Researching Sensitive Topics in African Cities: Reflections on Alcohol Research in Cape
Town
1
Mary Lawhon, 2Clare Herrick and 3Shari Daya
1
Corresponding author:
African Center for Cities
Rm 2.11, Level 2,
Environmental & Geographical Science Building
Upper Campus, University of Cape Town
Rondebosch, 7701
South Africa
Email: mary.lawhon@uct.ac.za
2
Department of Geography
King’s College London
Strand
London WC2R 2LS
Email: clare.herrick@kcl.ac.uk
3
Environmental & Geographical Science Building
Upper Campus, University of Cape Town
Rondebosch, 7701
South Africa
Email: shari.daya@uct.ac.za
Researching Sensitive Topics in African Cities:
Reflections on Alcohol Research in Cape Town
Abstract
Recent African urbanist scholarship has suggested the need to delve deeper into our
understanding of the everyday lived experiences in African cities. While this is essential for
our understanding of African cities, researching lived experiences is fraught with
methodological and ethical challenges. This is true for any topic when the researcher-subject
gap is shaped by differences in nationality, class, race, norms and education, but especially so
for the study of sensitive topics such as violence, sexuality, HIV/AIDS, and xenophobia.
Geographers have begun considering the ethics of researching particular sensitive issues, but
not yet fully engaged with the international literature on the ethical and methodological
challenges of researching such topics. To begin filling this gap, we reflect on experiences
researching the lived experience and policy engagement with alcohol in Cape Town. We seek
to apply and adapt the literature on sensitive topics specifically to the South African context.
Our paper examines challenges which arose during the fieldwork and strategies developed to
mitigate these. We emphasize how examining a topic with strong normative associations,
which is bound up with illegality and community divisions, creates a need for particular
attentiveness to research methods.
1. Introduction
Recent geographical research has called attention to the need to move beyond the use of
Northern theory and research undertaken from structuralist and developmentalist
perspectives, and to study everyday lived experiences in African cities. The aim of such
studies is not to position Africa as exceptional but instead to argue that there is a need to
situate theory more clearly in its social, cultural and political contexts (Pieterse 2008,
Robinson 2006, 2011, Roy 2009). The research project on which this paper is based
represents a response to this need to understand the politics and regulation of a key aspect of
the everyday in African cities: alcohol, and the experience of drinking and alcohol-related
harm.
Much of the existing research on alcohol, particularly in the global South, has emerged from
the field of public health and made use of epidemiological methodologies to highlight
patterns and relationships between consumption and alcohol-related harms (Parry et al. 2002;
Parry et al. 2011). This bio-medical approach has also tended to underpin regulatory
approaches to alcohol, largely because of the influence of the World Health Organisation
(WHO) and its recent Global Strategy to Reduce the Harmful Effects of Alcohol (2010).
However, and as recent work on the social determinants of health and health inequalities is
now starting to demonstrate, the contextual factors influencing the behavioural choices that
have health impacts need to be better inculcated within policy decisions if they are to be
effective (Marmot 2005; Blas and Sivasankara Kurup 2010; Marmot 2010). With this in
mind, here we reflect on the experience of researching some of the contextual factors at play
in the determination of drinking practices in poor parts of Cape Town.
Undertaking research to understand the lived experiences of alcohol, and how lived
experiences are understood by policy-makers, raises complex ethical and methodological
challenges. Experiences of alcohol can be personal and intimate, carry significant stigma, or
be influenced by inter-personal or broader power relations. Questions of access,
confidentiality, shared cultural norms, researcher-researched distanciation, linguistic tropes,
researcher views and gender dynamics are all issues that researching alcohol renders both
visible and intensely problematic. We thus suggest the need to explicitly attend to the role
that methodology plays in influencing what people say about their experiences of drinking
and, therefore, the conclusions we may draw about cultures of drinking. These, in turn, may
shape our understanding of the contextual factors that produce risky drinking habits and
vulnerability to the effects of other people’s drinking.
In South Africa, the challenges of researching sensitive topics require particular attention as
these are often inflected by ethnic, class, educational or national differences among
respondents as well as between researchers and participants. These differences are present for
all social research, but take on added importance in research on sensitive topics, especially
where these may be deeply embedded in their spatial settings. And, while geographers have
attended to ethical issues (Proctor 1998, Valentine 2003), there still remains a need for
explicit geographical reflection on researching sensitive issues in the global South.
In this paper, we therefore consider the ethical and methodological challenges that arose that
arose as we conducted participant observation, focus groups and interviews on alcohol in
Cape Town. We aim to contribute to current debates on research on sensitive topics,
development geography and alcohol studies. We first explore engagements with ‘lived
experience’ in African cities, and the literature on alcohol control, poverty and development.
From here, we consider the ways in which sensitive topics have been researched within
geography. We then turn to a specific critical engagement with our own research project, and
reflect on the challenges posed by the research in three domains: focus groups, ethnographic
encounters and stakeholder interviews. We conclude by suggesting that the research process,
as much as the data it unearths, deepens our understanding of the role that alcohol plays in
lived experience and the translation of the everyday into negative externalities that alcohol
control policies in South Africa seek to mitigate.
