Methodology

Open interview/conversation
We developed our interviews during the first week of the study tour, with our main topic in focus: ‘religion, identity and change’. It was a good way to learn how to ask questions and how to get the questions answered. Lack of specific initial knowledge from the students’ side may have limited the total information that we managed to retrieve from the first open interviews and conversations. But at the same time, this freedom made a very wide base of knowledge for the rest of our studies in Indonesia.

Interview guide
We did our m

ain interviews in Flores and Java based on five interview guides with fixed sets of questions, though with room for small adjustments. Each interview guide was specific for religious leaders, teachers, cultural leaders, governmental officials, and ordinary citizens.

The layout of the interview guide was a result of group work and discussion between all the students, our professor Mr. Stein Kristiansen, and Mr. Louis, one of our local guides in Flores. The interview guides made it easier to start a conversation and to keep the focus on our topic during the interviews. But they also limited the freedom of the conversations, both for us and for the persons we were talking with. Some of the questions proved to be outside of peoples’ frame of reference and/or interest. For example, questions on impacts of religion on politics and economics were almost impossible to get people to answer. People often seemed afraid to answer such questions, and if they did, it was typically a general reply that came from a group of people, not from an individual.

After finalising our studies in Flores, we had a new discussion about our methods and we found it beneficial for our further study to make some changes in the interview guides. Minor changes, but we had gained the experience that some questions would be easier to answers if they where raised with another wording. We found during our stay in Flores that it was unnecessary to have both a questionnaire and an interview guide for ordinary citizens, so we added some questions to the interview guide and dropped the questionnaire during our research in Java.

Questionnaire
The layout of the questionnaire was also, like the interview guide, a result of group work and discussion between all the students, our professor Mr. Stein Kristiansen and Mr. Louis. The questionnaire was a tool that we wanted to use for ordinary citizens. We formulated the questions to get short replies, more fact-like answers, to be used for comparison between the information we collected in Flores and Java.

After the stay in Flores we decided to add some of the questions from the questionnaire in the interview guide for ordinary citizens. We did this because we found that we got mostly the same and complementary information by using both methods. By extending the interview guide we could still collect the data we where searching for. Our plan with the questionnaire was to use quantitative data in a graphical presentation of information for comparison, but because of the difficulty in getting people to answer some of the questions, this could not be done.

Using interpreters
Because of the language barriers, we brought local guides and interpreters, which was necessary to be able to collect the data we needed. In situations where the translation by interpreters was the only source of information, we had no way of knowing if anything was lost in translation. Sometime we were aware that we got the answers directly from the interpreters, and other times it was difficult to tell from whom the final answer came.

Observation
We worked in a lot of different settings and used observation to see how religion and identity can influence the ways of life. Observation became an important method for collecting information, because the data we collected through interviews, lectures and conversations were in some occasions clearly coloured by respondents’ religious, cultural or political background.

Lectures
We attended lectures at both governmental and religious educational institutions. The lecturers were mostly academics, but also practitioners and governmental officials. The lectures were normally followed by discussions. These discussions brought up a lot of interesting and important topics related to the theme of our study tour. In some cases, however, limited background knowledge among the students may have caused a suboptimal professional outcome.

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