Community-Based Research in Fragile Contexts: Reflections From Rohingya Refugee Camps in Cox’s Bazar,Bangladesh

Abstract

This commentary examines community-based research in fragile settings based on the authors’ experience working with Rohingya and host community researchers in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. This iteration of a community-based approach to research focuses on putting community researchers at the center and emphasizes their involvement at each stage of the research process – from design to implementation to analysis – alongside external researchers. Community researchers contribute their expertise to increase understanding of nuances that might otherwise be lost to external researchers. Integral to this approach is building and nurturing the trust of researchers, respondents and community members through innovative means such as an informal “trust network.” Also central to the community-based approach, especially in fragile¹ settings, is a sustained emphasis on community researchers’ learning and skills-building. The commentary article describes methods developed by the Centre for Peace and Justice, Brac University (CPJ), implemented with Rohingya refugees and host community researchers in Cox’s Bazar. The article suggests:

Putting community members at the heart of learning and research approaches helps to amplify marginalized voices and emphasize their needs and choices.

The political and economic atmosphere of a refugee setting can change rapidly. In such circumstances, community-based research can be vital to policymakers that seek to understand emerging concerns and issues.

Community-based experiential education and research approaches hold potential to promote grassroots leadership among refugee youth in situations of protracted displacement.

Strengthening the capacities of community researchers is crucial to this approach. Community researchers often lack language skills, especially writing and reading, and translating from local dialects to English or any other preferred language. The acquisition of research skills can also pave a durable and critical pathway toward meaningful youth engagement.

Trust and familiarity between refugee interlocutors and researchers require long-term engagement. Creating a culture of mutual respect and dignity is of utmost importance. The community expects researchers to respect their religious beliefs and cultural values.

The two-way exchange between community researchers and respondents enhances the learning process and can help discover areas for further inquiry.

Keywords

community-based research migration fragile setting Rohingya refugees experiential learning methodology

Introduction

Years of systematic marginalization and political persecution against the Rohingya people in Myanmar have culminated in several large waves of forced displacement. Nearly one million Rohingya people now live as refugees in the camps of Cox’s Bazar near the Myanmar-Bangladesh border. Five years on, the refugees’ sense of reprieve after fleeing immediate danger has given way to the realization that they will likely stay in the camps for a long time. The community’s priorities have expanded to include longer-term necessities such as education, livelihoods, and social mobilization. The Rohingya refugee community needs strength to participate in international justice mechanisms and community governance for peace and stability.

Five years since the mass exodus of 2017, Rohingya refugees live in increasingly insecure camps. The host community also suffers from geographic marginalization and structural inequities in Bangladesh. A continued lack of access to education and livelihood opportunities leaves most Rohingya in a state of limbo and youth without a chance to build toward their futures. While the Bangladeshi government allows some education for Rohingya children, it is far from ideal. Among other regulations and restrictions, all camp-based schools are required to register with the government, and non-governmental education providers can only offer classes in temporary physical structures and must adhere to the school curriculum used in Myanmar. The former curriculum is designed to facilitate return and prevent local integration of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. The more popular Rohingya-led home-based schools were forced to shut down and madrasas face continued restrictions in the camps (Daily Star 2021).

In addition, access to formal higher education is completely barred for Rohingya refugees and is limited for the host community. Shouldering a lost generation of refugee youth, the future of Rohingya education remains uncertain. About half of the refugee population in Cox’s Bazar are youth and children, who continue to be deprived of intermediary and tertiary-level education, despite desperately seeking opportunities to learn.

As a knowledge partner, the Centre for Peace and Justice, Brac University (CPJ) has innovated several community-based approaches to research, facilitating grounded exploration in refugee and host community spaces. CPJ ensured meaningful engagement with community members — refugee and host — using non-formal training and designing relevant academic coursework that enabled continued community collaboration even amid COVID-19 related mobility restrictions. In this commentary, we offer our experiences and reflections, as researchers, working with refugee and host community youth in implementing community-based research in and around the Rohingya refugee camps since 2019 (Olney, Badiuzzaman, and Hoque 2019).

Decades of toxic ethnocentrism and marginalization in Myanmar have pushed the Rohingya people away from basic rights and access to development. They have been, for generations, pushed away from formal institutions, including education and public service. The denial of their right to belong in Myanmar has precipitated serious human rights abuses, including denial of the rights to work, free movement, and education (de Chickera 2021). Few Rohingya reached high school in Myanmar.

