A Study of Shelters for Street Children from an Organizational ...

• Staff morale was high when motivated to concentrate on serving the children
and meeting their needs
• After negotiating the participants consent to record their responses, staff and
children were eager to be recorded. This came about when the researcher
invited a volunteer among the participants to speak and say something short
while testing the reliability of the tape recorder. The researcher replayed the
recorded talk to the participants. As they listened to the talk of one of them,
emotions of curiosity were evoked, they nodded, laughed and where the
speaker was not audible the participants were dismayed and wanted the
speaker to be loud and clear. That brief recording testing the tape recorder
became an opportunity for the researcher to train participants how to project
their voices and to speak clearly. The enthusiasm to be recorded provided
impetus in the focus group discussions.
• Staff and children participants were interested with the researcher because
though black African, did not speak Zulu as they expected. The researcher
became the researched, they wanted to know more about where he comes
from, how far is his the country and is it in Africa, what language people speak,
what food people eat, and whether there are children living on the streets etc?
The process of allowing participants to ask the researcher questions and getting
answers from the researcher made them feel recognized and equal in the
construction of knowledge and changed their views on being subjects of
interviews but participants. (Henning, 2003: 63-65). The researcher used the
opportunity of answering the questions to communicate in a manner that built
trust and rapport with the participants. This process took fifteen to twenty
minutes. A time that the researcher found worth for the research project. The
disadvantage of not knowing Zulu became the advantage and building block of
trust and confidence.
• The tape recorder and other research tools were reliable and valid in measuring
what the research sought to measure.
This approach was applied and followed in the study.
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