Tag Archives: colonial era

I was having a drink with a couple of colleagues, who, like me, are engaged in case study research, and the conversation turned to interviews. One of my colleagues mentioned some questionable propositions that had been put to him in one of those interviews. “I don’t believe that,” he said, “but if that’s what they say, what are you going to do?”
I knew the answer to the question: triangulation. But it took some excavation of my own research experience to remember how I had arrived at that answer. The idea of triangulation never actually occurred to me. It presented itself, in the form of a puzzle I encountered as a graduate student immersing myself in my first primary research project, a study of Kenya’s Million-Acre Settlement Scheme, the starting point for a book I later published under the title Land and Class in Kenya.

Continue reading →