DFM Guideline: Scoping research

This is a a brief overview of Scoping research within the Dried Fish Matters project.

The purpose of scoping

As outlined in the document A Guide to Scoping and Stacked Surveys for DFM, scoping research to be conducted under has several purposes

1. To contribute to DFM objective 1 of producing a ‘macro‐economic geography’ of dried fish value chains in the six DFM focal countries. For each country, or (in India) site, this mean identifying and summarizing what exists in terms of the structure, conduct and performance of dried fish value chains - i.e. the types and numbers of actor involved and their main locations, their behavior and their performance (and that of the value chain as a whole) in terms of equity, wellbeing, gender, preferences, food safety, etc.
2. To provide the foundation for designing stacked value chain studies. This will include: Identifying, for each value chain segment, which products and locations are particularly important (e.g. in terms of volume produced, nutrition, livelihoods) as a basis for making decisions about which locations and products to include and exclude from the stacked value chain studies; Collecting data that can be used a basis for sampling (e.g. lists of fishers, boat owners, fishing villages, traders association members); Collating information that will be needed to design survey questionnaires (e.g. local names for fishing gears, fish species, units of measurement used, types of worker)
3. To provide contextual information to help design studies and interventions related to objectives 2-4.

Reviewing existing information

One of the first steps in the scoping process for each research team will be to compile and review existing sources of information. The types of information reviewed may include published reports, statistics and papers. Unpublished reports, field notes, questionnaires, or data previously collected or prepared by the organizations involved in DFM, their partners, governments, or other institutions may also provide useful information. The focus of previous research does not necessarily have to be about dried fish. Any studies dealing with fisheries or fish production and trade may include useful contextual data.

Compiling and analyzing existing information will allow country teams to: (1) understand the current state of knowledge on dried fish production, trade and consumption in their respective countries; (2) identify existing resources that are helpful for scoping (e.g. data or questionnaires from previous surveys of fishers); (3) identify knowledge gaps, and; (4) design and target scoping activities to address knowledge gaps and to test the validity of ‘conventional wisdom’.

Early in the scoping process, research teams should list all the sources of information/data that they are already aware of, and identify other possible sources that they may be able to gain access to. These pieces of information should then be compiled in a central repository (e.g. a Dropbox folder), and a plan should be made for conducting any analysis (e.g. of raw data or statistics) that is needed and writing a short report summarizing the most important points. This report should be one of the first outputs produced by each country team.

Scoping

At a minimum, scoping should cover the four major segments of the dried fish value chain - fisheries, dried fish processing, dried fish wholesaling (including any imports and exports), and dried fish retailing. Other possible segments include consumers, transporters, and input providers. It will probably only be possible to study the consumption segment indirectly – i.e. through the perceptions of consumer groups and preference by retailers and other actors in the value chain – but, where possible, some interviews with consumers would be preferable. Where dried fish products of both marine and freshwater origin are significant, the production, processing, trade and retail of both of these should be studied. Different forms of preserved fish product (e.g. dried, fermented, salted) may each have slightly different value chains. These should all be studied if significant.

Scoping research is primarily qualitative activity, so the most appropriate approach will usually be to conduct semi-structured interviews, using a checklist of questions. Interview guides have the advantage of providing a common format across interviews, so that many people can be asked similar questions, and their answers can be compared, but the semi-structured interview format allows flexibility to ask new questions about points that require clarification, or interesting incidents, observations or hunches that emerge during the course on of interviews or as research develops. Checklists can be modified over time as the research progresses to incorporate new issues. It is not necessary to ask every informant every question on the checklist. Rather, the aim is to build up a composite picture over time, drawing on responses from multiple interviews to obtain answers all the questions on the list. Unstructured interviews (open ended conversations) can also yield valuable information. Everyone has different field note taking styles, but ideally notes should be as detailed as possible, and include quotes from informants that illustrate important points. Interviews can also be recorded if informants give their consent to be recorded. Ideally, field notes should be typed up immediately after each day in the field while they still remain fresh in the interviewer’s memory (with identifying information including the date and location of the interview and the details of each person interviewed). Typing up field notes will ensure that they are not lost, and will make it easier to analyze them later on.

Research team members are encouraged to take numerous photographs and video recordings throughout their fieldwork to illustrate any products, activities, or things of interest that they encounter. These photographs and videos will prove extremely useful for illustrating presentations, reports etc. Consent should always be secured before people are photographed or recorded on video.

Wholesale

It is recommended that all field based scoping activities begin by identifying major dried fish wholesale markets and conducting interviews at these. In most DFM countries it is likely that the majority of dried fish products are traded through a relatively small number of regional and national wholesale markets. The number of traders in each of these markets is likely to be quite small (in the tens, or possibly hundreds). This means that wholesale markets will be the most concentrated segment in the dried fish value chain (as the majority of the dried fish in each country pass through a relatively small number of markets and individuals). As a result, interviews with traders in wholesale markets can reveal a lot of information about the structure of the value chain and the products of which it is comprised (e.g. talking to traders will help to identify the variety of products traded, the most important products traded, their main places of origin, and their main end markets). This information will be extremely useful in supporting decisions about where to focus other scoping activities. In addition, wholesale markets are often located in major cities, making them some of the easiest value chain segments to access.

Within a single wholesale market there may be different types of trader who fulfil different roles (e.g. auctioneers may earn a commission by brokering sales between traders who collect fish from drying sites and wholesalers who buy dried fish for distribution to other parts of the country). It is important to understand these differences. Traders in large wholesale markets are often members of associations that set the rules of trade in the market. Markets traders are usually registered with the municipal authorities (if the market is publically owned), or the market owner (if private). Traders associations and other institutions related to markets have the potential to provide useful information (e.g. about numbers of traders over time, or volumes of fish traded). They may also help to provide access to traders if the research is explained to them and they are supportive of it.

