SL Geography

Geography Fieldwork Update

Hi everyone!

     As you may have read in any previous posts about Geography, we have begun our fieldwork! Our fieldwork question is: What factors affect the length of time spent by migrant workers in City X? We have written up a questionnaire to hand out to people that match the scope of our fieldwork, which is adults who live in the United States on a work visa. There are several teachers at our school who fit this criteria, but we chose to broaden our "sampling" by finding migrant workers at other locations (such as hotels, restaurants, etc). To get started, we called up several restaurants that we thought might employ migrant workers. Over the phone, we talked to all of them about the same thing:

1. What our names were
2. What school we went to, as well as our grade
3. Why we were phoning
4. What the nature of our fieldwork was

We then asked them the following questions:

1. Whether they employed migrant workers at their restaurant
2. If we could visit them one day to hand out our questionnaires
3. Which day would be best to come in

     Out of the 12 restaurants we called, only 2 of them said that they had migrant workers. At first, we wanted to go ahead and interview the migrant workers at the restaurants that allowed us to. After giving it some thought, we decided to stick to interviewing teachers of our school and people that they were acquainted with. If we were to interview someone who wasn't here legally, we would start an intense immigration issue that could even lead to the restaurant being fined. Our next step is to publish our questionnaire online so it is available for virtually anyone!

We will keep you updated :)

- Sophie F.