To commission the diaries, it was necessary to work through Home Based
Care (HBC) workers in the study sites to identify households in which a person was
currently ill, and to approach potential diary keepers. In each case, the HBC worker
was already well known to the household, and was already visiting them to provide
assistance. It was made clear that diary keeping was voluntary, but all of those
approached agreed to participate. With one exception, all of the ‘patients’ keeping
diaries in this research were women living in female-headed households. This is likely
to have been influenced by the fact that households were identified through HBC
workers. The gendered nature of caring in the Caprivi means that it is common for
women to return to their own relatives for care, often their mothers who, if widowed,
were likely to be disadvantaged in labour and resource assets and therefore, more
reliant upon assistance provided by HBC workers.
Diaries were kept by seven people living with AIDS-related illness and by
their main carer, for periods of one to six months. HBC workers made regular visits
(usually several times a week) to households to provide assistance and to monitor the
diary process. Coding and analysis of the diaries was undertaken whilst in the field
enabling rigorous cross checking of information and identification of themes common
across the diary keepers. Diaries were recorded in the preferred language of each
recorder, and those not written in English were translated by my interpreter.2
Although some consider the process of paying research informants as a reassertion of
power relations (cf. Ansell 2001), I agree with McDowell (2001) who argues that it is
appropriate to provide an incentive, or in some way recompense those involved in
research, and believe that not doing so can also be exploitative and reinforce power
relations over the ‘researched’. After discussions with my translator and HBC
workers, it was decide that the most appropriate payment would be in the form of a