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Negotiating Insider and Outsider Identities in the Field: "Insider" in a Foreign Land; "Outsider" in One's Own Land

Ergun, A., Erdemir, A. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:31:12 PST

The authors present a self-reflexive and comparative account of their fieldwork experiences in Azerbaijan and Turkey to examine insider and outsider identities of researchers in settings that are neither unfamiliar nor fully familiar. It is argued that the researcher is often suspended in a betwixt-and-between position in the transformative process. This position is not necessarily a transitional one that leads to either the inclusion or exclusion of researchers by informants. Rather, the insider-outsider relationship can be conceived as a dialectical one that is continuously informed by the differentiating perceptions that researchers and informants have of themselves and others.

Piloting Data Collection via Cell Phones: Results, Experiences, and Lessons Learned

Zuwallack, R. — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 06:06:16 PDT

From October 2006 through February 2007, Macro and six partnering state departments of health conducted over 1,900 interviews via cell phone in Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, and Texas. The survey collected about 10 minutes of general health data for adults in each state. Despite a high number of hang-ups, many cell users are willing to conduct a survey on their cell phones. The cell phone sample had a higher percentage of young adults and minorities than a comparative landline sample. A high percentage of respondents live in households without a landline or cell only, a population that cannot be reached through landline random digit dialing samples. A high percentage of respondents keep their phones on all day, suggesting that we are reaching a population segment that regularly use their cell phones rather than those who use cell phones sporadically. This cell phone survey experience has provided invaluable information about conducting cell phone interviews and has helped shape methodological directions for future surveys.

Interviews as Experiments: Using Audience Effects to Examine Social Relationships

Cronk, L., Gerkey, D., Irons, W. — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:59:28 PDT

To explore the ability of audience effects to shed light on social dynamics, the authors contrasted responses given in individual and joint interviews. Interviews were conducted among the English-speaking residents of Utila, one of Honduras’s Bay Islands. Interviewees were older adults with at least one living adult child and younger adults with at least one living parent. Interviews were conducted with individuals alone and with pairs consisting of older adults and their adult children. The topic of the interviews was parenting, but the authors’ particular interest was in a question regarding obligations children have to their elderly parents. Responses to that question and to a control question were coded for length, interviewer behavior, vocalics, and forcefulness of communicative style. Audience effects were found in children’s responses to the question about obligations to elderly parents: Children interviewed with parents responded more forcefully to that question than children interviewed alone. Responses to the control question showed no audience effect. Involvement in the island’s remittance economy was also associated with a more forceful communicative style, but this effect was not contingent on the audience present or the question asked. Audience effects may be a useful and important new tool for ethnographic research.

Using Participatory Mapping to Inform a Community-Randomized Trial of HIV Counseling and Testing

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:59:27 PDT

Participatory mapping and transect walks were used to inform the research and intervention design and to begin building community relations in preparation for Project Accept, a community-randomized trial sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health. Project Accept is being conducted at five sites in four countries: Thailand, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Tanzania. Results from the mapping exercises informed decisions such as defining community boundaries and identifying appropriate criteria for matching community pairs for the trial as well as where to situate the services. The mapping also informed intervention-related decisions such as where to situate the services. The participatory methods enabled researchers at each site to develop an understanding of the communities that could not have been derived from existing data or data collected through standard data collection techniques. Furthermore, the methods lay the foundation for collaborative community research partnerships.

Remaining Skeptical: Bridling for and with One Another

Vagle, M. D., Hughes, H. E., Durbin, D. J. — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 23:30:09 PDT

In this article, we argue that being our own best critics is a process by which we commit to interrogating what we know (or think we know) as we design a study. We situate the idea of bridling within the philosophical and methodological conversation of a more traditional notion in phenomenological research, bracketing, and then within Macbeth’s three expressions of reflexivity in qualitative research. Based on our analysis of some of our methodological decisions, we articulate four pivotal issues we faced. We close by making specific suggestions for faculty and graduate students individually and as research teams to consider as they strive to be their own best critics in their research.