Wholesale markets are frequently visited by sellers and buyers, so they offer opportunities to meet with and interview fishers, traders from other regions and retailers etc., not just wholesalers operating from the market itself. Wholesale markets are well served by vehicles that deliver products. Counting or estimating numbers of deliveries to the market can help to estimate volumes of trade through the market. Transport workers (e.g. truck drivers) are often a good source of information about the characteristics of trade in dried fish. Not all dried fish wholesalers are located in markets. In some places, traders local to the areas where fish drying takes place play an important role in aggregating dried fish. These traders should also be considered, but are best targeted at the same time as the fishing and processing segments of the value chain. Workers, managers, clerks, and labourers who work for traders should also be interviewed, as they may be willing to share different information, or provide different perspectives to traders themselves.

Fisheries and processing

In most cases, fisheries will be the segment of the value chain for which the greatest amount of information already exists, and with which DFM partner organizations have the best existing institutional contacts. Fish landing sites and fish processing sites are often located close together, and households and businesses that fish are often (though not always) directly involved in fish processing. For this reason, it will usually make sense to study these two value chain segments at the same time. However, in some cases, fish processing operations are co-located with wholesale markets, rather than with fish landing sites. In cases like these it will make more sense to study wholesale and processing together.

In some cases, fish landing sites and drying operations will be highly concentrated in a few key locations. Where this is the case, it will make sense to target most scoping and subsequent research efforts here, whilst attempting to obtain some additional information about fishing and drying activities that take place elsewhere. In other cases, fishing and drying may be widely dispersed across large numbers of villages. Here the best approach to scoping may be to visit several villages and to consider each as a case study site. In some (perhaps most) countries, both situations may exist (e.g. a few concentrated marine sites, versus many scattered inland sites) so mixed approaches will have to be employed. Information about the location and importance of fish landing and processing sites can be derived from many sources, including existing literature, institutional knowledge, interviews with traders, fisheries officers. In preparation for the SVC surveys, it is important at the scoping stage to be working consciously towards a sampling strategy that will best capture the full range of fishing and processing activities across the diversity of sites where these take place.

Many types of people are involved in fishing and fish processing. This includes not only owners of fishing boats and fish processing operations themselves, but the various types of workers that they employ, and family members who may play an important role in supporting fishing/processing activities. In addition, fishers and fish workers are not usually involved exclusively in these activities year round. Understanding seasonality and how fishing and fish work fits into broader livelihood portfolios (e.g. alongside farming, non-farm work, migration, other forms of natural resource extraction etc). is important with regard to the context of work in the dried fish sector and for the timing of SVC survey research.

Retail

Retail is often the simplest segment of the value chain on which to conduct scoping research, particularly if most dried fish is sold to consumers via ‘traditional’ market channels (retailers in fresh fish or “wet” markets). Traditional retail may also include ‘hawkers’ who are mobile, selling small quantities of fish from door to door – where these are a significant feature of the retail landscape it will be important to devise strategies to ensure that they are included.

Dried fish is increasingly sold by ‘modern retail’ (e.g. supermarkets, convenience stores), and it will be important to understand how this shift is changing the ways in which people buy and consume dried fish products, and the ways in which these businesses are transforming upstream segments of the value chain. Other forms of retail may include online retailing, where producers of high quality products market them directly to customers. Even where sales through modern retail account for only a small share of total production they should be explored because it is likely that they will become increasingly important in future.

Because retailers are numerous and very widely distributed, it will not be possible to obtain a completely representative picture of retailing at the national level. This means that scoping should purposively focus on locations which are likely to have contrasting characteristics. This could include wet markets in low income and wealthy areas of a capital city, rural coastal areas, and rural inland areas.

An important area for enquiry will be the purchasing behavior of different categories of consumer who buy from retailers (e.g. are these mainly men, women, old, young, poor, wealthy, of which ethnicity and religion, what quantities do they buy and how frequently, how much do they spend, how do they make use of the products they buy, etc?)  

Outputs

The major output will be a report (or reports) summarizing findings from scoping in each value chain segment. Ideally these would include:

• Map/s and lists identifying key geographical locations for each value chain segment
• Lists of species dried (with local and scientific names) and types of product
• Detailed descriptions of the fisheries from which these originate
• Detailed descriptions of the methods used to process these fish
• Detailed descriptions of various types of trader and their practices
• Detailed descriptions of the practices of retailers and the behavior of consumers who purchase from them
• Estimates of volumes of dried fish products produced and traded
• Estimates of numbers of actor (disaggregated by gender, ethnicity, etc) in each segment of the chain
• Analysis of the socio-economic context that shapes dried fish consumption
• Analysis of how numbers of actors/volumes of dried fish/dried fish prices have changed within the past decade
• Analysis of drivers of change and perceptions of major threats and opportunities facing the sector

The following crosscutting areas should also be addressed for each value chain segment:

• Working conditions and worker safety
• The composition of the work force, and the composition of owners of productive assets/capital, in terms of gender, ethnicity, caste etc.
• The role (if any) of migration
• Food safety and product quality
• The role of work associated with dried fish within broader livelihood portfolios
• Credit relationships
• Forms of governance throughout the chain (e.g. the role of associations, customary rules, formal regulation, patron-client relations, etc.)
• International trade (inward or outward) in dried fish products
• Consumption patterns that influence the value chain: i.e. cultural preferences, social and economic differences, and political trends that shape the market
• The sustainability of fisheries and fishing practices