12. RESEARCH METHODS
I had hoped to contact former students and find out how they remember the course and whether they attribute to it any effects in later life. This has proved possible but it has also been proved that the time available was not enough to produce more than a token of results. I would now estimate that a year would be needed to do a comprehensive study of this kind.

Locating the subjects
Finding people after nearly twenty years is not easy. The target people were about a thousand former students of the two schools in East Africa - Kololo Senior Secondary School in Kampala, Uganda and Kakamega Secondary School in Kenya.

Ugandans: Because many of the pupils at Kololo had been Asian it was in fact easier to locate them than the former Kakamega people. Because of the expulsion of Asians by Idi Amin many of them were living in Britain. Twelve were located through advertisements in the weekly magazines catering for Asians, especially the Gujarati speakers who are a majority of the former Ugandans. Of these, six returned the questionnaires.
I made no attempt to contact the Ugandan African former students. Uganda has gone through traumatic political upheavals in the last twenty years and those who have survived have more serious problems to deal with than this study.

Kenyans: The former students of Kakamega proved more difficult to locate quickly. An advertisement in the Kenya Standard produced only one relevant reply (though it also produced two people seeking admission to Aston University!). An announcement on Voice of Kenya radio produced no replies. In the end, personal contact in Kenya proved the only suitable method. The drawback to this method is that it requires time and in the two weeks I was there I was able to interview only four, though I heard of many more, and more time would undoubtedly have allowed more interviews.

The Respondents
The participants in Nairobi consisted of: two journalists, one working for a major newspaper as a Sports writer; and another for the Radio station; a third was a law lecturer in the university; and a fourth was a civil servant in the customs department.
All the Ugandan Asian respondents were Professionals or Business people.

Questionnaire
A Questionnaire (Appendix 2) was devised. A copy was sent to the respondents to advertisements in the Gujarati Press. These were former students at Kololo Senior Secondary School in Kampala who had been expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin. Six questionnaires were returned of which four were from Kololians and two from other schools as controls. This makes a total of eight former Block students and two others.Interview
Four former students were interviewed in Nairobi.
The taped records turned out to be of much greater value as a guide to the students' memories than the written questionnaires. It seems clear that whereas people are unwilling to write much in response to such research requests they are quite willing to talk. If more work were to be done on this project I would try to interview more people, rather than send them questionnaires. I conducted the interviews using the questionnaire as a guide, though without following in all cases the exact sequence of the questions. As the study was not going to yield statistical results I did not think it necessary to follow the questionnaire precisely.

Results
On the whole the questionnaire answers were not very useful as the key question, in a subjective study of this kind, was the Personal Statement and respondents did not for the most part spend much time on this. However, of the Personal Statements which were made the most common remark was the help given by the speaking activities. The same is true of the taped interviews. The most common thing stated in favour of the course was the large amount of speaking done, usually characterised by the respondents as "group discussion".

No negative opinions were spoken about the course, so far as people could remember it, though the remark of the General Practitioner that he wondered whether he might have gained from being taught "grummer" might be taken as an implied criticism. (And his spelling - see appendix 4 - might also be an implicit criticism.

Is it significant that there were no criticisms? In the statistical sense, 4 interviews from an original population of 324 (Kakamega) has no significance. Before beginning the interviews I did say that I did not mind if they had criticisms, but it may be that only questioning in depth would be able to bring out negative feelings, because of most people's politeness. However, the general impression from the spoken interviews was very favourable. At the time the course was going, once the initial hostility was over, there was an atmosphere of enthusiasm, and the memories of this seem to have survived.

In the written replies the most interesting criticism was of the suddenness with which the Block course finished at Kololo (where the person in charge left at the end of contract and the school reverted to a conventional set-up overnight, the result of personal hostilities.) The administration of the school at Kololo had been hostile and many teachers had not liked it but had been forced into taking part. This points to the need to negotiate this kind of project if it is not to be dependent on a single individual of strong will.