2. Researching lived experience in African cities
As the world, and Africa in particular, grows increasingly urban, there has been a renewed
interest in researching cities (Myers 2011). While there is a long history of African urban
work, rural areas have tended to dominate the scholarship (Freund 2007, Myers 2011). In
recent years, scholars have noted the shortcomings in our understanding of African cities, and
specifically the limitations of using Northern theory to explain them (Robinson 2006;Pieterse
2006a; Pieterse 2006b). In such framings, African cities are largely viewed as failuresfailures of modernity, with inadequate infrastructure and governance (Myers 2011, Pieterse
2008, cf Davis 2006). African urbanists have argued that, instead of viewing them against a
Northern standard of normality, African cities need to be understood on their own terms. This
is not to suggest that there is a single “type” of African city, that African cities are somehow
exceptional, that Northern theory is irrelevant or that the findings from research in African
cities are not relevant to broader theorization. Instead, it is to argue that looking at cities in
Africa solely through theoretical lenses developed in and for the North will leave key
questions unexplored and limit the types of insights which can be drawn on to understand
urban practices and processes (Watson 2009).
Until recently, most African urban research has drawn largely on structuralist or
developmentalist approaches (Robinson 2006), yet important anthropological work exists
which seeks to understand the specificity of the African city while speaking back to broader
urban theory.
In the last decade, African urbanists interested in better understanding the practices and
processes that constitute African cities have called for a re-engagement with everyday lived
experience (Simone 2004, Pieterse 2008). In line with this, scholars often frame their work as
an attempt to begin articulating the specificity and wider relevance of African cities, drawing
on Robinson's (2006) seminal argument for the study of “ordinary cities”. Some exemplary
works draw on ethnographic methods and extensive long term investments in particular sites
(cf Banks 2011; Ross 2009). Outside of anthropology, however, funding mechanisms have
largely precluded the ability of researchers to develop their research project iteratively with
participants. Gaps in the literature are expected to be clearly identified, research questions
developed in advance of the research process and short funding timescales leave little leeway
for iterative changes in strategy. More positively, however, the proclivity towards
transdisciplinarity has opened a space for research projects which allow for participants to
shape the direction of the research and greater freedom to explore topics and articulate
questions in response to ongoing research.
While there is much that is encouraging about these steps, translating diverse fields and kinds
of knowledge from researchers and participants into specific methods and finding appropriate
ways to account for them in reporting findings remains a rather ambiguous process (Goebel et
al. 2010, Lawhon et al. 2010). Questions remain regarding, for example, how to interpret
results when different epistemologies result in competing accounts. What do we do when, in
the context of alcohol consumption for example, bio-medical or epidemiological models of
explanation conflict with reported anthropological understandings of causality? How do we
interpret respondents telling repeatedly converging stories which are based in (largely racist)
received wisdom? While unable to provide definitive answers to such questions, in this paper
we reflect on how such tensions and complexities operate in the research, analysis and
writing encounters that typified our research on alcohol in the Western Cape.
3. Researching experiences of alcohol and its regulation in geography
While a ‘problem-orientated approach’ has long dominated the study of alcohol within
sociology, influenced by the field of addiction studies and analysis of quantitative data sets,
geographic studies have tended to adopt a critical perspective towards the assumptions and
presumptions embedded in ascriptions of non-normative drinking (Fred 2010). As recent
review paper suggests, while geographical scholarship on alcohol includes social, cultural,
urban and health sub-disciplines, a key strength of such work is the use of “critical theory and
qualitative modes of encounter to offer insights into… alcohol consumption, addiction,
treatment and recovery... to make explicit and perhaps challenge and reconfigure the ethics
and politics of addiction” (Wilton and Moreno 2012, 99). Geographical accounts have thus
tended to be concerned with ‘normal’ and everyday drinking (see Hammersley 2005), even
where these may be considered ‘risky’ in biomedical terms. As a result, they have adopted
largely qualitative methods for this task. This is not to say, however, that quantitative or
spatial analysis methods have been absent from geography, but that their use has not
generally been accompanied by critical ethical or methodological reflection.
It is notable that cultural geography’s concern with embodiment and affect has encouraged
greater uptake of ethnographic methods (Chatterton and Hollands 2003; Hollands and Chatterton
2003; Daya and Wilkins n.d.). However, these studies remain in the minority, with qualitative
research dominated by approaches that use interviews and focus groups, either alone or in
combination. While geographers have made impressive strides in carving out a theoretical
contribution to the study of alcohol, there remains a need for greater reflection on
methodsand their ethical complications and moral implications (Jayne et al. 2008a). However,
despite this call, methodological issues often receive little more than a cursory mention in
geographic accounts.
Geography’s most significant body of research on drink, drinking and drunkenness (Jayne et
al. 2011) has relatively little to say on the methodological challenges that the topic poses, even
when working with communities where drinking may be covert or culturally taboo (Valentine
et al. 2010) or where drinking is undertaken in private spaces (Holloway et al. 2008; Jayne et al.
