Episode 11: Field research in Korea: Collaborators' experiences
Welcome back to the podcast on access to justice in the era of digitalized public services. In the next two episodes, you will have the chance to meet the persons I collaborated with during field research and for data generation. We will hear about the experiences of interviewers and other colleagues who contributed to the research process in the scope of this research project. In today's episode, the colleagues I worked with in South Korea are invited to share their experiences. In the next episode, we will hear from colleagues in South Africa and St. Maarten, as well as from my colleague Hannah, who is based here in Vienna, Austria and whose voice you already know from previous episodes.
So now let's first listen to Jiin Ha, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Seoul. Her work, however, was mainly done before we met in person, since she supported me in gaining field access by identifying and contacting relevant organizations for potential interviews. This was crucial since I don't speak Korean, which would have made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to gain interview partners, especially from abroad. Jiin is now a PhD student in political science at Washington University in St. Louis, US. She has a background in public policy and public administration, and she studies political psychology and behavioral approach to public policy, especially focusing on how people perceive and feel about public sector issues and how such perception shapes policy preference. Given the fact that, at least in the social sciences, cooperation between researchers from Korea and European countries are not overly common, I was interested in how my local colleagues perceived collaborating with a foreign researcher. Listen to Jiin's experience.
“I really enjoyed working with Professor Julia Dahlvik and felt very honored to support her meaningful work in my own country. It was actually my first time working with a foreign researcher. So, I was a bit nervous about communication and cultural differences at the beginning. But I think our shared research goal and the successful completion of the project were far more important than our differences in language and culture. As soon as we started discussing the details of the research, Dr. Dahlvik was no longer just a foreign researcher. She was a great project leader and co-worker of mine. She was also very open to the culture, and it was exciting to hear and discuss not only public surveys but also about the cultural aspects of my country from a foreign researcher's perspective.”
I definitely shared Jiin's observation that it was highly interesting to discuss certain particularities of Korean culture. I also asked Jiin what she liked about her tasks in the research project, which I described earlier, but also what were some of the challenges she experienced in the process.
“One thing I liked about my tasks was that the information and knowledge I gained from them were very meaningful and also very new to me. I realized that I didn't know much about many of the public services and resources my country provides and that I've been taking them for granted. I also really appreciated all the opportunities I had through this project, such as meeting and talking with various relevant people. It was very grateful moments beyond living in my own bubble. I don't think there were major challenges, but if I had to pick one, it was difficult to convince potential interviewees to join the project. I think it was mainly because face-to-face interaction with a foreign researcher could be a little overwhelming for non-English speakers with no prior similar interview experience. Some potential interviewees were also not sure about why they mattered to the research. But in most cases, they agreed to the research goals and the interviews went well.”
I was happy to hear that contributing to the research project for Jiin also implied learning something new about her country's system. Some of the mentioned challenges, such as having to explain to persons why their perspective matters for the research, I have often encountered in my previous research projects. The other aspect, people's reservations to participate in a foreigner's study with the help of an interpreter, is also highly understandable and would probably happen in many other countries as well. As a last point, I asked Jiin if there is anything else she would like to share with the listeners. In her reply, she underscores the relevance and advantages of qualitative research, which, as I heard, tends not to be taken as seriously as quantitative research in Korea.
“I just want to highlight how insightful and important it is to conduct qualitative and field research in social science. Including myself, we often miss very important information that can be obtained beyond numbers. There are things we can learn only from actually visiting the site and meeting people. Also, thanks to great technologies, language is a much less barrier than before. So, I hope I can do this kind of incredible field work in my future research. And again, I want to thank Professor Dahlvik for including my country as an interesting case and for sharing insights with academia and all the other readers and listeners.”
Jiin mentions another interesting aspect, namely the impact of artificial intelligence on communication with different languages. The aspect of language was very present during the entire research in Korea, and it was mentioned by all my cooperation partners, as you will hear. On this note, let's listen to Anna Kyoungeun Kim, who interpreted the interviews I conducted in South Korea, mainly with representatives of different governmental or publicly funded institutions. Anna is currently a first-year JD student, so a PhD candidate at Peter Allard School of Law in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has an MA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and did her Bachelor in Political Science and International Relations and Literature at Korea University. She is trilingual in Korean, English and Spanish. To begin with, I also asked about her experiences of collaborating with a researcher from abroad, in my case from Europe. She describes quite vividly how people tended to react when we went to meet and interview them.
“Working with someone who isn't Korean and someone who is such a visibly non-Korean in a very racially homogeneous country, was an interesting experience, especially because we weren't working offline. We were going around different places. And every time, because it's not a common thing for these municipal organizations to be interviewed or be visited by someone who's, you know, all contact that these organizations probably have with an outside organization are Korean organizations and I don't think anyone comes all the way from Austria it's extremely rare so just seeing the visible shot on people's faces every time we went up to different people and then tried to introduce what we were doing and what Julia was doing that was just interesting and every time the first couple of minutes I could sense that people were sometimes tense. So, I think people really appreciated it when Juliet took the time to go over things and introduce herself and introduce and lay out the purposes of this research in detail and really carefully, because I think that gave them a sense of trust. Me personally, it was just fascinating, and I had so much respect for the professor that she came all the way here to conduct this research, and I honestly hope she got something out of it. It was just honestly, not even an exaggeration, such an honor to participate and I'm glad that I was able to be this involved in different aspects of the interview and interpreting process.”
