to the health care group from last year's program we learned that in August pretty much everyone is on vacation, including doctors, and they had a hard time contacting anyone. If we cannot contact any health care providers, where should we turn for information?
2. Finding immigrants to interview. We are really excited about our research topic, but we still aren't sure how to go about contacting immigrants who will be willing to answer questions that we have because obviously we just can't walk up to any non-dutch speaking individual and ask them if they are immigrants. We were thinking about visiting cultural centers to find possible sources but we don't know where those are located in the city or how appropriate it would be for us to go there and try and ask such sensitive questions.
3. The third big problem kind of ties into the others, and that is how to formulate appropriate questions that can provide us with meaningful information/incite.
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
What is e-research?
I have been having a lot of trouble understanding the e-research component of this class mostly because I don't know what is meant by "e-research". As we touched on a tiny bit in class on Monday, I think of research as a process of using knowledge and resources in a way that generates new knowledge, furthering our understanding of a field and/or phenomena. In this context I would say that e-research involves the use and study of the internet as part of the generation of new knowledge of something offline. However, e-research could be research focused on the study of the internet to form new knowledge of something online. I may be completely off on both of these guesses, but that is my best understanding of e-research so far.
As far as utilizing e-research in our research project, I expect that we will look for online manifestations of our topic. We are looking into the accessibility, affordability, and quality of health care services for immigrants, so in conducting e-research, we could look for clues on Health care provider websites such as the availability of varied language options, and whether or not there are links to help pages for immigrants. We also plan to look into issues such as euthanasia and how this option is presented to immigrant populations. We can employ similar methods as above in order to see if information about euthanasia is made available to immigrants and if so, if it is portrayed differently than it is to the native population.
As far as utilizing e-research in our research project, I expect that we will look for online manifestations of our topic. We are looking into the accessibility, affordability, and quality of health care services for immigrants, so in conducting e-research, we could look for clues on Health care provider websites such as the availability of varied language options, and whether or not there are links to help pages for immigrants. We also plan to look into issues such as euthanasia and how this option is presented to immigrant populations. We can employ similar methods as above in order to see if information about euthanasia is made available to immigrants and if so, if it is portrayed differently than it is to the native population.
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