2011; Valentine et al. 2012). Thus, while an interesting conclusion of research concerning
minority drinking patterns in the UK is that ‘Muslim clients [of alcohol treatment services]
may prefer speaking to a non-Muslim counsellor because of fears that their confidentiality
might not be maintained in close-knit local Asian communities’ (Valentine et al. 2010, 20), this
begs the question of the impact of the interviewer-interviewee dynamic on the research
process itself. Furthermore, given that there are negligible geographic studies of alcohol from
the global South (although see Brickell 2008), the existing cannon offers little by way of
methodological enlightenment to researchers engaged outside the global North. Instead, we
contend that a deeper commitment to reflecting on the methodological challenges of
researching alcohol amongst the urban poor in cities of the South has much to offer research
and researchers in the North.
4. Researching sensitive topics and the implications for geography
Geographers have often reflected on the ethics and need for methodological considerations
regarding North-South work (Oldfield et al. 2004, Saltana 2007), particularly given the
interweaving of the discipline’s past with the colonial endeavour and subsequent reflection in
the ‘post-colonial’ canon (Sidaway 1992). The growth of humanistic geography and interest
in qualitative questions including lived experiences of space and place meant that researchers
also began paying attention to the ethics of research approaches as (Ansell and van Blerk
2005, Valentine 2003). While there are reflections on the research of particular topics (cf
Meth 2003) and populations (cf Valentine 1999) which may be sensitive, geographers have
not commonly drawn on the wider social science literature on sensitive topics in order to
understand broader patterns within this kind of research.
Reflections of researching sensitive topics have considered the compounding impact of
research among ethnic minorities (Elam and Fenton 2003; Culley et al. 2007), but given less
attention to how North-South research is impacted by investigations in sensitive topics. Lee's
(1993) book Doing Research on Sensitive Topics may be considered the first thorough
articulation of the importance of specific considerations when researching such issues. For
Lee, sensitivity is not inherently defined by the topic; a topics may be sensitive in some
contexts but not others, and some questions may or may not touch on the sensitive aspects.
Indeed, as Culley et al. (2007, 108) assert “What constitutes a sensitive topic in research is
contextual and fluid: it is socially constructed and constantly changing.” Lee's (1993) model
identifies three reasons for sensitivity still widely used in the literature. Research may be
sensitive because, first, it asks questions about intimate, personal issues which respondents
are not generally comfortable discussing. Second, it may involve discussing discredited or
deviant behavior. This may include respondents' fear of the repercussions of disclosure, or
concern that their experiences and/or practices are seen as abnormal according to the
dominant culture. Third, power shapes whether a topic is sensitive, including power
differentials between researcher and participant or because participants may have a vested
interest in the research topic. Participants may have an interest in keeping a topic illegible to
researchers, as well as to policymakers . This framing has been widely used by health
researchers, but has relevance for geographies of, for example, health, violence, sexuality and
drinking.
Researching sensitive topics requires particular kinds of ethical and methodological
considerations (Johnson and Clarke 2003). Most ethics boards require that research does not
harm participants,ut asking respondents about sensitive topics is likely to bring up negative
emotions (Ansell and van Blerk 2005). Robson (2001, p. 136), reports in her research on
child carers in Zimbabwe that “almost half of the interviews were not completed because the
young person was in tears and unwilling or unable to continue the conversation.” She shares
the criticisms of the interviewer, concerned at subjecting the research participants to such
stress-inducing inquiries. And yet, in many cases, having a respectful interviewer listen may
actually be a positive, if distressing, engagement (ibid, Corbin and Morse 2003). Further the
research can have political implications that may help others in similar situations if not the
respondents themselves. She concludes that greater attention is needed to particular methods
to reduce harm, a point to which this paper seeks to respond. Further, while her conclusion is
noted for child carers, we suggest that her point that they “desperately need allies with longterm commitment in both academic and political worlds”, applies more broadly to
marginalized people of various ages, races, genders and classes (Robson 2001, p. 140).
Developing improved methods and appropriately training researchers presents challenges in
part because it is impossible to predict what kinds of responses and interactions will occur,
making the mitigation of such emotions particularly challenging (Johnson and Clarke 2003).
Researchers themselves may have emotional encounters, and this may be particularly true for
younger researchers (Dickson-Swift et al. 2006, 2007, 2009). Methodologically, questions
may need to be asked indirectly, and/or conversations broadened to build trust and provide
ways to defer answers. For example, Ansell and Van Blerk (2005) found that framing
questions around migration rather than HIV/AIDS allowed respondents to focus the
conversations elsewhere but still provide important and sensitive commentaries. Researching
such topics also requires particular attentiveness on the part of the researcher. Wellings et al.
point to numerous non-verbal cues as important “texts” for interpretation. For example, “the
way in which accounts of individual behaviour are prefaced with disclaimers and apologies,
provides unique insight into the mismatch between social norms and values on the one hand,
and individual behaviours and attitudes on the other” (2000, p. 265.) Researchers need to be
attentive to such issues, but also aware of the cultural context in which they occur.
Beyond these general issues, scholars have considered the implications of sensitive research
for particular racial and cultural interactions. Pragmatically, “working inter-culturally and
with sensitive topics brings additional research challenges and additional resource
requirements…considerable time and effort may be required in recruitment, especially if
working in communities with which the researcher is not familiar’ (Culley et al. 2007, 110).
Further, some over-researched communities are increasingly (and understandably) losing
interest in participating in research which appears to have little immediate or personal benefit
(ibid). While these insights are useful in the South African context, they are typically made in
the global North where white researchers are considered to be part of the racial and cultural
majority and to accord with dominant norms. In South Africa, by contrast, researchers are
more likely to be of an ethnic minority (i.e. white) and from the most affluent and empowered
social stratum.
