Doing Pakistani Ethnicity the Female Way: Issues of Identity, Trust and Recruitment when Researching Older Pakistani Muslims in the UK

Abstract

In this chapter we reflect upon our experiences of undertaking qualitative fieldwork with older Pakistani Muslim women and men living in the United Kingdom (UK). The significant increase that is expected within the next 20 years in the proportion of older people living in minority black and ethnic communities within the UK (Merrell et al., 2006) — particularly those living within the Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities (see Katbamna et al., 2002; Phillipson et al., 2003; Burholt & Wenger, 2003) — suggests a growing need for conducting research on this hitherto under-researched group of Bangladeshi and Pakistani older people (see Vincent et al., 2006; Victor et al., 2012). This is especially because of the particularly high levels of inequality and disadvantage experienced by members of these communities in the UK (Qureshi, 1998; Harding & Balarajan, 2001; Nazroo et al., 2004; Nazroo, 2006), and their higher levels of morbidity rates (Katbamna et al., 2002), which are likely to have important implications for how old age is experienced by members of these minority groups. However, as it is common with many other under-researched minority and migrant groups, doing qualitative research with older Bangladeshis and Pakistanis presents researchers with key challenges. These challenges stem not merely from the cultural and linguistic differences that may often exist between researchers (and also between the wider academic world) and these ethnic minority groups (see Boneham, 2002; Feldman et al., 2008; Hanna et al., 2008; Lloyd et al., 2008), but also relate to the particular social and cultural identities of the researchers vis-à-vis those they research.