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3) Primary sources related to the research topic in both Thailand and China are also examined. 4) Furthermore, secondary sources in Thai, Chinese, and English are utilized. 5) I also extensively refer to PhD dissertations, master’s theses, newspaper reports, and articles published in scholarly and business journals.
Interviews and Questionnaire Sampling Design
The ethnic Chinese who live in Bangkok can be divided into three groups: those who live in the Chinatown area and maintain Chinese cultural traditions, those who live outside Chinatown but still maintain their Chinese tradition and practices, and those who live outside Chinatown and do not follow Chinese tradition. The reason for dividing the Chinese in this survey into three groups is to help me assess whether a strong Chinese cultural environment and traditional practices is a key factor in their assimilation into Thai society.
I developed and distributed 200 surveys to ethnic Chinese who live in Bangkok with differences of background (economic status, education, age, and sex). I used questionnaires, and the “Simple Random Cluster Sampling” and “Snowball Sampling” formats to update the data that Chan and Tong (1993) gathered in the last decade. To design the questionnaires, I have chosen open questions to test the validity and reliability of the respondents by using some similar questions on a different level of the questions to make sure that the answer could be valid for different types of questions. Furthermore, to analyze this quantitative research, I have chosen the percentage classification method to verify the outcome of each respondent.
Furthermore, to verify the validity and reliability of the questionnaires, I conducted 30 open-ended interviews with Thai and Chinese government officials, leading scholars, business people, and overseas Chinese groups both in Thailand and China on the same topics and included the questions on Thai-Chinese foreign relations, Thai domestic policies that have affected the overseas Chinese, and the Thai social, political, and cultural environment with respect to Chinese assimilation. This data and information gathering were used to test whether the Skinnerian Paradigm is still valid and whether fourth-generation Chinese in Thailand exist.