In my method's practice 2 I wrote about our experience that we had visiting the Tongan Ward. I really loved going there and getting to spend time with the people. It made me even more excited to go to Tonga. It's been really stressful trying to figure out everything as far as money goes and classes, but visiting the ward reminded me why I am really going to Tonga. It's about the people. The other stuff is just logistics and details, but the point is the cultural experience that I'll have with the Tongan people. I know that the research and educational aspects are very important to the Field Study experience, but I think the most important thing to me is the culture immersion. Spending time with the Tongan people and eating their food and hearing about their lives, made me excited to gain a real experience in the actual culture.
As I continue to research about Tonga and the family, I have been thinking very hard about how I want to go about asking the questions I want to ask. As I have read about research methods and after the methods workshop today, I am pretty sure I want to ask questions in a semi-structured interviewed setting. I am going to ask a series of very basic questions about family relationships. I have a couple of books that are giving me some good guidelines for the types of subjects that I want to look in to and the types of questions I'd like to ask. I think the most important thing I am trying to keep in mind right now is to make my questions narrow enough to get good, specific answers, but broad enough to gain a good assessment of the general Tongan family. It's a hard balance, but I think it's very doable, so that gives me a lot of hope!
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