This chapter was parted into six sections as I found that there are a set of different approaches on to how to take a deeper look at the participation of women in the National Popular Resistance Front of Honduras. These approaches cover different aspects of elements that I regard as important when looking at the gendered participation in such an organization in such a time. Whether or not there is actually a difference in behavior, these approaches are also important as a toolbox and a reference so that it is easier to spot those crucial details one otherwise might overlook.
I started out this thesis with my research question being the following:
“Is there a gender difference in participation in the "National Popular Resistance Front"?
How do gender-differences influence the armed/non-armed profile of the organization?”
Based on these research questions the following are chosen as working hypotheses for this thesis:
H1.Women participate in the movement’s actions in an equal manner as the men.
H2.Women in the movement are participating in the use of and taking of the street in the same manner as men
H3.The women in the movement are as inclined to reject or accept firearms as the men.
H4.Gender differences do not change the overall attitude towards violence in the studied organizations that form part of the movement.
In the previous chapter I touched upon the importance of the marital status of the perpetrators of war, terrorism and unrest. This is in addition to theories regarding the violent or non-violent nature of women and their participation in organizations and events of conflict, war and struggle for peace. This also includes how one uses public space for these purposes and how this differs for men and women. Looking at marital and social status of the persons involved in such organizations and actions is important to give a different perspective of the situation and assess the impact of gender in such a situation.
The questions that we now might ask are: if the marital status of the person influences conflict-related choices more than their gender? Does your gender or other aspects of your personality influence you or the groups you are a part of in how you would choose to utilize the public space, and does the use the public space further your cause? Even though all of these are important questions it does not change my hypotheses and my research question, but it does influence my discussion of my findings that will come in Chapter 8. Having asked this question will in itself provide a basis of skepticism to my own findings so that it will be easier to discover where my original thoughts on the subject do not provide sufficient insight into the topic and where other approaches might.
5 Methodology
In this chapter I describe both the theoretical basis for my methodology and how I chose to apply that theory into the practical action. I look at both what I did and some of the things I did not do and why or why not. As there are both theoretical foundations for why something should be done and practical reasons why it cannot be done, in this chapter I will try to justify the how and whys regarding my research into the women and their roles in the Peoples National Resistance front in Honduras.
5.1 Fieldwork
Being on fieldwork means traveling to the place of interest where you interact and participate with the locals in their activities in a pursuit of knowledge about the topic of research. This is to a great extent more suited to acquiring qualitative data, not quantitative data (Thagaard 2003:16-17).
As relatively little has been written about the situation in Honduras after the coup and I have not found anything academic on the situation of women, particularly not on my perspective of the conflict, I chose to go to Honduras to see the situation with my own eyes. I wanted to hear what the people participating had to say about my topic and how they wanted it to be. Fieldwork in itself has a large tradition in the social sciences, although it is not so highly regarded in the academic tradition where I depart from, political science. As I lived in Honduras earlier I already had contacts and friends in the country, so I did not have to “start from scratch”. I already spoke the language, so my starting position seemed fortunate.
Being on fieldwork creates a whole lot of considerations one must take into account regarding how you want to participate, how you secure your own safety and the safety of your informants, how you collect your data while on fieldwork and so on. Later in this chapter I will look into these aspects of the fieldwork, both from the theoretical aspect, pre-travel in a way, and the practical aspect, which in a way can be said to be in-travel or post-travel.
5.1.1 Considerations regarding safety, security and ethics
Being a part of a study program in Peace and Conflict Transformation and focusing my thesis on an ongoing conflict implies that if I go into the field I would be entering a conflict zone. Although it must be said that this was not a hot conflict zone with daily murders, there have been reports of up to nineteen related murders just in the first six months after the coup (Human Rights Foundation 2010:298; Ruhl 2010:103) and there have been clear threats made against the public, teachers, demonstrators, journalists, human rights personnel and lawyers (Frontline Defenders 2011; Sommer & Burrow 2012; Lara 2012;
Taraciuk 2010; Burnette 2010; Mejia 2010a; Mejia 2010b; Whitney 2011). Several journalists have also been killed in unsolved criminal acts (FNRP 2012c). Entering a conflict zone with so much distrust and fear on both sides of the conflict means that I have to be ready to give a confident and secure impression my risk and the risks of my informants and to maximize the output of my research activities.
Normally I have what you might call a “low paranoia level”, but as a fieldworker in this project, with this type of research question and in this situation, I needed to contemplate
and adjust my caution level so that I would satisfy even the most cautious in the movement so that I could be trusted. I set up a solution for digitally collecting all my answers and getting them transferred back to me in Norway without ever having them physically cross the border.
This created the problem that my questionnaires cannot be verified or documented in retrospect as the individual forms do not exist anymore. They only exist as the summary and statistics, although thoroughly typed in word for word, that I have collected as an SPSS-file.
In my first questionnaire I put in several more questions that turned out to be the final edition. The first draft also contained detailed questions about what kind of violent acts they had participated in during demonstrations and in each type of violence I asked if they had performed this act just once or if this was something that had happened a few times or many times. This was removed from the final questionnaire as both my supervisor (who has field experience from Honduras, in particular experience in insecure political situations from Honduras) and contacts discouraged me from including these questions.
Although I went through all questions to create a secure environment for the informants and informed them of this, I would sometimes be informed that they could not answer some of my questions, out of their own security and with respect to my security as it might happen that the government could be particularly interested in the information extracted from these particular points in my research. This mostly occurred in relation to the questions regarding firearms and the arming of the movement and whether or not this could be a good thing and when the firearms in such cases could/should be used.
As one can see, my considerations for security might have been too much considering what was necessary and in other situations might have been too little for the informants to feel secure. The security considerations also change how the fieldwork was conducted and what parts of the survey could be documented by other researchers.