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Deepening The Data With More Voices: Invitation for in-depth interviews

Deepening the data with more voices

Where you might come in
We are entering the next phase of our AidWorkVoices project and again need your help, this time from a few of you who want or may be wiling to share your stories.

One of the most interesting nuggets to come from the survey data thus far are the thoughts you’ve had about identity.  In the post “You are as you are seen” many of our respondents–you–wrestled with exactly that: how you are seen by those around you matters on many levels. Many of you believe that the way you are seen (for example:  young, white, attractive Western female) has an impact on your overall effectiveness.  A second impact is that on the self concept of the aid worker: how she or he feels about her or himself.

Our goal at this particular stage is to deepen the data with more in-depth voices speaking about identity management both in the ‘field’ and in other locations, including at home, and throughout the aid industry. We especially want to hear from aid workers whose ‘at home’ identity (what Goffman would call ‘back stage’) may at times present a challenge.Goffman

We’re specifically working here with the concept of “master status” in sociology. There are two general categories of master status: Those that are disclosed as soon as people see you, such as skin color, sex (probably), age (possibly), and some kinds of physical disability or special-ability; And those that can remain disclosed with some effort, for example religion (or lack thereof), sexuality, and relationship/marital status.

Who would we like to talk to?
We are interested in more in-depth interviews with aid workers that may have faced and/or currently face workplace challenges related to “how they are seen.” Basically, we want to talk to any aid or development worker in a setting where your sex, sexual orientation, marital status, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, local/non-local designation, age, religion, worldview, or other identity status somehow shapes your ability to be effective. Some examples include (but of course are not limited to):

  • Jewish aid workers in predominantly Muslim locations, or vice versa.
  • Atheist aid workers working in faith-based organizations and/or in locations where devotion to some religion is expected (Bangladesh comes to mind, based on recent news coverage).
  • Non-heterosexual aid workers in, well, most anywhere.
  • Red-headed aid workers (or those with some other  exceptional physical attribute.  Any 2 meter+ aid workers?)
  • Differently-abled aid workers (sight/hearing impaired, ambulatory challenges, etc.)
  • Medication dependent aid workers (e.g., insulin dependent).

You get the idea…..

interviewSpecifically we want to arrange open-ended interviews (via phone, Skype or otherwise) with aid workers who deal with identity management issues such as the above.  If you are interested and/or have questions please send a message to me (Arcaro) with details of how you would prefer to be contacted.

We expect that interviews will take approximately 30 minutes. While we may need to interact with you as yourself in the context of an interview, we promise to maintain your anonymity in any publication or other external reference to your interview.

The big picture
We are now entering a very intense phase of analyzing and writing about all of the survey results, both quantitative and qualitative. In addition to making regular (weekly) posts to this blog we are in the midst of outlining a book-length treatment of all the results.  Our hope is that we have a beta-version draft out by late fall.

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Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

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The Role of Humanitarian Aid & Development?

Question 60: “Please elaborate on your views about the future of humanitarian aid work.”

The majority of respondents who have answered this question thus far seem to have focused their comments on things ultimately to do with technical delivery, implementation and efficiency. But a few have chosen take on what I consider to be probably the most important question facing the humanitarian aid and development industry today.

“I think the aid industry is still figuring out what its role should be and how it should have an impact – and the people who can support that (taxpayers, donors, etc) still aren’t sure about its value. I am hopeful but somewhat skeptical that the aid industry will continue to grow and always have a positive impact, as a result.”

This response hits it on the head. What is our role, as aid workers and aid organizations, vis-à-vis the bigger picture? Maybe times were simpler 30 years ago, before Rwanda, or 20 years ago, before Hurricane Mitch and Kosovo, or 10 years ago, before The Tsunamis. Now, in a post-Haiti earthquake and full-on Syria, South Sudan, Central African Republic period the standardized, pat answers fall flat. That famous quote about aid being “a measure of humanity, always insufficient…” (widely attributed to ICRC) is great marketing but it doesn’t really help us analyze either the increasingly complicated contexts where we work, or the less obvious, sometimes long-lasting effects that we often have on those contexts.

“I think the line will become more and more blurred between humanitarian aid work and military aid/stabilisation/restructuring/military operations in the future and we will need to stop pretending that aid organisations are not implementing the policies of donor governments and are not neutral (in the vast majority of cases) and are spreading the capitalist ideology of the “western” world.”

This response hits closer to home with reality than many of us wish was the case. It seems clear that the humanitarian principle of impartiality and neutrality are aspirations, not descriptions of how things are in fact.

