Objectives

The purpose of this chapter is twofold: firstly, it shows how the research was conducted, how data were generated and interpreted, and what research ethics were concerned, so that readers are able to actively engage with the research process and the text. Secondly, it is an attempt to offer an alternative methodological approach to social capital studies, other than the current mainstream quantitative research methods.

As I pointed out in the introductory chapter, the aims of this research, and hence the methodology adopted, are to explore mainland Chinese migrants’ associational life in Hong Kong, and to examine the context, meanings, and motivations which lie behind individuals’ involvement in their ‘communities’. The methodology adopted for this research can thus be described as exploratory in nature, rather than relying on statistical analysis. I was interested in observing the everyday lives of migrants, understanding their formal and informal social networks, inquiring about their accounts of how their decisions on participation were made and the impact it had on them, and producing situational, contextual, and culturally specific knowledge (Wong 2002).

The three specific aims of this research are:

• 1. to evaluate the gap between migrants’ ‘actual’ decision making processes of participation and the neo-institutional design framework for collective action.

• 2. to explore ‘agency-structure’ duality by analysing migrants’ perceptions about the opportunities and constraints of community participation and the degree of agency they brought to bear on different aspects of their lives. It is also an attempt to locate their accounts in a broader social and institutional context and offer a view of structures in which they lived.

• 3. to examine issues of access to, and distribution of, social capital and power relations in communities.

Research questions

Formulating research questions, as Mason (2002) argues, is a device for subsequent analytic focus and guidance for my observation and interviews. The identification of these research questions was generated in the initial planning stage, arising from an initial review of the social capital theory and literature on community participation in order to identify what important issues needed to be explored and where the gaps in knowledge and explanation lay.