First, we present some key theoretical and methodological notes that laid the foundation for our adapted community-based approach in Cox’s Bazar. We then highlight scopes of learning and research design, methods, and implementation, especially drawing from our Critical Thinking and Analytical Skills (CRITAS) course. We then offer critical reflections based on our experiences and our positioning in the research space. Finally, we present our thoughts on the potential application of learning-focused and community-based research in different fragile contexts.

Theoretical and Methodological Foundations

Understanding social differences and community perceptions strengthens the capacities of researchers to monitor and analyze emerging concerns and social dynamics in a fragile setting, to the benefit of both policymakers and humanitarian workers. Community-based research facilitates gathering nuanced and diverse viewpoints, helps to foster community dialogue, and can help uplift marginalized voices. The authors’ adaptation of the community-based approach was informed by Participatory Action Research (PAR) along with the idea that research can be a pedagogical tool and an experiential approach to learning.

PAR is a democratizing approach that seeks to transform how knowledge is produced by placing the participation of “research populations” at the center of the research process. Such an approach effectively challenges the researcher-participant hierarchy. The combination of participation, action, and research helps reduce the extractive tendencies of research and holds the potential to contribute to positive change for individuals and communities. In this approach, participants are subjects within their own communities, take action within those communities, and engage in research that allows their communities to produce knowledge (Centre for Peace and Justice [CPJ] 2021). Further, PAR allows communities to understand the research process and the need for research (Martin et al. 2019). PAR holds potential to create a space for “critical hope” to participating community members, even when that may not be visible to the researchers (ibid.).

Beyond knowledge production, PAR creates a scope for learning for community researchers. It can be a “pedagogical tool” for “active learning” while designing and employing PAR (Hammond et al. 2005). Community-based learning and research, in combination, allows community researchers to build their understanding of social phenomena, apply knowledge and expertise, create ideas, and disseminate them through effective interventions across diverse communities. Ultimately, this combined approach becomes a way to “redress power imbalances,” “expedite shared benefits among community members and external academic apparatus,” and “promote reciprocal knowledge translation” (Wallerstein and Duran 2010).

The experiential approach guides the critical examination of the learners’ thought processes, subsequent actions, and even their emotional responses. As such, experiential education encourages participants to reassess their perception of their surroundings, increasing their openness to new ideas. As Itin (1999) notes:

“An open mind is a fertile ground for creativity, criticality which is useful for academic research, conflict resolution as well as personal challenges.”

To design our research approach, the authors reviewed literature — both academic and practice-oriented — on the pedagogy of teaching social differences, community perspectives and politico-economic dynamics, and replacing conventional practices with a more organic, visual, and experiential approach. The latter prioritizes the use of different activities, role playing, and local stories to make learning more comprehensive, pertinent to the context and applicable to learners’ day-to-day lives. As Chickering (1976, 63) states:

“[Experiential] learning. . .occurs when changes in judgment, feelings, knowledge or skills result in a particular person from living through an event or events.”

Community-based research can help initiate or strengthen refuge-led initiatives to advocate for themselves and to contribute directly to positive changes. It holds the potential to build and strengthen camp-based civil society and to inform long-term strategies for change (Krishnan et al. 2020).

The adoption of an experiential method to learning accelerates retention with access to hands-on lessons, ensuring more engagement with the learning process. As learners understand how they learn, they become more likely to investigate future questions. Experiential learning pedagogy has emerged in the last decades as a transformative research paradigm that bridges the gap between science and practice through community engagement and social action to increase social equity (Wallerstein and Duran 2010).

In the context of Cox’s Bazar, an adapted community-based research approach allowed the authors to contribute to three spaces within the refugee response. First, it created paid volunteering opportunities for Rohingya youth in the camps. Second, it contributed to creating non-formal learning and training opportunities for adult researchers from the Rohingya and host communities. Third, it attempted to redirect the power and ownership of the produced knowledge to the communities that inspired the research insights. The Research was led by community members to serve community needs, creating a more authentic exchange of information.