“Humanitarian aid will always be needed and will have a positive impact on lives, however I am increasingly concerned about the reality that we are responding to political crises and conflicts of which there is no end in sight and no political will to solve. Humanitarian aid cannot and should not be used as a political tool and the frequency of how often that is happening currently is worrying.”

And then…

“I hope that the amount of cash we funnel through humanitarian aid will change; though that’s unlikely given the governments who need to support their foreign policy interests. I do think that aid as we are currently doing it is on track to become irrelevant and boring, and not a core part of change-making in the world.”

Personally, I remain a believer in what I call the humanitarian enterprise. I think we have a role to play in changing the world for the better, and I hope that we can find a way out of the irrelevant-boring loop.

What do you think? What is our role? What does our future look like?

Take the aid worker survey. Comment in the thread below this post. Talk to us on Facebook.

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J.

J. is a full-time professional humanitarian worker with more than twenty years of experience in the aid industry. He currently holds a real aid world day job at a real humanitarian organization as a senior disaster response manager. In a previous blogosphere life J. wrote a blog about aid work called Tales From the Hood, and was half owner/curator of the uber-awesome Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like.These days he occasionally blogs about serious topics at AidSpeak (aidspeak.wordpress.com). J. has written several books, including the world's first humanitarian romance novel, Disastrous Passion, and a non-fiction book entitled Letters Left Unsent. Follow J. on Twitter @evilgeniuspubs

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Yes, a snapshot can be useful…

…but there is so much more being offered by many respondents.

As I read though the many responses to the various open ended questions on the survey many patterns emerge.  One pattern is that many people will qualify their statements and add critical context.  Here are just three examples that came in response to the question about corruption [“Please use the space below to elaborate on the questions above related to corruption.”]:

  • In the organisation, it is bloated with money and many people simply gorge at the trough of development aid. I am thankfully removed from this in my field, I have little reason to interact with others in my organisation. I do see the old boys network everywhere, the British upper middle classes in particular seem to have taken over other organisations, such as parts of the UN for example. Corruption is endemic to the human condition however. Regarding the region (mostly Africa) – there is a fine line between helping ones friends and families and corruption, in some cultural contexts this line is not where we expect. It is imperialism to impose our values on others like this when we have so much ‘acceptable’ corruption in our own private and public sector. We should get our own house in order (for me, the UK) before we judge others.
  • Where do I begin? Once of the problems of BIG AID is the endemic corruption it carries with it. In poor countries, lots of money connected to faceless donors creates a magnetic field around it which distorts markets, expectations and integrity. Battling this is a full time job and demands a canny understanding of the context. This demands battle hardened veterans who stay around and can manage the corruption issues. However, the nature of humanitarian work is one of constant turn over, so this is an issue. When it comes to “development work”, then they have no excuse for the rampant corruption, which I have witnessed. I really feel that development aid of the big dollar variety has in many places really created corruption, dependency and undercut local efforts at self-development. It’s almost as if this industry was in the business of keeping itself busy under the myth of lifting people out of poverty.
  • I did not like your choices. A key challenge for humanitarian actors is a very narrow donor base (US+N/W Europe) which is vulnerable to budget cuts. We are also entering a new time where most people live in middle income countries, and their governments have greater capacity. In many cases our business model is no longer so relevant. ‘Humanitarian’ work has really ballooned in scope and volume during the last 15 years, in part to get around Paris Declaration-type principles and circumvent host country governments. I think this will have to be scaled back. We are also all very confused what ‘humanitarian’ is – is it defined by the funding source (donor country emergency funding) or is it the type of work (temporary and unplanned)? Much if not most work funded by donors through emergency envelopes is really quite routine and planned, but this modality allows less recipient government scrutiny and coordination – for better or worse.

The issues raised in these two thoughtful responses are many, timely, and critical to the future of humanitarian aid work.snapshot data

The third example above sums it well:  “I do not like your choices.”  Indeed, I agree most closed ended choices are boxes that beg to be questioned.

The nature of the beast with any survey is that you are taking a snapshot:  this is how people responded when they took the survey.  Happily -though with no surprise- many who gave us the gift of their time and thoughts in the survey have nodded at the inherent limitations of trying to put into boxes and short answers their insights and have offered up some narrative haikus that offer good points of departure for more discussion.  As I have pointed out before, that is indeed the main point of this exercise, this survey.

To rephrase, the inexorable trap of inferring a monolithic and oversimplified answer to any question, particularly the sometimes nuanced and complex ones in this survey, can be minimized -or at least addressed- by openly recognizing that taking a snapshot of a process is impossible:  the transform from many dimensions (certainly temporal being the main one) to just a flat two-dimensional view is a trick no one has mastered completely.