In this context of sensitive topics across racial and cultural difference, the literature suggests
that ethnically matched interviewers be used. However, various other categories of difference
may also be prudent to match, but which forms of identity are and are not matched may then
be under- or over-emphasised (Halcomb et al. 2007). Additionally, familiar researchers may
be over-familiar and consequently expected to know things that need not be said or to
participate more in the conversation (ibid). Such concerns can also be linked to the “fallacy of
Third Worldism” which suggests that individuals from the place where research is conducted
may “know best” (Sidaway 1992). In some cases, a lack of familiarity may actually be a
positive trait, enabling respondents to open up and to explain assumptions (Dickson-Swift et
al. 2007, Gokah 2006). Such considerations come to the fore when researching the lived
experience of alcohol consumption, policy and harms in South Africa.
4. Alcohol control, poverty and development in South Africa
There are strong arguments within public health regarding the need for alcohol control
policies in the global South (Parry 2000, Bakke and Endal 2010), and, in particular, South
Africa (Schneider et al. 2007, Parry 2010). However, these accounts have tended to be
prescriptive, based on limited qualitative insight into the actual context of alcohol
consumption, and offer limited critical reflection on the complexities of policy development
and implementation. Our research project is therefore motivated by an interest in
understanding the everyday challenges of residents of African cities in relation to alcohol and
its control. In South Africa alcohol reinforces "a quadruple burden" of infectious, chronic,
perinatal/ maternal, and injury-related disorders (Mayosi 2009), cross-cutting urban,
development, poverty alleviation, security and post-apartheid social policy agendas.
South Africa has tried to redress its alcohol issue through various policy initiatives at a
variety of governmental scales (see Lawhon and Herrick n.d., Herrick this volume)
However, despite the clear policy drive to address South Africa’s alcohol-related economic,
social and health burden, this has largely been a supply-side strategy, aiming to reduce
availability and control access. While such strategies have been shown to be most effective in
reducing whole population consumption (and therefore harms) (Roomet al. 2005; Babor et al.
2010), they skirt around the upstream causes of drinking, such as poverty, inadequate
recreational facilities, a lack of alternative livelihood strategies for shebeeners or stress. The
project emerged from the need to better understand the contexts within which drive people to
drink, the consequences for the drinkers and others, and how understandings of lived
experiences of drinking feed into the policy process. Through a mixed-methods approach,
encircling a series of interlocked ‘work packages’ the project sought to tease out the
constellations of lived experience across a number of case study sites in Cape Town.
5. The research project: case study sites, questions and methods
In order to capture a variety of lived experiences, the project was designed around three sites:
Salt River, Philippi and Freedom Park. Our aim was to provide thick descriptions of different
places that individually and in sum represented particular (and more generic) challenges
relating to urban poverty and development such as poverty, unemployment, poor
infrastructure, crime, low educational attainment. This meant selecting sites that exhibited
diversity across racial and class categories, formality and informality and, in the case of
Freedom Park Moreover, they occupied different geographical positions within Cape Town’s
urban form: Salt River is close to the city centre, Philippi a relatively new township on oncerural land and Freedom Park a small pocket of upgraded housing on the Cape Flats.
The use of multiple qualitative methods reflects the particularities and limitations posed by
each case study site. We engaged in ethnographic methods through long-term (one year)
participant observation in Salt River as well as in an additional site – a homeless shelter in
Lansdowne – in order to learn about the very different lived experience of alcohol among
poor white men living on the fringe of an informal settlement. This was also undertaken to
challenge dominant tropes of the social and spatial nature of poverty in Cape Town. Focus
groups were conducted across all three sites to capture detailed narratives of experiences and
opinions. These were spilt by gender in Philippi and Freedom Park and with a church group
and community policing forum in Salt River (due to recruitment hurdles discussed below).
Finally, we undertook stakeholder interviews to understand how lived experiences are (or are
not) taken up in and by policy makers and the policy making process. In the Western Cape,
alcohol policy-making involves numerous stakeholders and our interview sample sought to
capture the breadth of stakeholders who influence alcohol policy, including government,
lobbyists and interest groups.
7. Ethical and methodological reflections on alcohol as a sensitive research topic
In this section, we reflect on the three main methods used in our research: ethnographic work,
focus groups, and stakeholder interviews, identifying ethical challenges and our responses to
these.
7.1 Ethnographic encounters
Ethnographic research was undertaken by two post-graduate researchers.1 Blake spent a year
doing participant observation at an established drinking space in Salt River (see Blake, this
1
Given the time consuming nature of this method, only students were able give the
time required for this depth of engagement.
volume). Blake's study examines the sense of community in this changing neighbourhood and
the role of the pub as a site of conviviality and memory. Salt River is increasingly shifting
from an old, primarily coloured South African suburb to a home of African immigrants. In
this context, gaining the trust of the locals in the pub was a critical entry point. As a white,
non-Capetonian South African, Blake had to provide some claim to the area in order to be
accepted as part of the local. That he had family who had worked in Salt River, had friends
with family links to the area and that he had lived in Salt River the year before were deemed
sufficient links to integrate him into the local group. Despite this welcome, access in some
ways remained a challenge for Blake as for safety reasons his visits were limited to daytime,
before the heaviest hours of drinking.
