Blog 5

Blog 5

1. Progress report - How many interviews did you do so far? And/or how many materials (i.e. media texts) did you research, and how did you research on the texts – textual analysis, genre study, etc.?

I have done 5 interviews regarding to my research last week, there were 3 elderlies, 1 housewife and 1 worker who worked in the construction site nearby. I think my questions that I asked towards the interviewees were specific enough to my research topic and I was quite satisfied to their answers / feedbacks. Here were the 4 main questions for the face-to-face interviews.

     

1.What do you think Cha Chaan Teng Culture is?

 2.What is the most essential element of Cha Chaan Teng?

  

3.What is the role of Cha Chaan Teng towards the neighborhood and the elderly?

4.What is your opinion comparing with Cha Chaan Teng in the past and nowadays?

Besides, 15 questionnaires were sent out in late March and they have been collected this week. I was still generating and understanding the result of the questionnaires. Therefore, it took some time for me in order to interpret and comprehend the meanings / attitudes towards the respondents, but it would be fine.

For the research materials, apart from the readings you gave me in the meetings, which was related to local space and identity for subculture in Hong Kong, I have also found out an interesting paper, which was related to social value that I thought I could have a chance to apply it to the theoretical framework also. However, I didn’t know whether I could use it or not and I would like to ask for your opinion / permission. It was written by Chris Johnston and it named as “What is Social Values?” published in 1992. The reason why I considered it was useful since it mentioned that social value was about collective attachment to places that embody meanings important to a community and these places were usually community owned or publicly accessible or in some other ways appropriated into people’s daily lives. Moreover, it indicated that places of social value were normally found with the characters that the author mentioned, for example, it provided a spiritual connection or traditional connectional between the past and present; it provided an essential reference point in a community’s identity or sense of itself or historical grounding; it provided and essential community function that over time developed into an attachment that was more than utility value etc.

Here’s the link of the discussion paper: 

http://www.contextpl.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/What_is_Social_Value_web.pdf

2. Preliminary findings – What do you discover up till now? (For example, what are the commonalities amongst the texts/interviews?) How do your findings help you answer your research question?  

Regarding to the field observations, I acknowledged that 2 Cha Chaan Teng that I visited were family 

business and one of the boss told me that the restaurant were generally self-owned and self operated by the licenses. There were a lot of workers who worked in the construction site nearby dined in Cha Chaan Teng during lunch while there were more neighbors, elderlies, housewife and regular customer during breakfast and afternoon tea.

Regarding to the responses from the interviewees, they all mentioned about Cha Chaan Teng was a place with easy-going atmosphere since they could chat with loud voice. Also, it was a traditional character from their point of views that couldn’t be substituted / covered by the other restaurant, such as fast food shop and eastern/ western food restaurant. Furthermore, it created a sense of human kindness since the boss and the man “伙記” would usually had a close relationship with the customers, they were talkative and would like to share their stories / life experiences no matter who you were.



Student Name: Chu Chi Wai

Student ID: 10550989