Last year, when I was getting my master's degree, I wrote a thesis. It's a big research paper, kind of like a Ph.D. dissertation, but much easier and shorter. Even so, I'm not very good at explaining it in regular words, let alone in a dance. But what good is research that nobody understands? For eight months I've been procrastinating on coming back to it, but now I'm going to try using words that people use in real life. It won't be nearly as cool as a dance, but it will be better than 97 pages of gibberish, which is what I wrote in my thesis.
A thesis starts with a question (or a few questions) and then looks for the answers using research. My main question asked, "Do Cambodian students who participate in student council have more emotional intelligence and act more like the Three Goods (good students, friends, and children) than Cambodian students who don't participate?" My hypothesis said yes. Actually, the results didn't show much of a difference, which wasn't very surprising.
Every school in Cambodia has to have a student council starting in fourth grade. But unlike in America, they don't usually make a lot of decisions for the school or help communicate between students and teachers. At many or most schools, there's a list of student council members, but they don't actually meet or do anything - it's just to keep the school out of trouble with the government. At other schools, the student council helps everyone follow the school rules, and gets students in trouble when they disobey. At just a few schools, they have other responsibilities like teaching students about hygiene or organizing projects where students can help the community. It makes sense that if the student council doesn't do anything, its students won't act very different from everyone else at their school.
My follow-up question asked, "How do Cambodian students and school leaders picture emotional intelligence and the Three Goods?" I was curious whether most of them had clear ideas that were similar to each other's ideas. I also wanted to see whether they thought that emotional intelligence and the Three Goods were mostly the same or different. There were some important similarities, but the Three Goods was a lot more about people's concrete actions, not just their attitudes or people skills. For example, people said a good student should come on time to class, and a good child should help with cooking and cleaning.
Why did I pick those questions? I wanted to learn more about Cambodian schools and young people, but I didn't have a specific idea of what to study. My professor had helped other graduate students do a project on two Cambodian schools where the student councils are very active. These were two of the six schools in my study. The Cambodian government says that student councils should help students with the Three Goods, which means help them become good students, friends, and children. But the government never explains what it means to be those things. I'd heard that a lot of American schools are trying to help their students develop emotional intelligence, which means how well people deal with emotions (their own and other people's) to accomplish their goals. Emotional intelligence is useful for relationships and learning in many different ways, and I wondered whether it was similar to Cambodians' ideas about being good students, children, and friends. If I found out that student councils were good at helping Cambodians with the Three Goods and emotional intelligence, I could recommend that more Cambodian schools develop strong student council programs.
I looked for answers from three main sources:
- One source was a literature review, which means I read lots of articles and books to find out what other researches had learned about related topics.
- Another source was surveys that I gave to Cambodian students from six different high schools. The surveys were mostly multiple-choice so that I could turn all the students' answers into numbers (choice A = 1, choice B = 2, etc.) and then do computer tests called statistical analysis to look for differences between groups of students in their survey answers.
- The third source was talking with people in Cambodian schools. I interviewed school leaders and had focus groups with about eight students at a time from several of the schools. I asked each group a set of questions and took notes on their answers. Since they spoke Khmer, not English, I needed a translator because my Khmer isn't good enough to understand everything they said. A lot of my questions asked for explanations or examples of emotional intelligence and the Three Goods. Other questions asked about the influence of Student Council on students at their school.
My favorite part was probably reading for the literature review. I learned so many interesting things about Cambodians! Sometimes it wasn't quite on topic and I couldn't include it in my final thesis paper. For example, I started out with a question about what it means in Cambodian culture to be a citizen. Sometimes their options for participating in the community and nation are different than our options in America, or sometimes they have different views of participating because of their culture. I read about a TV show that helps teach Cambodian young people how they can participate as citizens. I also read about a lot of ways that schools around the world organize and use their student councils. Finally, I read a lot about resiliency, which is a set of things inside and around a person that help him or her to stay strong and be OK when bad things happen. I loved learning about resiliency, even though it wasn't a main focus of my thesis.
The surveys were tricky for several reasons. The translation from English to Khmer wasn't always clear, even though three Cambodians worked on it with me. I paid a Cambodian man to talk with all the schools, explain the surveys, and make sure enough students took the surveys. But one school forgot to give out the surveys and made him come back the next week. At two schools, he arrived when students were already taking their final exams for the year, so many students never took the survey. At another school, many students skipped almost half the survey questions. Maybe my survey was too long and they didn't have time, or maybe a teacher told them to skip those questions. After I saw all the problems, I wished that I had gone to all the schools with this man to watch students fill out the surveys and avoid some of these problems. But by then it was too late, so I just did the best I could with the surveys I had. It was good enough for my thesis, but it made it much harder to trust that the survey results showed an accurate picture of the students. Another limit is that students answered the questions about themselves, and many students picked the same answer (for example, "Strongly agree") for many questions in a row. So it's not clear if they really read each question and thought about it.
One survey result was really clear and surprising for me. I thought students might vote for student council members who had good grades, or who had better emotional intelligence and people skills, or who were good friends and kind to everyone. Instead, student council members were older than average for their grade, and most of them had repeated a grade. That made me think about how Cambodians always show respect to people who are older than them. Maybe they felt like the oldest students in the class should also be the leaders - even if they were the oldest because they had been struggling to learn. I did find, though, that student council members tended to have more friends. When I saw that result, I wondered: Were students with a lot of friends so popular that it was easy for them to be elected? Or did something about their actions and attitude make them good friends and good student council members? It's common for research projects to end in more questions than answers, and that was definitely my experience. The more I learned, the more questions I had.
I liked the interviews because I got to see people's faces and hear their voices and their own words. But the time always seemed so short! Some questions were also tricky for people to answer. One interesting thing was that it helped me see the differences between Student Council programs. At some schools, everyone liked and respected the Student Council, but not at every school. At some schools, students felt like they'd learned a lot about leadership through joining Student Council, but not at every school. At one school, the principal described the Student Council very differently than the students who were participating in it. He said they'd been active all year, but they said they'd only been elected a couple weeks earlier, near the end of the school year (about the time that I contacted the school). I think the principal was doing something called saving face, which means lying so you don't embarrass yourself. I tried not to embarrass him, but I think he could still tell that I didn't always believe him. He seemed glad when the interview was over.
My adviser tried to get me to publish my thesis in a scholarly journal, which is like a magazine full of research articles. I did a lot of work on it this spring and sent it to several journals, changing it a bit for each one to fit their requirements about the length and format. So far, none of them accepted it. That's fine with me... in fact, I'd be kind of mad at them if they did, because publishing a research article means you think they have important results that can be trusted, and I didn't feel that way about my results. Journals also tend to like results in numbers that prove one main point. I get that. But I felt like in my research, numbers were not the most important part, and I had many different observations that I found interesting.
However, I'm glad I wrote a thesis. It took lots of hard work, and it made me learn things that I never would have taken time for otherwise. Even if I didn't prove my hypothesis (which I was skeptical about from the beginning), it gave me a much clearer idea now of Cambodian young people and their schools. All these observations can stay in the back of my mind when I go back to help Cambodian teachers, and maybe they'll come in handy someday. And that's really why I wanted a master's degree in the first place.