As we continue to move forward with collecting responses I must offer a heartily ‘thank you’ to all who have so thoughtfully joined the conversation thus far.

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Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

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More voices coming soon….

Non-English versions of the survey coming soon

Though I don’t have any firm numbers to go by, a quick scan of available data is that English is not the first language of most humanitarian aid workers.  While it is a fact of life that the default language of many (most?) organizations in the aid world industry is English (with French coming in a very strong second), of the over 300,000 aid and development workers globally I’ll repeat:  for most English is at best a second language.

This fact is perhaps reflected in our data in that we have attracted a very small number of local aid workers:

Screen Shot 2014-03-28 at 12.23.23 PM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our main goal in taking on this project was to provide a space for more discussion about the lives and views of aid workers and so, toward that goal and more specifically toward the goal of hearing more -and more diverse- voices, we are working on translating the survey into Arabic, French, Spanish and German.  Please send us a Tweet if you have suggestions for other languages – especially if you have someone able to do the translation.

In other news, check out this article in Devex International Development Career Forum that mentions our survey and also quotes my collaborator J.

 

 

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Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

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Perceptions, Realities?

Perceptions, Realities?

Our survey of aid workers (read:  anyone who’s ever somehow been part of the aid industry, ever) has been live for about one week, now. We’re seeing some interesting patterns begin to emerge out of the quantitative portions, and we’re getting some really interesting responses from you in the open-ended boxes. Thank you, and please keep those responses coming!

One piece of the picture of who you are (and me, too. I’m an aid worker), which I find particularly interesting, is what’s starting to emerge from multiple-choice questions #44 and #46, and “elaborate your thoughts” open-ended answer boxes which accompany them both. In their entirety, these two questions read:

Question 44: Many (most?) humanitarian aid workers will ultimately become ex-humanitarian aid workers. Excluding those few -but tragic- that will die in service, which below do you think is the *most* common reason why humanitarian aid workers choose to leave this line of work?

Question 46: Many (most?) humanitarian aid workers will ultimately become ex-humanitarian aid workers. Excluding the unlikely and tragic possibility that you will die in service, if you do so by choice which below do you think will be *your* reason for leaving this line of work?

So, basically, why do you think most people leave the aid industry? And then why do you think you will eventually leave?

Bear in mind that we’re not anywhere near closing the survey, so this obviously preliminary analysis could (and very possibly will) change before we’re all done. But one week in, here’s how you answered (screenshots directly from Survey Monkey):

Responses to why *others* leave the aid sector
Responses to why *others* are likely to leave the aid sector

 

responses to why *you* are likely to leave the aid sector.
responses to why *you* are likely to leave the aid sector.

 

My quick read-outs:

Retirement & Leave the Sector: It looks as if it’s fairly common to assume is that you will all eventually retire. There appear to be similarly strong assumptions around simply leaving the sector, say, for work in another industry. My (again, very initial) takeaway here is that this probably points to the reality that we increasingly see work in the aid sector as exactly that: work.

Maybe we work somewhere in the aid industry until we retire. This assumes that we will retire, which assumes some sort of retirement planning, which in turn assumes we’re somehow compensated enough to enable an actual retirement. There will come a time when we say, “okay, I’m done. I going to stop making the world better, and just play golf…”

Leaving the sector, while pretty broad and encompassing, also suggests that many of us see this all as “just another job.” Other studies have shown that it is common for people to shift industries several times over the course of an adult working lifetime. The aid industry is one of those industries, like many others, that people increasingly cycle through, as one option among many.

Termination: It was very interesting to see that almost none of you view termination (being fired) as much of a possibility, either for others (0.34%), or for yourselves (o.69%). Many elaborated this in the open-ended box following question #48 (“what do you think is the most common reason humanitarian workers are fired?”). In the words of one respondent, simply:

“Overall, I think you have to try pretty hard to get fired.”

Yep. This rings true, based on my experience. Outright termination is fairly rare.

Burnout & Disillusionment: The most interesting for me, personally, were the results that came out of Burnout and Disillusionment. Look at the tables above. Almost as many of you see disillusionment as almost as common a reason as retirement for others to leave the aid industry.

Tabulating views on “others” versus “you” were interesting as well. Based on results so far, many of you see others as more likely to leave because of disillusionment than you, yourself (others, 19.32%; self, 16.96%). This contrast is even more marked if we look at “burnout.” More of you chose burnout as the reason for others leaving the sector than any other option (27.8%), but “termination” was the only option with fewer choices than burnout as the reason why you would likely leave (9.69%).