Blake typically found respondents willing to engage with him and discuss their relationship
to drinking and the drinking establishment in terms of sociability. As the research was
primarily in the site of consumption and the method was observation, many of the harms
associated with alcohol remain outside the scope of the study: violence tended to occur later
in the evening or in the home; health issues were difficult to identify and not raised by
participants; alcohol was often purchased for others and the financial impacts in the home
were unclear. This meant that many of the more sensitive aspects of drinking remained
outside the scope of the study and would have required an alternative methodology and new
research sites. One topic which may well have been considered sensitive - in that it goes
against some social norms- was the xenophobia of participants and how this was enacted in
and through the control of drinking spaces. Specifically, non-South African black people were
not welcome in the pub and were largely seen to be responsible for the negative
neighborhood change. Interestingly, the participant observation method may well have
provided a sufficiently comfortable environment for the respondents to speak freely on this
sensitive topic in the same way they may do in the absence of a researcher.
The second ethnographic study entailed a study of a homeless shelter in suburban Cape
Town. The aim was to work with an equal number of male and female residents at the shelter
over four months to understand their lived experiences of alcohol consumption and the
impact of excessive drinking on their day-to-day embodied and emotional states of being. At
the start of the study, volunteers were requested for participation in a study on alcohol
consumption; seven men but no women consented to take part, with the women typically
claiming they did not drink nor did they know anyone who did.
This reluctance to participate likely points to the sensitive nature of the topic and the stigma
surrounding alcohol and alcoholism even in the environment of a homeless shelter, where
experiences of addiction were far from exceptional. More specifically, it suggests the
gendered nature of such stigma; although men’s drinking was clearly frowned upon at the
shelter, several men were nonetheless open about their past or present difficulties with
addiction. The refusal of the women to engage in conversation about their own, or even
indirect, experiences of drinking, hints that taking part in or being associated with such
activities might carry greater social reprobation for them.
The study ultimately focused closely on the experiences and accounts of two men, BMW and
Mot, who had resided at the shelter for one and five years respectively. Good friends for
many years, the men were both clearly (and by their own admission) dependent on alcohol.
They drank regularly at a shebeen in a small informal settlement a few minutes’ walk from
the shelter. In this case, the sensitive aspects of alcohol were critical to the research study. To
overcome some of the difficulties in talking with them about the sensitive and personal issues
of the embodied and emotional impact of alcoholism, the research relied not just on
interviews but used body tracing and participant observation to achieve deeper insight into
the men’s lived experiences of drinking.
The body tracing exercises asked the men to ‘map’ on a self-drawn diagram of their body, the
places where they felt pain, joy or other sensations and emotions at different times of the day.
Although the method had limited success, with few men completing their ‘body book’ as
frequently as we had hoped, the exercise nevertheless provided insights into the ways in
which the men used and felt about alcohol and other drugs (e.g. OTC painkillers). For
example, BMW depicted his bodily changes over the course of a day. In the morning before a
drink, he felt insecure both physically and emotionally: he had ‘the shakes’ and sore eyes, and
felt nervous. After a drink he noted that his shakes had stopped, and he felt relaxed and
joyful. The drawings, and the conversations they facilitated, illustrated the men’s
contradictory relationships with alcohol. Although both were fully aware that their alcohol
consumption was harmful, the drawings showed the ways in which alcohol also served to
alleviate the pain and discomfort of withdrawal and enabled the men to function more
effectively in their everyday social environments.
Perhaps the most useful method in this study was participant observation at the shebeen
where BMW and Mot regularly drank. Being present at this site enabled first-hand
observation of some of the contradictions of these men’s lives and drinking. Though
described by the men as a ‘rough’, ‘terrible’ and ‘shocking’ place that was also ‘dirty’ and
‘crowded’, the shebeen was evidently the place where they felt most at home. Warmly
welcomed by other patrons (and in stark contrast to the xenophobic exclusion of other
drinkers in Salt River), the men engaged in cheerful conversation and sometimes singing, and
left noticeably relaxed and at ease with themselves and others after a drinking session. Again,
they were in no doubt as to the damaging effects of the ‘chemical plonk’ they drank there, yet
both clearly felt a sense of belonging and acceptance at the shebeen that was not available to
them anywhere else, an aspect of shebeens thoroughly discounted in policy discourse.
Importantly, the process of conducting research at the shebeen was not without complication.
As a young female, the researcher, Wilkins, was uncomfortable going alone and requested the
company of a second researcher. In this case, the presence of two young white students
clearly impacted the experience for Mot and BMW, even to the extent that they walked to the
shebeen along the pavements, not cutting through backyards and over fences as they typically
would.
7.2. Focus groups
The second method we reflect on is focus groups, although as our research progressed we
came to consider them “unfocused groups”. This term was not meant to critique the facilitator
or participants for “going off topic” but instead to convey the exploratory nature of our
research. Our aim was for the group to help shape the research focus through their responses,
as we sought to understand how problems were framed, and alcohol’s associations
[connotations?]. We therefore needed to be open to where the conversation took us: it was
telling that women participants prompted to discuss alcohol focused on violence and that
young men were excited about the sociability of drinking and evaded the negative aspects.
