Week 1 (03-09th, Feb 2014)

■ Work Finished

1. Decide two coop samples in Caidian District, Wuhan City, Hubei Province, which is my hometown. They are Nongfuda veg coop and Yongxin lotus root coop. The leaders of these two coops fully support the survey. I interviewed Mr Hanyun Liu, the leader of Nongfuda on 8th and will interview Mr Jiben Liu, the leader of Yongxin next week.

2. Decide two coop samples in Sichuan Province: Nongwang coop in Jianshe Village, Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture and a swine production coop in Jianyang County, Ziyang City. Prof Shangyong Li in Ya’an School of Administration is helping us contact the leaders of the two coops.

3. Improve the questionnaires. After discussing with Mr Hanyun Liu and other researchers, we decide to use the following four questionnaires:

(1) Questionnaire for the cooperative, including the psychological test sections. The leaders of the cooperative are supposed to be the responders.

(2) Questionnaire for cooperative members. The household members of the cooperative are supposed to be the responders.

(3) Questionnaire for the village (from which most of the coop members come). The leaders of the community are supposed to be the responders.

(4) Questionnaire for households (in the selected village), including the psychological test sections. Randomly selected households in the village are supposed to be the responders.

Meanwhile, I improve the design of several questions.

4. Train two students in carrying out the survey. I met two master’s students supervised by Puqing, Pan Wu and Dan Liu, on 9th. They will help me do the survey in Hubei Province We have made a plan of surveying the two coops in Caidian.

■ Work to Do

1. Finalise the questionnaire before Wednesday 12th.

2. Survey Nongfuda coop. It will take about three days.

3. Contact Dr Hengshan Deng at CCAP (Centre for Chinese Agricultural Policy) and Prof Shi Li at CIID (China Institute for Income Distribution) for the secondary data.

4. Determine the coop samples in Henan Province and Shandong Province.

5. Discuss with Prof Zhou at CCAU (Central China Agricultural University) for determining the coop samples in Zhejiang Province and Shaanxi Province. We are probably needed to visit Zhejiang University (in Zhejiang) and Northwest Agriculture & Forestry University (in Shaanxi) to get support.  

■ Questions

1. The household members of most coops come from more than one village, but more than 60% members come from one village in general. Can I just do the village level survey in this village? A village generally has about 300 households (10 village groups, with about 30 households in each group). Even if we only select 10% (is this percentage too low?) of the households in a village, the work of doing village level survey will be very heavy. We probably need to visit each sampled household to get the questionnaire responded.

2. We will try to ask the farmer respondents to recall their answers to the questions about social capital in 1990s (we should be able to dothis for questions about entrepreneurship). If most respondents can do this, can we trust the data? In this way, we do not need secondary data.