I also asked Anna what she liked about the interpreting process and what were some of the challenges she experienced. She mentioned some difficult situations or dilemmas that interpreters often experience, being those that sit in between not the chairs, having to fulfill different expectations, but also in between the cultures.
“It was overall a very enjoyable experience. I think the biggest challenges were when some of the interviewees seemed to feel like they had to edit their answers or had to sanitize their answers because they felt like they were representing the organization. not just being interviewed on specific aspects or roles or tasks that the organization took on, but by extension of being interviewed about the organization, they felt like, especially also because Korea is probably not a leading research country, it's really rare for quote unquote foreigners to come to Korea all the way to collect information as far as I know. So, I think it's because it's not a common thing to do. They felt like they had an obligation to represent the country also in a positive light. So, I felt like some of the more unsavory aspects, they edited out themselves or in some cases they explicitly told me not to relay some of the information back to the professor. it was sort of difficult as a person in the middle, as an intermediary, to figure out my role, my political role in the situation, because I could see that they were coming from a good place and they had good intentions, but I was also employed and I had an obligation to collect the information and to translate because if I cut it off in the middle, this information is probably not going to get passed on to the professor. So there is a clash or tension between the information collecting purposes of the research itself for which I am employed versus, I guess, sort of the ties or obligations that I owe to quote unquote my people and because I could see why the interviewees were sometimes requesting that the information not be passed on. Aside from that though, it was genuinely a really pleasant and enjoyable experience. I did not know much about the term ombudsman and also going around different places that were acting as public ombudsmans in the country was also just a first-time experience for me as well so I really liked that. Traveling all the way to Sejong was which is a city I've never been before and a city I've probably will not have any chance to visit and would not have visited if it weren't for the purposes of this interview. So that was also very fun.”
Anna mentioned the nice aspect of traveling to different places throughout the country, which I also enjoyed very much, especially since traveling together, also gave us the opportunity to discuss many interesting topics. The third person that made an important contribution to this study in Korea was HyunSeung Joo, who conducted interviews with citizens who were using community service centers, important institutions of which I already reported in a previous episode. In the highly digitalized Korea, these places are important because people can go there when they need any public service. Most neighborhoods have several of these centers. Hyun Sung-ju has a degree in cultural studies and global finance and is currently preparing for law school. I asked him the same questions, how he experienced collaborating with me as a researcher from abroad, what he liked about interviewing people, which kinds of challenges he experienced, and if there is anything he would do differently if he were to do the interviews again. Here is his reply.
“First of all, it was a new experience to me, but I think I enjoyed it. I had fun during the interview because my personality is outgoing and I don't have difficulties to talk to others. However, there was a nervous part of applying for an interview with the complete strangers. Also, it was challenging that not everyone responded kindly to the interview. In particular, older people seem to have a high degree of rejection in specifying interviews to match the gender ratio with the age groups of several generations. So, I think the reason seems to be the conservative cultural characteristic of Korea's older age people who are reluctant to cause or take inconvenience to others. If I do an interview again later, I think I will request an interview differently for example, by proposing a cafe voucher first to reduce the probability of rejection.”
Since the interviews with citizens were not pre-arranged, HyunSeung Joo mentions that he experienced a certain amount of rejection when asking for interviews. This is something rather typical when people are invited to an interview in public space, more or less out of the blue. In the following, he explains that, as we had agreed, he was looking for diversity regarding interviewees' assumed age and gender.
“Basically, the interview was conducted based on the given questions. Sometimes I asked the additional questions impromptu when interviewees’ answers are quite interesting or present something that's worth thinking about. And when selecting a group of interviews, the subjects were selected so that both age and gender could be different according to the research topic as much as possible.”
As mentioned earlier, HyunSeung Joo also found that language barriers were not a big issue between us due to the use of AI in our written communication and for the interview summaries that he produced.
“I liked it. Actually, I was worried about the language because I have no experience living in a country other than Korea. But there wasn't much difficulty because as you know, AI technology is so good these days that it didn't seem very difficult to convey my opinions or understand the researcher. Later, I think that makes more easier to give you accurate interview results because of double-check on my summary. So, I can say that this was definitely a positive experience.”
Last but not least, I asked HyunSeung Joo if there is anything else he would like to share with the listeners. It was good to hear that he experienced the interviewing process as a meaningful opportunity.
“I don't think interviewing someone is easy to experience in life. Particularly, I don't think it's a common opportunity for my interviews to be meaningfully consumed by participating in like this studies. Also, it was more interesting than I thought to watch people give different answers even if they ask the same question. So, if you have the opportunity about who can get this opportunity of proceeding interviews, I strongly recommend it you to experience it at least once.”
So, this was a short glimpse into how Jiin, Anna, and HyunSeung Joo experienced our collaboration. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all very much for your valuable contributions to this research project. For me, it was a great pleasure and an honor collaborating with you and learning about the challenges of digitalizing public services in your local context. Without your work, the study would not be what it has become. And thank you for sharing your experiences in the research process with our listeners. I would also like to thank Professor Jin-Wook Choi of Korea University's Department of Public Administration for supporting my study and for Johannes Schelakovsky for always helping me with Audio Mastering the Podcast. Thank you for listening and stay tuned.
