The research team of the Institute of Philippine Culture’s (IPC) latest institutional project, Filipino Families in an Urban Informal Settlement: Traditional and Emerging Family Forms, Challenges, Resiliency Strategies, and Aspirations, recently held a series of community feedback sessions last November 2015. The feedback sessions for the neighborhood association and for the residents of the urban informal settlement community (located in Quezon City) were held last November 15, 2015 at the community chapel and November 22, 2015, at the sitio’s multipurpose covered court, respectively, with more than 100 people in attendance. A separate feedback session for the barangay’s local government officials was conducted last November 24, 2015 at their Barangay Hall.
The study aims to examine the emerging and changing family forms in an urban informal settlement in Quezon City; the residents’ views on “alternative” family forms (vis-à-vis the “traditional” family form based on the marriage of a man and a woman); their views on sources of happiness and of unhappiness in their family life; their aspirations for their family, especially for their children; and their experiences with and views of social institutions that deal with families.
Two hundred and twenty (220) people were interviewed for the survey; nine residents shared their life stories through in-depth, personal interviews; and six focus group discussions (with male youth, female youth, male adults, female adults, the elderly, and with LGBTs) were also conducted for the research project.
Directed by IPC Research Associate Angela Desiree M. Aguirre, the research for the IPC’s Filipino Families project began in May 2015 and will be completed in December of this year. A research team comprised of a project research assistant, a quantitative research (survey) specialist, a qualitative research (focus group discussion) specialist, a narrative writer of the life stories of the interviewees, and field interviewers was mobilized for this project. Furthermore, in keeping with the IPC’s thrust of promoting participatory community action research, the study was carried out in collaboration with the local barangay government, a federation of people’s organizations, and the local neighborhood association’s women’s group.
Community feedback sessions are conducted by the IPC to “give back” to the community and to present the results of the various research studies to government officials, civil society organizations, and the research respondents themselves. The IPC’s project teams gather reactions and feedback from the research participants in these sessions to validate and refine their research data further. After the presentation of research results, the organizations in attendance of the sessions usually collaborate and interactively formulate strategies to address problems that came out in the study, incorporating some of the suggestions made by the research respondents.
The results of the Filipino Families study will be presented before the Loyola Schools community at a research dissemination forum that will be held in March 2016, with the publication of the report slated also for 2016.