How Did I Select Participants?
Before conducting the interviews, I was very aware of addressing cultural diversity during the selection process. For example, I tried to include both Mandarin and Cantonese speaking Canadians, as well as English and Francophone Canadians. To achieve a more inclusive representation, I also invited second-, third- and fourth-generation Chinese Canadians as well as first-generation immigrants.
There was no application process to participate in the interview. When a museum passed me information about people who were willing to participate, I reached out to them to schedule an interview time. After considering the suggestion from Queen’s University’s Ethics Board, I decided that I would not limit the interviews to one woman for each decade because one of my goals was to represent the diversity of the Chinese diaspora. Thus, when needed, I interviewed multiple women per decade (the 1970s and 1980s). When I decided to invite or accept an invitation, I considered the participant’s fashion consciousness and how their experience engaged with Chinese Canadian social history. I made a chart of some key events in both Canada and China that influenced Chinese Canadian women’s fashion and living conditions in each decade. When I contacted a potential participant, I asked them to send a brief introduction of themselves to see whether their life experiences interacted with historical events and sub-cultural fashion trends such as the rise of the Punk, the Hippie, and the New Romantic Movement. Among my participants, three women had an unrecorded pre-interview conversation with me through Zoom or over a phone call, where I asked them a few questions to know more about them and explain my project. Many participants sent me an introduction of their biographical experiences or a photo collage of their fashion evolution over the years, making me assured that they were an excellent fit for this project.
Before the selection process, I decided that suppose I received an incredible amount of responses; I would use the selection criteria to evaluate each potential participant based on how much they were willing to contribute to the exhibition. The measurements included whether they consented to document the interview, whether they accepted the “creative challenge”, whether they could share images of their clothes or personal objects related to fashion, and how informative they were about Chinese Canadian history. However, the actual selection process did not involve evaluation before the interviews.