Implementing a Community-Based Research Approach in Cox’s Bazar

Using a “researchers as learners” model, the authors have been working closely with community researchers on several research projects since 2019. CPJ recruited community researchers by assessing the participants’ basic literacy skills, technical skills, and leadership skills. Identifying appropriate community researchers is challenging in the camps as systemic discrimination in Myanmar hindered the Rohingya community’s access to basic education. In searching for potential community researchers, CPJ found it useful to partner informally with Rohingya-led community-based organizations (CBOs).

Creating an (Almost) Equal Learning Field for Community Researchers

To address the concern of limited literary skills in the English language — skills that are critical to reach a global audience — the Rohingya and Bangladeshi community researchers underwent extensive training and mentoring. The initial language training and mentoring from staff researchers had their limitations, especially with communication in English and in translating. Seeing this, we paired community researchers with advanced English language skills with those who were less proficient. The two-pronged approach created parallel spaces for community researchers to practice and build their English language skills with staff researchers and their peers.

Improving writing skills among community researchers were also emphasized. The engagement with community researchers were divided into “academic and research months.” During the academic months, community researchers were engaged in reading, workshops, and discussions to accelerate their comprehension of the research topics at hand. During the research months, participants applied their learnings to study social differences, politico-economic dynamics, and community perceptions. CRITAS course instructors also taught Bloom’s Taxonomy² (Armstrong 2010) tools to stimulate the community researchers’ analytical thinking.

Learning While Doing; Doing While Learning

Community researchers participated in CRITAS not only as students or data enumerators but also as active researchers throughout the research cycle. Through weekly “homework” assignments, community researchers produced various knowledge documents, including interview transcripts, field notes, briefing papers, analyses, and research reports that reflect the nuanced perspectives of local residents and refugees.

The community researchers first studied the monthly topic and relevant research techniques through lectures, reading assignments, and watching videos. Next, they discussed the topic in small teams of four or five called “pods,” and submitted a set of research questions to course instructors and researchers for feedback. With guidance, the pods then developed appropriate tools to pursue their research questions. Areas of support from staff researchers included identifying sampling strategies, drafting interview and focus group questionnaires, developing surveys, and designing case studies. Following data collection, the pods analyzed their findings and produced a group analysis paper. These analyses were submitted to the authors, who then drafted the reports to share with the community researchers for final review prior to dissemination.

After participating in the interviews or surveys, community researchers were encouraged to dialogue on several critical questions in their pods and with the larger group with the instructors. The internal reflection prepared the participants for the workplace and enabled them to have a better understanding of the community, improve personal and social relationships, and address their psychological needs. For instance, the community researchers conducted a research on “Three Generation History’’ where they interviewed their family members from three different generations using storytelling methods. They reflected that their bonding with family members grew stronger and that the interviewees were happy to share their stories. The community researchers also felt enriched to have learned about their family histories. A host community researcher reflected, “I could learn from my grandfather about the time of Bangladesh Liberation War. I got to know what they faced and how they fought during the war. I did not know these stories before” (Olney, Hoque, and Ahmad, 2022). Moreover, interviewing family members scaffolded them to acquire research skills and made them confident to conduct research in the community.

Further, instead of imposing research themes, we encouraged participants to come up with their own ideas and issues that they would like to study. Staff researchers provided technical and mentoring support to learners to design their study, including developing open-ended research questions and question banks for community consultations.

Facilitating Peer-to-Peer Learning

Working separately but on parallel research assignments, researchers from the refugee community and host community prepared themselves and implemented their research skills to produce quality reports and briefs for humanitarian decision-makers. Participants met in small “pods” each week to share and interpret their findings. Each pod submitted an analysis piece to staff, who integrated these contributions into research reports. Community researchers reviewed draft reports, gathered community reactions to findings by providing verbal summaries in their own language, and helped revise and finalize written materials.

Each month, the teams focused on a different topic relevant to their lives. Monthly topics included food security, environmental studies, trafficking and migration, and ethnographic history. Research skills were taught incrementally, scaffolding the learning process of participants and mentoring them to strengthen their motivation and participation. Instructors gradually transferred responsibilities to the learners.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors hosted “Chat Hours” via WhatsApp each week, where community researchers shared inputs from community respondents. This strategy to use “Chat Hours” emerged to mitigate information gaps between the refugee community and the humanitarian agencies. Such an approach also allowed for regular and remote engagement between community researchers and staff researchers, and helped avoid gaps in communication.