This approach presented some challenges, particularly given that we had to use external
facilitators for language reasons, but generally proved to help us understand how our
participants tell stories of alcohol.
We originally intended to conduct four focus groups in each of the selected communities with
participants recruited through various community institutions including NGOs, churches,
government. However, the sensitive nature of the research and particular institutional barriers
at some sites meant we were unable to recruit respondents as expected. In Philippi, where one
of the researchers had a long-established relationship, an NGO recruited respondents.
Although we requested respondents who did not know each other given the sensitivity of the
topic, it was clear that the participants were all familiar with the NGO and each other. Given
that we lacked other entry points, we conducted the focus groups despite this limitation. In
Salt River where the NGOs in the community cater primarily to those outside the suburb, we
resorted to mixed age/race/gender groups organized by a church and the community policing
forum. In Freedom Park, where the same researcher also had an established relationship, we
were only able to recruit sufficient numbers of women for a single focus group; no men
agreed to participate. We suggest that the different gendered responses to participation
between this study (in which women were easier to recruit) and the ethnographic work above
(in which men were easier to recruit) is because the focus groups were explicitly framed as
about talking about drinking, not about individual experiences of drinking. Although in our
communication regarding recruitment we emphasized our interest in different experiences
with drinking, it may be that the men in Freedom Park felt that participation would raise their
visibility, especially given the problems of domestic violence in the neighbourhood.
In planning for our research, a key challenge for such a diverse research context is the
selection of facilitator. Matching language, race and gender would have meant recruiting
twelve facilitators for our expected focus groups; in the end, we struggled to identify
facilitators with language skills and sufficient experience working in similar communities
regardless of race and gender. We worked with a black man (for both Xhosa focus groups), a
coloured woman (both Afrikaans female focus groups), and a white man (both Afrikaans
male groups), a choice shaped by pragmatics and personalities as much as race or gender.
Specifically, the selected black isiXhosa speaker had experience in Philippi and community
facilitation, his demeanour was very open and his relative youth suggested that women would
not simply defer to him in conversation. In contrast, we were not confident that either of the
particular Afrikaans speakers would be able to successfully engage across a gender divide.
The first way in which Lee (1993) suggests a topic may be sensitive is that it deals with
intimate or personal issues which individuals may not want to discuss. For many respondents
in our focus groups, respondents appeared comfortable discussing drinking . We found this to
be particularly true in our focus groups with young men who were eager to share stories of
what the local shebeens were like, and for older women discussing the problems caused by
“other people”. However, aspects of the drinking experience did appear sensitive. For
example, the tone of the focus group with young men changed when asked about the negative
consequences of drinking. The jovial eagerness to talk about what, when and why people
drink, was replaced by silence and shifting of participants’ gazes downwards, away from the
facilitator as well as each other. We suspect that this is not just due to discomfort with sharing
this in a focus group setting, but also because this is not a topic the young men typically
discuss amongst themselves.
During the focus groups, a member of the project team was always present. Our goal was to
simply be present as observers, however, our clear status as outsiders meant we were
generally a curiosity. For focus groups in Philippi, a young white woman and man from the
team were present, but during the during focus group with older women the man was asked to
leave because the participants continuously watched him although he was outside the circle.
During the focus group with young black men, one of the participants made clear that he was
a university student. While all others spoke isiXhosa and engaged each other, the student
began speaking in English and directed his comments at the young white research team
member. When the team member did not respond (although she was concerned that this was
rude) and it became clear that the drinking stories shared by other respondents were
“acceptable” responses, the university student began to engage more with his peers and
shifted to speaking in isiXhosa.
We were less successful in responding during the younger women's focus group. In this
event, most of the women appeared to know each other; while we attempted to get
participants who did not know each other, this was not really possible given our constraints in
using the NGOs. People who know each other enhance collective memory and may well
make individuals more comfortable with each other- this turned out to be a positive
connection for the young and older men. However, for the women, this also meant that they
knew that one of the other women was a drinker, and someone whom they felt drank in
problematic ways. Repeatedly, participants looked at this woman when describing the
negative impacts of drinking or telling specific stories of alcohol-related harm. While the
facilitator repeatedly intervened to suggest that stories not be about anyone and that the goal
was to share stories, not judge, the established relations in the group could not be overcome
in this instance.
7.3 Stakeholder interviews
Given our concern here with lived experience, the task of stakeholder interviews takes on a
slightly different mantle. In our research, stakeholder interviews were conducted in two
contrasting realms: in Philippi with community leaders, and with stakeholders in the
provincial and policy policy sector. Drivdal (see with Lawhon, this issue) sought to conduct
interviews with shebeen owners in Philippi, where she had spent the previous year engaging
with stakeholders on community leadership. These efforts were complemented by two
research assistants who also sought to interview shebeen owners in other parts of Philippi.
Race, gender and personality appeared to have played a significant role in the ability of the
researchers to engage with the owners. Interestingly, the research assistant with the most
similar background- a black, isiXhosa speaking male- had the most difficulty. He was
accused of being a spy for government or other shebeen owners, and told to leave the area
under threat of violence. The second research assistant was white, but had spent extensive
time working in similar communities and was familiar with the shebeen scene. Owners, we
suggest, responded positively to this unusual case - a white South African man at ease
conversing and drinking in the shebeen.
