Awra Amba RJ 300612 EN - Contacter un comité local d'Attac

1. Method
final conclusions of Mekonnen (2009) are not deduced from the data really presented in the
text body and are not presented as personal viewpoints of the author.
This violation of the scientific standards is not a formal question, but an indicator of the scientific
quality sometimes questionable of the studies, these standards being a part of the scientific method
ensuring the quality of the results. In this regard, studies of Atnafu and Yirga seem outstanding.
Some studies intend to measure through survey behaviours, but only measure the perception of their
behaviours by the interviewed people: for instance, the question "Are you beneficiary of mass
media? 1.Yes 2.No" (Yassin, 2008, p. 93) cannot in any way assess the degree to which the
interviewed people have real access to mass media and the degree to which they are beneficiary of
them – it should for that purpose have asked for instance a closed question about the frequency of
access to different mass media; This question only measures each one opinion on his own
information, which gives an interesting information, but somewhat less reliable and notably vague.
The relatively limited resources of the studies did not allow without doubt more comprehensive
research. This relative weakness is especially present in Yassin (2008).
Finally, as usually, neither the journalist reports, nor the personal accounts give generally their work
method, which does not allow assessing their quality.
1.3. Work method
The four main sources coming from master studies have each a subject very well documented, but at
the same time give a lot of other information on a wide variety of subjects. On given points, data can
be contradictory; in that case, we present the different versions.
In all the cases, we try to indicate accurately the source of the information given, for transparency. It
leads to very numerous references. In order to make the text lighter, the four sources the most often
cited are cited by using the following abbreviations: Jo10b instead of Joumard (2010b), At05 instead
of Atnafu (2005), Yi07 instead of Yirga (2007), Ya08 instead of Yassin (2008) and Me09 instead of
Mekonnen (2009) 1 .
With a few exceptions, we do not put the text parts copied from the different references between
quotation marks in order to make the reading easier. Nevertheless, most of the report merely repeats
data and information coming from the literature: a paragraph including a reference can generally be
attributed to this reference, even we have modified the wording.
We express also own opinions of the author of this report, either through an independent paragraph
without reference, or through text elements clearly attributed to the author by expressions like "In
our opinion...". Pictures and figures are from the author, unless otherwise specified.
The demonstration of contradictory versions according to authors as well as our own thoughts lead
us to ask precise questions, more or less important, to which it is useful in our opinion to answer in
the future. These questions are listed in Annex by order appearing in the text body, and they are
referenced in the text body when appropriate.
Moreover, the social transformations introduced in Awra Amba cannot be understood without
reference to the Ethiopian society and more precisely to the Amhara society which Awra Amba is
part of and where it comes from. We try therefore to present for that reason at the beginning of each
subject the situation in the traditional Amhara society, before focussing on the situation in Awra
Amba.
1 The number after "/" indicates the page ; Therefore, Yassin (2008/45) or Ya08/45 indicates the
reference Yassin (2008), page 45.
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