Malaysia experienced another peak of case numbers in the Covid pandemic in mid-2021 which strained health facilities enormously. Rationale behind the choice of this method:Īs the Covid pandemic restricted movement and travel in places across the globe, it constrained the implementation of research activities, especially engagement and connection with stakeholders. As such, they are good people to speak with in regard to water security concerns or challenges that already exist, or that are emerging in the village or the basin. Most of the invited participants for each of the coffee talks were village headmen or gatekeepers, hence, they are key informants who act as representatives for their villagers, and who perform significant roles in resolving village disputes or conflicts. In the Johor River basin, we invited community representatives from different villages to share their perspectives and thoughts about water security issues. The interviewee or key informants are those who have experience and capability in reflecting on specific topics or phenomena in their context. Significantly, key informants are not necessarily an elite category of individuals in an institution they can be minor yet important groups of experts that provide prompt answers to research questions and conceptualize the research. Through the process, the interviewee is more willing and ready to share more insights and insider information about a situation or issues that affect their area. The virtual coffee talk method is also inspired by key informant interviews, which involve people in small-scale interactions to generate and stimulate meaningful discussion in between researcher and interviewee. Hence, we arrived at the idea of virtual coffee talks as the research method that best suits our local context, as food is always a good conversation-starting topic in Malaysia! The World Café method has been widely used across a variety of settings, institutions and disciplines – in educational, academic and social studies, as well as entrepreneurial strategic development and planning, and consumer studies (Fouché & Light, 2010 Fullarton & Palermo, 2008 Chang & Chen, 2015 Ritch & Brennan, 2010).Īs the popularity and adoption of the World Café concept has increased gradually over recent years, we adopted the ideology of this method, and modified it to apply to the phenomena, research issues and targeted respondent group of our case study. It is designed as a public participatory tool for facilitating open and informal conversation with interviewees, especially community groups. The idea of this research method has been introduced by Brown and Isaacs (2005) as the World Café method. At the end of the coffee talk, we gave each participant a voucher for them to get a real-life coffee for themselves, as a token of appreciation for their contribution, and to thank them for spending time with us. The same questions would then be asked at the next coffee talk, but with community representatives from different villages. We began the talks with an introduction on water security and several questions for the participants. For each session, we engaged with only one village or community group to make sure they felt relaxed and free talking without the presence of outsiders. At the virtual coffee talks with them, we set up in a virtual café style by changing our background to a UTM café photo, as if we were all in the café, to generate a comfortable and informal environment. We previously conducted virtual coffee talks with community representatives. Virtual coffee talks can be used to reach out to a variety of stakeholders such as governments, decision-making bodies, non-governmental institutions and community groups – everyone who is interested in contributing to sustainable solutions to a problem. A creative, flexible, informal participatory research approach to pinpoint the different perspectives of people living within an institution, culture, phenomenon or sector to facilitate the bottom-up understanding of a research problem, which will be useful to elicit and scrutinize sustainable solutions to global challenges concerned with social, economic, governance, ecosystem and environmental resilience.
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