Malawi Journals Project (MJP), 1999-2015 (ICPSR 37347)

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The Malawi Journals Project provides a unique perspective on a contemporary epidemic in Africa. Begun in 1999, when HIV incidence and prevalence peaked, it tracked contradictions between survey data and qualitative data. After the first round of the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH) (ICPSR 20840), in 1998, the researchers had a great deal of data about the composition and structure of local social networks in which rural Malawians talked about AIDS. They had not; however, learned much about the content of the social interactions--what people said to each other, rather than to interviewers, about AIDS or their strategies for avoiding infection and death--and even less about the wider everyday interactions that shaped responses to the epidemic.

In 1999 Susan Watkins instituted "The Malawi Journals Project" as a complement to a longitudinal survey that she was conducting in rural Malawi. At that time, Malawians were suffering and dying from a major AIDS epidemic. After the first round of the survey, she found evidence of social desirability bias. For example, when survey interviewers asked men under age 35 how many sexual partners they had, the typical response was that they had only one sexual partner, their wife. In the context of Malawi, as well as other African countries; however, a man with only one partner was so unusual that his survey response was not believable.

Watkins thus developed a new approach to data collection: learning what men and women said to each other rather than to an interviewer. After the first round of the survey the researchers had a great deal of data about the composition and structure of the social networks in which rural Malawians talked about AIDS. They had not; however, learned much about the content of the social interactions--what people said to each other, rather than to interviewers, about AIDS or their strategies for avoiding infection and death--and even less about the wider everyday interactions that shaped responses to the epidemic. Thus, the researchers improvised by commissioning 10 high school graduates, both men and women, who had worked for the survey to be participant observers as they went about their daily routines. They were to pay attention to what their peers said about the AIDS epidemic in their informal social networks, such as walking to a funeral or drinking at a bar, and to write the conversation word for word in a private space. If they overheard anything concerning AIDS, they were to make mental notes of what people said and did, and then write their recollections word-for-word in commonplace school notebooks that evening or soon thereafter. The notebooks were given to a local intermediary who mailed them to the researchers. In 2005, Watkins invited a colleague, Adam Ashforth, an ethnographer who had conducted research in Malawi, to join the Malawi Journals Project

More than 1,000 journals have been written since 1999, each approximately 12 single-spaced typed pages, and each usually covering several different conversations or incidents. Since there are frequently several people conversing, the reader can overhear, at second hand, several thousand people. Twenty-two journalists (9 females, 13 males) have contributed to the corpus of texts, with three (two males, one female) contributing very frequently, 13 frequently, and six only occasionally. The diarists wrote in English, a language learned in school, and used parentheses or carets to set off their explanatory comments or untranslatable expressions in the local language. The handwriting and repetitions suggest they often wrote rapidly. We have retained locutions that reflect local adaptations of English. English is taught in Malawian public schools starting in Standard 5, equivalent to U.S. fifth grade, and has become somewhat indigenized. For example, to be sexually promiscuous is to be "movious" and one who has multiple partners is said to be "moving around," an Anglicization of a Chichewa expression, woyendayenda, derived from the earlier association of multiple partners with migrant labor. The naturalness with which the journalists adapt English to Chichewa, chiYao, or chiTumbuka linguistic forms means that their English is somewhat closer to local languages than is the standard English in which a Canadian, British or American ethnographer might translate local languages. In our publications, we have retained most of the idiosyncrasies in grammar and spelling, although on occasion we insert obviously missing words in brackets and make minor corrections.

Initially, Malawians were convinced that all would die of AIDS, and were skeptical about the attempts of the government and international organizations to reduce new HIV infections. Over the subsequent years, this began to change as conversational partners advised each other to be careful to select their sexual partners with care. By 2017, men and women speaking about AIDS in their social networks acknowledged that times had changed, and the number of new HIV infections had steeply declined.

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