Quantifying the African Presence in China (extract from an interview with Tendai Musakwa): TM: You write that there are around 500,000 Africans in China, including at least 300,000 traders, 30,000 students, 4,000 professionals, 10,000 tourists and 10,000 temporary business travelers. Can you explain the methodology that led to the discovery of these numbers? AB: My team and I used a variety of painstaking methods to arrive at these ESTIMATES. We have never said they are precise numbers. We went to official sources (and didn’t get much help), we talked to community leaders, we administered questionnaire surveys far more extensively than any scholar ever did, we observed market scenarios, we listened to narratives, and we used a myriad of participant-observation techniques! We are not specialist statisticians but we are quite confident about our estimates, and some government sources have even started quoting our sources even after they first refused to attend to us. We have never said that these are Africans who LIVE in China, we say these are Africans who live in, and or frequently visit, China. The phraseology "Africans IN China" is semantically a complex phraseology, it shouldn’t be interpreted simple-mindedly. Just as you have detractors in politics, so do you also have academic detractors? I have been attacked or, to put it mildly, challenged anonymously (- all refereed publications are anonymously critiqued -) about these numbers on the basis of some misunderstandings. So I am writing a paper preliminarily titled "Quantifying the African presence China" to counter-attack such anonymous detractors, but also to explain to my academic friends and address well-meaning critiques, the rationale behind these estimations based on educated guesses, what I call "guesstimations". I am not the only social scientist who guesstimates. Responsible social scientists do it all the time: specialist police statisticians guesstimate crowd numbers all the time, organizers of demonstrations guesstimate all the time, opinion polls guesstimate voter and other population numbers all the time. Only dysfunctional scholars don’t guesstimate and when a journalist comes to talk to them they give convoluted answers and end up not giving any satisfactory quantification. It has been said that if you can’t quantify something you can’t come up with meaningfully useful generalizations for policy makers and the tax-payer, financiers of your research, only ending up with dysfunctional academic idiosyncrasies.
Posted on: Sat, 05 Oct 2013 03:29:08 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015