Centering Trust in Learning and Research

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, CPJ worked with dedicated and talented Rohingya community researchers and developed a “Trust Network” of community members, including Majhis (camp leaders), religious leaders, CBOs, teachers, and grassroots leaders. The resulting informal “Trust Network” included over 3,000 individuals, who agreed to participate in regular consultation on a rotating basis. Roughly 1,000 participated in these consultations each month. Community researchers covered emerging concerns and questions from these consultations over the phone each week and compiled findings and analysis in a weekly internal report sent to the authors.

It must be acknowledged how disconcerting it must be for persecuted and traumatized communities to share their experiences and stories with outsiders, including researchers who are often from outside their communities. Rohingya refugees are survivors of the most atrocious violence and most have experience repeated trauma over decades. Further, a combination of disappointment in humanitarian systems and justice and fear of potential retaliation have pushed the Rohingya people to gradually become distrustful of researchers, especially those who seem to parachute in and out of the camps. Olney and Hoque (2021) documented such a “trust gap” between refugees and humanitarians in Cox’s Bazar. The “Trust Network” approach can create a congenial, informal but secure atmosphere for community researchers and community respondents to talk and discuss sensitive and crucial issues. The approach seeks to create norms of reciprocity and a network of civic engagement, ensuring researchers remain accountable to respondents. It also empowers people in the network who pose their straightforward questions to relevant actors.

Although this “Trust Network” was born out of COVID-19 and mobility restrictions for outsiders, it continues to be an important source of information even after public health-related mobility restrictions have been lifted. Long-term, personal engagement between staff and community researchers builds community trust and familiarity with the research process. Repeated engagement between researchers and respondents also builds institutional reputability and acceptance as respondents develop awareness of the purpose, limitations, and potential impacts of research. With this trust established, more frank and nuanced feedback can be collected from the community, allowing greater insight into the topics of inquiry.

A two-way exchange between researchers and community respondents enhances the learning process and helps uncover additional areas for inquiry. However, research is often a unidirectional process in which researchers are not accountable to community respondents. From our interactions, many young refugees note interactions with enumerators and researchers, but most rarely saw the research findings or observed tangible changes following the research. Many community members are not briefed adequately on the purpose of the research. To overcome this asymmetry, we invited community respondents to share their comments, questions, and concerns. Such research and learning designs also create opportunities for respondents to learn about different topics, which can be especially valuable in settings where their access to information is otherwise limited.

A Few Critical Questions and Reflections

There are opportunities and challenges associated with implementing the described community-based research approach. Our continuous engagement with Rohingya and Bangladeshi host community researchers has allowed us to reflect on some questions integral to our research and our research approach. The following are some critical reflections on lessons learned, experiences, and unanswered questions.³

How Did Our Community-Based Research Approach Create Learning Opportunities?

Community researchers benefit when enumerations are conducted as an immersive learning experience. Access to higher education is prohibited in the camps and is also limited for host community youth in Cox’s Bazar, a peripheral district of Bangladesh. The research preparation and analysis stages offer unique spaces that promote non-formal learning opportunities for youth, especially for refugees whose access to learning is strongly limited. In this process, community researchers must not only be trained on data enumeration, but also on thematic areas and concepts from different disciplines, especially the social sciences. Allowing space for community researchers to learn research theories, methodologies, and questions can facilitate learning beyond basic data enumeration. This learning can be further facilitated with intensive training on research ethics and soft research skills that can be transferred to the community researchers’ future work. CPJ was unable to provide accreditation to community researchers due to policy restrictions. However, all community researchers received training and project completion certificates to commemorate their successful work and to document their experience for their future endeavors.

Such a research approach also extends new roles to the refugee and host community youths — namely learners-students-volunteers and researchers. Many community researchers are university-aged youth, who have been systematically excluded from higher education. For many community researchers, this work was their first interaction with a university. In our interactions and conversations, community researchers often expressed their eagerness to supplement their lack of access to formal education with the non-formal learning and training opportunities we designed (CPJ 2021). This meant that course instructors and staff researchers had to extend their roles to that of mentors and teachers, which requires deep commitment and engagement outside of work for course instructors.

