ABSTRACT
My research in Lin Village progressed smoothly during the first four months of my residence there. I had become acquainted with many villagers who would invite me to their house for special social occasions or drop by my flat to chat with me about their problems. By March 1985, when I was quite confident that I had established good enough rapport with most village families and that I understood issues that the villagers were concerned about, I decided to conduct a systematic household survey to collect information that could be analyzed later. I designed a set of questionnaires that included questions on family life, finance, farming, marriage, ancestral worship, and value orientations. Of the 200 families in Lin Village, 40 were selected following the one-in-five random sampling procedure. During those household visits I had intense, face-to-face meetings with these village families with structured questions. It was then that I came to realize that there were still many villagers that I didn’t know due to their low visibility, and I had not realized some of the problems they faced. The following incident was one such example from my field notes.
