January 12

Today in our class discussion, we talked about how to make a good research proposal. It pressured me to get on narrowing my research project so that I can start preparing for my proposal. As a general idea, I want to study families and their interactions. I want to come into the field study as what I would call a "socioethnopoligist," where I combine sociological ontological assumptions when approaching my research, and study as an anthropoligist in that I will participate in life in order to experience it and understand it more, and then to write up my research as more of an ethnography of family life in Tonga. Specifically, I'm very interested in women in society, and how their roles affect family life. In class my group discussed how I can narrow my topic by looking at one aspect of the women's life, such as tapa weaving, and then see how it affects family life or perceptions on what family is and how its structured. I'm very excited to do more research in order to really dig deep into what I want to study.