First Results Are In

After months of preparations in Indonesia and - let’s just say - “more than months” before Indonesia, the pilot is finished. I now have my revised procedures and far-more-educated guesses as to what might work, and I even have my first set of real, original, methodologically defensible (?) data to analyze. It’s an odd feeling: uplifting, exciting, but also a little anti-climactic.

It’s my dataset; research I planned and implemented in a far away country for a question I identified and revised three thousand times. All those hours of speculation and redrafting in an office in California, cafeterias of Jerusalem campuses, corridors of hospitals, Pacific beaches and about a dozen trips in seat B13 between the snoring guy and chatty one crossing the Atlantic have started to pay off.

These past few weeks a few dozen Indonesian students and three research assistants actually showed up to divide money according to odd rules and answer a long set of questions, from voting preferences, to the number of times they lend books and CDs to friends in a typical month, to the number of prostrations they perform in nighttime Tawarih prayers during Ramadan (since, obviously, “Traditionalists” tend to perform 23, while “Modernists” tend to perform 11; I like to pretend I’ve known that – or what Tawarih is - for ages).

On second thought, however, it’s, well, a dataset. It’s a matrix of numbers on a spreadsheet. Is it really ok to be excited about it? And yes, it's my dataset, but who said anyone else will care about what it says? (And no, you don't count.)
What’s more, it’s just a pilot. Now I need to repeat it – in revised form - with many more students here in Yogyakarta and in Padang, and hope the results hold up.

But, given that this has been one of the busiest months in recent memory, it feels good to be done with one part at least. Moreover, at first glance, the data looks very promising (no evil-eye-taunting intended…), although debriefing subjects revealed some important changes to be made to the procedure. We tried out most of these changes, and I’m still hopeful.

This has been the main asset of the past month, the intrepid, tireless and insightful Yogyakarta staff:









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I still plan to post some pictures from the Jakarta kampong tour. Here’s a taste, courtesy of Mr. Z’s photography:

And here’s another. I previously mentioned the new and rather radical PKS.
Well, guess who won the mini-election in my pilot questionnaire:














And now I'm going to sleep for 48 hours. Selamat malam.