One of the most frustrating parts of doing research about Tonga is how quickly things are changing over there. From what I have heard, it seems like the Tongan culture prides themselves on their traditional ways and on their being one of the only monarchies not to be taken over by another nation. Even though a lot of things they do are still very traditional and have resisted westernization, they are rapidly changing some of their ways. For example, we talked in our section about how they are moving towards democratic elections. Anyways, the reason this is so frustrating is because even a research article that is only ten years old can be very outdated. For this reason, it's hard to know what you can trust from the article and what no longer applies to how things really are.
I read an article about Class systems in Tonga. The article was kind of difficult to read, and used pretty technical language, but it basically said that their is not really a class system in Tonga, or atleast their is no middle class. The author said that because of the monarchy, there is a noble class, but then everyone who isn't in that class is pretty much the same. If this is true, and if this is how it is today, I think that's pretty great. I think it would be a nice change from American culture to have everyone be in one class, but unfortunately in Tonga, I think that class would be a pretty impoverished class. I'm excited to go see for my self if this is still how it is today.
Another thing that I thought about while I was reading this article was how different observational research is from experimental. Doing observational research is wonderful and can let you see a lot more than experimental research in many cases because you aren't limiting yourself to one survey or just a few specific questions, you can see the people and the way they live and see how that would influence their answers. But, I think one thing to take into consideration about doing research in another culture is to not apply your findings to everyone in the population. It's important to note that the research you collected may not apply to every single person or family in the whole culture.
I have to admit that I found the participant observation method to be a lot harder than the interview. I'm glad that you got it down though! I like the point that you made when you said we can't generalize our findings to the whole population. Its hard not to do that since I'm trying to find any amount of valid information, and I tend to use the little I find to make broad stereotypes based on my findings. I agree that its hard to find valid articles, but that justifies us even more for going to Tonga and doing research.
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