Drivdal, who had worked with locally recruited research assistants in the area previously,
extended the work to interviews with shebeen owners. She then returned with the same
research assistants for observations and follow up questions. While all three assistants were
supportive of the research project and interested in the work, the young female research
assistant was very reluctant to conduct the interviews as shebeens are “hectic places”.
Nonetheless, research assistants were able to begin developing a picture of the local shebeen
culture, including some understanding of the diversity of spaces. Drivdal was welcomed on
the one occasion that she attended a shebeen, but such participant observation provided
complicated consent- the parting words of one customer were “let’s keep this our secret.”
Given the various limitations of this data, these interviews were largely used by researchers
as informing their own sense of context rather than as “facts”.
Herrick conducted interviews with policy stakeholders (see also this volume), an important
complement to the understanding of lived experience gleaned from focus groups and
ethnographic methods because they demonstrate how perceptions of lived experience become
enfolded (or not) within policy “solutions”. One of the frequent criticisms of policymakers is
their distanciation from the subjects of their policies, whether by class, education, income,
ethnicity or gender. This is no less true of alcohol control stakeholders and research in the UK
has examined the middle-class fetishisation of “civilised European” drinking (in
contradistinction to disorderly, English binge drinking) as a policy goal (Jayne, Valentine et
al. 2008; Measham and Ostergaard 2010; Herrick 2011). However, while even less is known
about the alcohol policymaking sphere in South Africa, given the country’s extreme socioeconomic inequalities, it is fair to assert that lived experiences are likely to be exceptionally
divergent and this will have an impact on the ways in which stakeholders “rationalise”
experience to formulate policy recommendation.
Significant differences in views on the contextual drivers of drinking were clear between (and
within) representatives from City and Province, public health, industry, NGOs and trade
associations. Indeed, alcohol’s stakeholders are found across numerous domains, reflecting
both aspirations for intersectoral working and the reality of siloed and often conflictual
approaches to policy. These domains, in turn, tend to influence and condition the narratives
stakeholders use to contextualise and justify alcohol as a problem and, therefore, by
extension, the renditions of lived experience taken up and, sometimes, acted upon. Thus,
somewhat controversially, stakeholder interviews primarily revealed a frustrated desire to
understand the lived experiences of the poor, but a reliance either on the research of others
(for example, the work of Holtman 2011 was recalled by interviewers on several occasions)
or received wisdom derived from popular stereotypes to do so. Stakeholder narratives did
exhibit some striking commonalities across professional differences and one such area was
the predominance of two normalised narratives of causality and effect. The entrenchment of
these narratives is in the first instance, analytically fascinating, but it also poses challenges to
the researcher trying to mine perceptions and understandings of alcohol. Further, it raises
ethical challenges for the researcher struggling to remain objective rather than question the
narratives that are repeatedly rehearsed.
The two most common narratives that circulate between and across policymaking domains
are the causal influence of the ‘dop’ system on drinking habits and norms in the Western
Cape. The second is the schizophrenic nature of the shebeen as ‘den of iniquity’ and/ or site
of Apartheid resistance and female entrepreneurship. Given the entrenched nature of this
received wisdom, the challenge for the interviewer was to get policymakers to question these
naturalised assumptions in ways that acknowledged their importance, but also encouraged
reflexivity and critical engagement. This was essential to the success of the interviews, which
risked limited insight due to the frequency with which causal explanations for the Western
Cape’s relationship with alcohol were reduced to the ‘dop’ legacy or the shebeen “situation”.
However, such probing for further reflection was frequently undermined by the interviewer’s
own positionality as a white, middle class, non-South African. This had the effect of
stakeholders assuming a lack of awareness of the South African context, a tendency to take
explanations “back to basics” and no doubt contributing to the likelihood of rehearsing
normative explanations. The geographic and cultural divide here between interviewer and
interviewee was no doubt a significant factor in constraining the criticality of some responses,
as was the political sensitivity of the liquor legislative process. However, this distance also
had the effect of allowing some interviewees to be more open and start to challenge the status
quo. Alcohol for many stakeholders is politically charged and questioning the party line2 is
2
fraught with tension. Many interviewees were sceptical of the Western Cape Liquor Bill, but
as many believed that its concern with closing shebeens and culling the illegal trade was
well-placed. In such cases, the interviewer’s status as non-South African enabled a fuller
discussion of the political aspirations loaded onto alcohol control.
8. Towards sensitive research of alcohol
Our study of alcohol in Cape Town proved to be sensitive in all the ways proposed by Lee
(1993), although what precisely the sensitive aspects were remains somewhat of a conjecture.
Drinking itself, we suggest, was rarelyan intimate or personal issue which respondents feared
to discuss. Drinkers were eager to share positive stories of sociability, particularly when
engaged in their drinking spaces. However, the harms associated with alcohol - particularly
those occurring outside the drinking space - were much more intimate issues which drinkers
were more reluctant to discuss in any of the research contexts. Non-drinkers, on the other
hand, were often keen to tell these stories. The drinkers and victims of alcohol-related
violence - often pointed out implicitly or explicitly by other focus group participants- were
evidently less comfortable. Such reflections suggest that, under some conditions, stories of
harm may be willingly told, but careful consideration is needed regarding the positionality of
different participants in the conversation. Further, more reflection is needed on how to
provide an appropriate space for drinkers of all genders to discuss alcohol-related harm.
