PLOVER COVE VILLAGE TO TAIPO MARKET
99
Generally speaking the interviewees were cooperative, although suspicious of the interviewers. There were refusals, of course, but we fulfilled our scheduled interviews in all but one old village group where we were completely unsuccessful except for being able to interview (in lieu of his ill father) a twenty year old son.4 That our failure rate should be so high in the one village is worthy of considerable note but thus far no satisfactory reason has been ascertained. Among the other villagers the male respondents were more reluctant than the females, whom we interviewed when no male was available. Due to the suspicion which we encountered in our first interviews, we modified our research plan and decided to shift temporarily away from interviewing housewives, and begin instead with the interviewing of children at the school (and at other schools where children of these families studied),5 We interviewed the children on the school grounds during recess periods in one day, and hoped that the children would tell their mothers of this unusual event, thus making access to the mothers easier during the next interview wave. The strategy worked very well and the cooperativeness of the women whom we interviewed during the following week was very good." Table I summarizes the number of interviews accomplished in each village during this early phase of the research. It does not include the numbers of children, and other status group members not discussed in this paper as most of this interviewing is still going on.
TABLE I
Where Living: Households Sampled Interviews with: Village* Out In Two Respondents Wife Only Husband Only Siu Kau 41 73 2 3 Tai Kau 48 97 3 IN 2 Kam Chuk Pai and Tai Lung 161 107 2 4 I Wang Leng Tau and Nai Tong Kok 98 125 Chung Mei · Chung Pui NN 22 62 73 134 TOTALS 443 598 NUN 2 0 3 2* These place names are in Cantonese romanisation and, together with their Chinese characters, can be found in the Hong Kong Government's publication A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories (Hong Kong n.d, but 1960) at pp. 193-194.