Day 2

On our second day in ENP, we began conducting more surveys with locals and tourists at the park. As we were in the process of doing so, we found that our surveys in particular were inadequate in addressing our objective of finding out their opinions on elephant tourism. More specifically, we wanted to find out their motivations behind choosing to come to ENP rather than other parks. Initially, we felt that our questions should be crafted more broadly to ensure that we do not lead our respondents to a certain answer. However, we found that this became an issue as our questions were very vague and added little value to our research topic. Therefore, we spent a lot of time rethinking our questions and I really learned a lot about the thought that has to go behind crafting survey and interview questions that are able to elicit genuine and personal, yet objective responses.

As our experience in ENP came to a close, the most interesting thing I discovered was that even though the main thing we did in the park was simply walking around with the elephants, it was an extremely fulfilling experience. Although many may have the perception that riding the elephants would be more exhilarating, I would have to disagree as learning about the elephants’ stories from Jen was probably more meaningful than the thrill of riding them could have been. This provided great insight for me as it made me think about how we could educate the tourists to switch to visiting this newer model of elephant parks, as simply walking along with the elephants can be fun too.

Back at the hotel, we had an intense discussion about our findings at ENP, especially as we needed to drastically change our survey and interview questions. We explored many ways of asking questions, such as considering whether to give them scenario-based questions, creating our own “elephant tour packages” or directly asking them about what they look for in deciding which elephant camp to visit. While it was frustrating that every method had its loopholes and limitations, I really learnt a lot about formulating interview questions as we went in-depth into the possible thought processes of our participants. Reflecting back on the Project Work (PW) I did back in Junior College, my group and I had never gone through such a tedious process of formulating questions, as we knew the answers we were looking for and fell prey to confirmation bias – our questions were designed to lean our participants to a certain answer. Therefore, even though it was a time-consuming process, I feel that it was very important that we made the conscious decision to avoid committing the same mistake.

So Day 2 was really a day of reflections as I consolidated all that I’d learned from ENP; I don’t believe I would have had as fulfilling an experience if we had not been given the opportunity to stayover in ENP. Perhaps that’s the reason why our whole group was like a broken record by the end of the two days, repeatedly proclaiming how we were the luckiest group to have had such an eye-opening experience.