Second, our study raises questions regarding the construction of sensitivity because of
deviance. A conversation may be sensitive if the responses are viewed as “deviant” by peers,
The Western Cape Liquor Bill was first drafted by the ANC, but later become a
strong pre-election cause of the Democratic Alliance and its party leader and ex-Mayor of
Cape Town, Helen Zille.
community norms, and/or broader social norms. In the case of alcohol, for example, heavy
drinking may well be considered typical amongst one's peers, but deviant by other members
of the community, for example church goers (Lawhon forthcoming) or some forms of media
(Lawhon and Herrick, n.d.). Racialised norms makes this point particularly relevant in Cape
Town. The relativity of deviance has influence regarding the interviews and facilitators, as
participants appeared to be more sensitive to questions which they thought the researcher
would find deviant. However, choosing similar interviewers provided its own limitations,
particularly because of the importance of power.
Alcohol is interwoven with vested interests at multiple scales. Many respondents have a
specific interest in what the findings show, and as such, an incentive to either make the topic
illegible or to mislead the researchers. Consideration of power was essential for
understanding participation, including power within the household, community and at a
political level. For example, the separation of focus groups by gender was, we felt, useful for
enabling women to speak about domestic issues including violence and control over
household income. However, given that our interviews in Salt River were with a church and
the community policing forum, the participants were generally community members for
whom alcohol-related harm was not part of their individual household. This, we believe, was
why the respondents themselves disregarded our suggestion for gender separated focus
groups.
Additionally, illegality and informality produces both methodological and ethical issues. This
(economically significant) element of the national liquor industry is largely unknown to
outsiders, unquantified, unmapped and viewed as illegitimate by many. Researching liquor
seeks to render its geographies visible and its drinking spaces and drinkers vulnerable. This
invokes an ethical dilemma: how do researchers protect research subjects in a context of
illegality which, under the terms of many ethics committees, would place the researcher
under an obligation to disclose these practices to the police? Further, respondents have
limited motivation to “expose” or make legible their operations as they may fear for their
own safety and may want to fend off the unwanted attention of the authorities. That our
project achieved at least some success in interviewing shebeen owners suggests that our
explanation of our interest in sharing stories may have been adequate to overcome this fear.
Indeed, in the context of political change around alcohol, shebeen owners may well have
thought it to their advantage to make their stories known.
Research on the lived experience of drinking can be stymied by the various types of
sensitivities related to alcohol, and not attending to these challenges will both limit the scope
and validity of the research as well as present ethical dilemmas. For example, we failed to
develop appropriate strategies for recruitment given the sensitivity of the topic for men
drinkers. We suggest that sharing our experience through explicit reflection is one means
through which to improve both our own research practice and that of others in the future. One
approach through which we hoped to transcend these sensitivities was to distinguish our work
from the typical understanding of “what white people want to know”. We sought to be clear
with participants that our research aimed to make all experiences known – both positive and
negative; in the focus groups the facilitators purposefully did not intervene, allowing
participants to question each others’ assertions and justify opinions to the group. Yet, in our
work with key policy stakeholders, we sought to balance “listening” with encouraging critical
reflexivity by means such as iterative probing. Clearly distinguishing the research from
judgment was also essential in the participant observations; researchers who appeared
comfortable and participated in drinking were more likely to gain participant trust and in-
depth insight. At the same time, such drinking needed to respect ethical conventions by not
sanctioning the harms associated with it (i.e. drink driving), or the xenophobic commentaries.
9. Conclusion
As geographers seek to understand experiences which can be personal and intimate, carry
significant stigma, or influenced by power relations, reflections on researching sensitive
topics within the health and social sciences has much to add to limited reflection in urban,
development and health/medical geographies. Our research on alcohol in Cape Town
illustrates that, ‘it is not individual topics that are sensitive, but their context and
environment’ (Elam and Fenton 2003, 16). This context and environment extends as much to
the locale in which research takes places as the behaviour and locales that the research seeks
to understand. These are issues to which geographers are undoubtedly deeply attuned, but in
the study of alcohol, researchers from all disciplines need to be mindful of potential
sensitivities at each stage in project development: case study choice; sampling; recruitment;
access; safe and appropriate places for research activities; encouraging open dialogue;
analysis; and reporting back on the findings. This is not least as the dynamics of sensitivity
play out in different ways at each of these stages as well as having a cumulative effect at the
point of reporting back.
The paper has reflected on the nature of the sensitivities raised by this research on the lived
experiences of drink and drinking as well as some of the strategies deployed to mitigate their
effects. In some instances, these were effective, while in others (such as trying to recruit men
into focus groups in Freedom Park), our best efforts were to no avail. Here, while men’s
reticence to take part actually provides insight into some of the broader gender dynamics of
Freedom Park, it did little to help our analysis. We therefore agree that research on sensitive
topics ‘can be very unpredictable’ (Johnson and Clarke 2003, 423). We also acknowledge that
our shortcomings may offer lessons for other researchers similarly interested in the complex
lived experiences of drinking and drinkers.
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