My read: Basically we see others as burnt-out and disillusioned, or at least highly at-risk, while we still see ourselves as less so, or perhaps somehow immune. What does it mean? I’m not sure—still pondering. There’s a level at which it feels as if many of us have a generally negative view of our sector, yet remain basically optimistic (or maybe wishful) ourselves.

 

What do you think? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments thread below this post. You can also tweet to @tarcaro and @talesfromthhood with the hashtag #humsurvey. Be sure to follow my own snapshots of the #humsurvey results and discuss me and other respondents in more or less real time over on my Facebook page.

And of course, be sure to get as many as possible of your aid industry friends to take the survey.

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J.

J. is a full-time professional humanitarian worker with more than twenty years of experience in the aid industry. He currently holds a real aid world day job at a real humanitarian organization as a senior disaster response manager. In a previous blogosphere life J. wrote a blog about aid work called Tales From the Hood, and was half owner/curator of the uber-awesome Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like.These days he occasionally blogs about serious topics at AidSpeak (aidspeak.wordpress.com). J. has written several books, including the world's first humanitarian romance novel, Disastrous Passion, and a non-fiction book entitled Letters Left Unsent. Follow J. on Twitter @evilgeniuspubs

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Thanks for taking our survey….

Thanks for taking our survey…. and what was that all about, anyway?

Don’t know what we’re talking about? Take The Survey! 

Thanks for taking the time to join this conversation. You’re probably wondering who are we are why are we doing this?

First things, first. Meet the research collaborators:

 

This project, according to “J.”

I’ve spent the better part of the past twenty years believing that something was wrong with me.  I knew the cause, of course: I am a professional aid worker, and I have been for some time. And that fact alone seemed, for a while, to explain it all. Aid-work-induced weirdness was for many years something easy to hold up as a pseudo-explanation for why I couldn’t or couldn’t be bothered to try to fit in or get along.

But you get to a point—or at least I did—where the simple acknowledgement that “aid work affects you” is no longer sufficient. It’s not sufficient because we want to understand ourselves, and others like us. I am now in a space where I need to understand, supervise, lead, and in a few cases even mentor actual, young, newly-minted aid workers. The ability to analyze and make some sense of my own experience, including those moments of jarring disconnect, is a critical attribute.

But there’s also more to it than enhancing one’s own level of self-awareness. There are real world—real aid world—consequences to not understanding ourselves, as aid workers, too. In her paper entitled ‘Living Well’ while ‘Doing Good’? (Missing) debates on altruism and professionalism in aid work, Dr. Anne-Meike Fechter argues that:

“A persistent and exclusive focus on the ‘other’ obstructs more open and necessary debates on the role of aid workers. Such academic invisibility allows popular and misleading stereotypes of aid workers to flourish; more pertinently, it hinders honest appraisals of the experiences of aid work and its challenges.”

In other words, it is important to understand us, too. Aid workers. We are part of the aid equation, too, and if we’re not understood, neither can our roles and contributions be understood. And if our roles and contributions cannot be understood, then we cannot make improvements to it all.  Good aid requires good aid workers, and good aid workers require and understanding about what an aid worker is in the first place.

All that having been said, we’re an understudied and largely misunderstood group.

Which is why, I’m particularly proud and pleased to be part of a new project meant to address exactly this. It’s my privilege to be able to collaborate in my personal time with Dr. Tom Arcaro of Elon University on a project to study us! The first step, as any real aid worker will appreciate, is to do a survey, and that is what brought you to this blog.

 

This project, according to Tom:

As founding Director of the Periclean Scholars program and Mentor of the inaugural Class of 2006, I have mucked around on the edges of aid work for the last 12 plus years.  Guiding my Class through their experience partnering with HIV/AIDS related NGO’s on the ground in Namibia  gave me a deep appreciate for the complexity of aid work and thus began my long and serious emersion into the world of humanitarian outreach and development work.  In the last several years I have been teaching a course on ‘global citizenship’ in general and more specifically about the issues related to humanitarian aid.  The work that I am doing now in studying the aid world is important to be on many levels but most critically because (1) I believe that a robust conversation about the realities of how we are responding to our global issues is vitally important and that (2) knowing more about the views of those most directly involved in this response is a positive step toward a more just world for all.

So, thanks for being part of the conversation.  Stay tuned to this blog for frequent ‘mini’ polls which will appear on the right side up this page (see above now for the first one), ongoing presentation and analysis of the emerging data from the survey and, we hope, both heat and light.

 

Thanks for stopping by! Please promote this survey on your Facebook page, Twitter, or by any other mode you might prefer. Be sure to check back here often for updates and discussion as our research progresses.

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Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

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