Field Methods

The synthesis of qualitative and quantitative research findings is increasingly promoted, but many of the conceptual and methodological issues it raises have yet to be fully understood and resolved. In this article, we describe how we handled issues encountered in efforts to synthesize the findings in forty-two reports of studies of antiretroviral adherence in HIV-positive women in the course of an ongoing study to develop methods to synthesize qualitative and quantitative research findings in common domains of health-related research. Working with these reports underscored the importance of looking past method claims and ideals and directly at the findings themselves, differentiating between aggregative syntheses in which findings are assimilated and interpretive syntheses in which they are configured, and understanding the judgments involved in designating relationships between findings as confirmatory, divergent, or complementary.

Researchers often need to know the parental school attainment of adult subjects. When researchers cannot ask parents about their school attainment, they must ask adult offspring about the school attainment of their parents. We assess the accuracy of answers provided by adults about the school attainment of their parents with data from a native Amazonian society in Bolivia (Tsimane'). Offspring overestimate the school attainment of their parents. They also report inaccurately other human capital attributes of their parents (e.g., writing skills, fluency speaking Spanish, practical indigenous knowledge of medicinal plants). Results mesh with findings from the United States about the lack of reliability of adults' self-reports about parental school attainment and with prior research among the Tsimane' suggesting significant misreporting of other outcomes (e.g., age, income, parental height).

This article clarifies the role of triangulation in mixed methods research designs. Triangulation is used to describe “severe” statistical tests of correlation between alternative quantitative measurements and is employed to test the accuracy of those measurements. In contrast, the broader concept of mixed methods describes the integration of diverse qualitative and quantitative approaches and is employed to build theory. The concepts are developed and demonstrated in relation to a complex field study that evaluated an Israel experience educational program.

This article describes a method to collect data on the spatial organization of land use within a rural property as part of a large-scale project examining the linkages between household demographic change and land use and land cover change in the Brazilian Amazon. Previous studies used several different spatial approaches, including maps and satellite images, to improve the information collected in standard survey questionnaires. However, few used sketch maps to obtain information from the point of view of the survey respondent about the spatial organization of land use and infrastructure. We developed a method of creating sketch maps with respondents to describe their properties. These maps then provided a spatially referenced database of the social and land use organization of the properties from the perspective of the respondent. Systematic rules allowed sketches to be used in subsequent spatial analyses in combination with satellite images and Global Positioning System reference points

Behavior coding is a widely used method for pretesting survey questionnaires. It is based on the idea that certain types of interviewer-respondent interactions indicate question flaws if the number of such interactions exceeds some specified percentage of the pretest interviews. In this article, we examine statistical approaches for assessing the reliability of different observed percentages of problematic interactions.