PhD thesis Title Page Final _Richard Juma - Victoria University ...

interviewing the Turkana pastoralists informally during a reconnaissance
survey, and this had helped me to gain enough confidence to conduct
more intensive interviews. Thirdly, documentary data, observation and
informal interviews had made it possible to sharpen the focus of the study,
and enabled me to redesign and update the original interview schedule.
During the household survey, I used a one page questionnaire (see
appendix 1) for the bio-demographic data. It was useful to have this data
in hand while I proceeded with the rest of the interview. The rest was a
structured interview with some open-ended questions (see Appendix 2).
3.6 Pre-testing of questionnaire.
The first interview task was to pretest the questionnaire. The original
interview schedule had been prepared in advance while still at Victoria
University of Wellington, aided by the help of some guide points generated
from ‘Rural livelihoods and diversity in developing countries’ (Ellis 2000),
and ‘measuring social capital: an integrated questionnaire’ (Grootaert,
Narayan, Jones, and Woolcock 2003).
The pretesting interview task was done on my second day at Morulem
village. I visited one cluster of homesteads and randomly selected six
households. The household heads of those six selected households were
interviewed. It took six days to complete the interviews.
From the result of the pre-testing interviews, it became clear that it was
very difficult for the nomads to honour appointments, and interviewing one
household could take even more than two days. This made it necessary to
arrange the interviews in such away that they could be conducted at
different times of the day, depending on the availability of the respondents.
Secondly, I realized that the questionnaire was rather too long. The
interview was expected to take less than one hour per household, but it
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