Beyond the course content, the authors also tried to address any gaps in reading and comprehension, especially English. Rohingya and Chittagonian are both spoken languages and do not have scripts or syllabaries. The Rohingya and Chittagonian languages to have some 70 percent in common, and the Chittagonian and Cox’s Bazar dialects have about 90 percent similarity with each other (Translators without Borders 2017). Additionally, the Rohingya people know Burmese, and host community members know Bangla. Nevertheless, language barriers in English would often hold back community researchers from active learning process through writing. To encourage learners to practice writing, the authors held “private freewriting” and “focused freewriting”⁴ sessions. Private freewriting tools allowed learners to write continuously for a set period of time with limited concern for rhetoric, conventions, and mechanics. At other times, learners were given prompts to guide their writing. Both processes helped learners to gain confidence with their writing.

What Scope Is There for This Approach to Encourage Grassroots Change and Leadership?

Community-based research can encourage critical thinking and initiate discussions on cultural change. In 2019, CPJ rolled out a civic learning course that had a small component on gender. Although gender was not a focal area, exploring differences between sex and gender initiated unexpected and lively discussions among the community researchers, who began to unpack the extent to which they had taken cultural gender norms for granted. After a particular session on gender rights, a few male participants shared with the instructor how they had beaten their wives in the past. Without any direct prompting, the men committed to not beating their wives going ahead. The training and discussions on gender helped learners better understand how tolerance of gender-based violence and their desire to grow as peacebuilders were in conflict. In this way, these conversations and learnings did not stay limited to the “classrooms.”

Community-based experiential education and research is not a revolutionary idea. However, this approach can be an exemplary path to support refugee youth and foster their grassroots leadership in situations of protracted displacement. To help refugee youth develop their intellectual leadership, skills should be considered one of the most important and durable solutions. Such a “learner-researcher” approach can create the space for refugees to raise their own concerns and needs and, potentially, contribute to prioritizing and designing responsive research that builds their skills and helps mainstream direct community insights into humanitarian response. More can be done to reflect the priorities of refugees through research. To that end, a community-based approach that emphasizes both learning and doing can help place refugees at the center of research and amplify community needs and priorities.

Both Rohingya and host community researchers frequently raised their ambitions to learn leadership and hone their critical thinking skills to mobilize their respective communities for a better future. Many Rohingya youth aspire to study law and politics, so they can meaningfully participate in international and domestic justice mechanisms. The social sciences were largely missing in Myanmar’s curriculum. As a result, most Rohingya never studied the social sciences in their school or college.

Did We Adequately Address Inequalities Within Communities?

The community-based research approach is not without limitations. The authors often asked which voices were missing in their research. Although such an approach surfaces community voices, it still risks leaving some voices behind. Unlike random sampling, the “Trust Network” approach relied on convenient sampling, where community respondents were selected based on ease and the community researchers’ social network. This approach meant that there were some missing voices among community respondents. For example, some camps were more represented than others and the “Trust Network” had more male than female community respondents.

There are also sizable differences in the levels of education within the Rohingya community. Rohingya learners have been deprived of their civic rights, including education, job opportunities, and barrier-free movement. The Rohingya people have been historically denied access to employment in the public or corporate sectors in Myanmar, which often provided most with little incentive to pursue formal education. As a result, many prefer agriculture, farming, and fishing to school. Also, it is uncommon for Rohingya girls to attend school due to cultural restrictions. For example, school authorities in Myanmar did not allow Rohingya girls to enter the learning space without a school uniform, which was frowned upon by the Rohingya community. Families are also reluctant to continue girls’ education after puberty. Given these gendered challenges, identifying female Rohingya community researchers was challenging. The gender distribution of our predominantly male community researchers reflected this challenge. To be culturally sensitive, the authors created an exclusive learning pod for female community researchers. Some initiatives to make community researchers and their families more comfortable included providing separate spaces for female and male researchers when needed, communicating with family members and making open two-way communication constant throughout the process.

Most Rohingya community researchers did not have computers to attend online sessions, which sometimes made it difficult for them to avail electronic learning materials. Many, however, had smartphones that allowed them to join online classes and access learning materials. To ensure effective participation, the community researchers were given small amounts of mobile top-ups and data.

