How Focus Groups got Interesting

I've lived many places...I loose count...but...most my overseas experience has been in former English colonies. There was bad English now and again but I don't remember feeling overwhelmed. However, English in Cambodia...it's just really bad very often. Understandably, Cambodia was essentally the Communist Bloc until 1991. Still, my fears that my English will deteriorate into the depths of the underworld, are consistently reaffirmed. I frequently can't find words to express myself. It's already happening. It's awful.

I've recently been doing quantitative research for my partner organization. This means reading through transcripts of focus group interviews (our preferred method of monitoring and evaluation) and looking for themes, repeated phrases, and nuances in language. However, my interviews were translated from Khmer to English. This throws a twist into the process, and so I'm looking for almost exclusively themes. It's been interesting. Mostly because the translator...an outsourced third party...was really, really bad. 

• On a proverb which we should all apparently know, "the punctuality does not win the dead-lock road."
• On listening: "To become a good listener, the most important thing in conflict is that we have to listen to the reasons from both sides seriously."
• On the type of conflict in the community, "There is a domestic violence with some reasons: husband is the drunkard, children doesn’t listen to parents’ advice, husband and wife are not harmonized and they have no sense of being tolerant to each other."
• On a specific conflict, "In the time of consolidation, we use the reasons to deal the conflict but in the case they don’t listen to our advice, they can continue suing the case."
• On a case study where a child is skipping school to spend time with his girlfriend, "As my ideas, first of all, need to educate and give advice to correct the habit not to go sightseeing [dating] too much and need to transform what we did wrong. Because the child is still in the age of study and have to think of the future...""...Educate not to go sightseeing [dating] till too late at night...."
• On another specific conflict, "Conflict because of words approached to the beating."
• On the dangers of falling coconuts, "Nowadays in my village there is a land conflict and conflict between the neighbors because of no sympathy to each other. For example, such as coconut tree grows bending to another land side and that side asks cut it off because of being dangerous but the owner did not agree then the conflict brought about." 
• On going with justice, "As a matter of fact, when we receive the complaint on something, usually there is only one side that comes to sue and prepare all things surrounding the conflict. In order for our resolution to go with justice, it requires us to listen another conflict side as well."
• On gender equity: "the strategies to solve the problems are judged by the mediator based on the rationale reality; for instance, sometimes husband do not accept their crime of domestic violence to wife so we capture husband for punishment because the women are physically weaker than the men so the men can’t abuse to women."
• On the importance of listening, "For me, I think that listening is the cornerstones for the conflict solver."
• On a conflict as old as time (and my personal favorite), "For my village there is a case threatened to bombard because loving the villager's daughter could not fulfill."

My project with this material is still in process, trying to pull off a legitimate baseline report on precisely what Cambodians think about mediation. It's one thing to do research in a language you don't understand, without deep concern for the purity of mediation. However, as they say, "the punctuality does not win the dead-lock road."