I was in fact able to interview parents on a one-to-one basis in their own homes. There is no doubt I was fortunate to have this opportunity to talk with parents, as many social science researchers, especially when on short research visits to mainland China, find it difficult to get past official frameworks and institutions and arrange less formal, person-to-person interviews. Everything in these circumstances depends on personal contact and the willingness of individual officials or professionals to facilitate and support an outside research initiative.
In addition to the interviews with parents of children at the center in Nanjing, I sought out as many other parents with deaf children as possible, although these interviews were not easy to arrange. Ultimately, five additional parents were interviewed in the city and seven in the countryside. Most of their children were older than the children in the preschool. Furthermore, the circumstances of the interviews varied—particularly in the countryside, where respondents were not interviewed on a one-to-one basis, the prepared interview questions had to be set aside in favor of a less structured conversation, and an interpreter was used because the local dialect was very different from the standard Chinese spoken in Nanjing. Nevertheless, these interviews provided very useful information: they enabled me to assess the representativeness of the views of the nursery school parents, affirmed the importance of certain key themes, and introduced more nuance into the picture.
Besides interviewing parents, who were the main focus of my study, I also talked with teachers, administrators, and staff at preschool rehabilitation centers and deaf schools in Beijing, Chongqing, and Nanjing. A morning spent at the Hexagon Well Primary School in Nanjing, which had accepted five deaf children into its first-year class, was particularly informative: the children themselves gave their views on their experience in school, and their teachers were also very helpful. I was also able to travel to the northern part of Jiangsu province to find out about some of the facilities for deaf children there, both in the town of Yancheng and in the surrounding countryside.