Refugee camp residents reside in small and often overcrowded shelters. Three to four people must typically share a small room, leaving little to no space for studying or working. As the internet connection is sometimes too weak to attend online sessions, community researchers often had to go outside their shelter to a hilltop or an open field to access the internet.⁵ This was particularly challenging for female researchers who may face higher security risk should they have move large distances. Furthermore, during monsoon season heavy rain inundated shelters and roads. Electricity is also an issue. Rohingya refugees cannot access electricity but use solar power, struggling to recharge phones and electronic devices for learning.

There were instances where some community respondents in the “Trust Network” were not interested in talking to community researchers. Some noted not seeing changes after consultations as the reason for such reluctance. Managing expectations on large-scale change has been challenging.

Did We Really Challenge West-Centric Modes of Knowledge Production?

Our answer to this is rather mixed. This research approach allowed community researchers to take an active role throughout the research cycle — from inception to data collection to analysis — which is rather rare. Research, especially in humanitarian contexts, is often a one-directional process in which researchers have little accountability to respondents (CPJ 2022). To further amplify community voices, we invited community researchers to review the draft research papers and provide their feedback and inputs before sharing them with others. On a slightly dismaying note, such an approach is highly dependent on external funding and is reliant on the whims of the perceived needs of external communities. This makes it difficult to plan and continue such a learning and research agenda on a continuous basis. Lastly, this article was written by Bangladeshi researchers, who acknowledge their outsider positioning in the research space.

Concluding Thoughts and Policy Recommendations

The authors encourage other researchers and organizations to consider these experiences and reflections from implementing a community-based research approach in a complex and fragile setting such as the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar. Here are a few lessons for consideration:

Community members should and can be at the heart of learning and research approaches, which amplify marginalized voices and emphasize their needs and choices.

Trust is critical and cannot be built without the needed time and effort. Building trust between the community, researchers, and humanitarians is necessary for effective collaboration and cooperation.

Creating a culture of mutual respect and dignity is of the utmost importance. There is significant risk of abuse or misuse of refugees by humanitarian agencies and local communities in fragile settings. Mixing refugee and host community youth in community-based learning requires sensitivity and management of social differences, which is both a gradual and continuous process.

Researchers must respect the community’s religious beliefs, and cultural values while running or operating an academic course, training, and research. Respect fortifies rapport between the community and external researchers.

A particular challenge of community-based research is to strengthen the writing skills and English language competencies among community researchers. Deliberate efforts are needed to level the learning field for researchers.

Community-based research must offer interpretation and translation facilities for community learners and researchers, while teaching and researching issues in the community. Any recruitment of participants should be based on merit, professional efficiency, and language competencies.

A community-based approach must also provide the needed mentoring support to community researchers, recognizing that everyone does not have the same ability to learn and the different ways in which different participants learn.

Sharing research results with community members who participate in studies can be crucial as it allows for transparency, community engagement, and credibility of the research. Additionally, it can also lead to the development of more effective interventions and policies that are tailored to the specific needs and context of the community.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This paper and the research described would not have been possible without Jessica Olney, who led the design and implementation of the community-based approach in Cox’s Bazar. The described research approach was applied through three projects: Bridging Community and Humanitarian Response to Covid-19 funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), the Drivers of Social Cohesion and Protective Factors in Cox’s Bazar funded by UNICEF, and the Capacity Strengthening of Volunteers: Social Differences and Perceptions Analysis funded by WFP.

1

The residents in a “fragile setting” face multiple risks due to severe, overlapping challenges and conditions.

2

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a framework that categorizes different levels of thinking and understanding into a hierarchy. It helps educators design learning objectives and assessments that target specific levels of thinking. It is a useful tool to create measurable learning objectives, design effective assessments, and to guide instruction.

3

Several of these lessons are drawn from CPJ’s unpublished works, especially from “Learning peace and civics to affect positive change in Rohingya camps and host communities” ().

4

Focused freewriting is a method where one writes about a topic without stopping or editing. This is often viewed and used as a tool to help students develop writing skills in a wide spectrum of educational contexts.

5

Internet access in the camps are also blocked at times.

Disclosures

This article draws from studies that had informed consent from all participants. The article did not involve animal subjects.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflict of interest with respect to research, authorship, and publication of this article.

Funding

The authors receive no financial support for research, authorship, and publication of this article.

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