NOT EVERYTHING THAT CAN BE COUNTED COUNTS AND

“NOT EVERYTHING THAT CAN BE COUNTED COUNTS AND NOT EVERYTHING THAT COUNTS CAN BE COUNTED” -ALBERT EINSTEIN

Matching Methods and Questions Understanding tobacco cessation • How effective is the QUITSMOKE program at reducing smoking rates? • What are some of the barriers to smoking cessation among QUITSMOKE participants? • How do participants experience the QUITSMOKE program? • Why do people continue to smoke despite the knowledge that smoking is harmful?

Matching Methods and Questions • How does moving from a high poverty neighborhood to a low poverty neighborhood affect educational attainment among youth? • How do youth experience the move from a high poverty to a low poverty neighborhood? • The effects of moving from a high to low poverty neighborhood differ for boys and girls. What explains these gender differences?

WHAT ARE QUALITATIVE METHODS?

What is Qualitative Research? “Any type of research that produces findings not arrived at by statistical procedures or other means of quantification” (Corbin and Strauss)

What are qualitative methods? • Both a set of research strategies: • Interviews • focus groups • participant observation • ethnography • and also a paradigm (framework of knowing). It can be a fundamentally different way of thinking for those who have been trained in a quant paradigm.

Inductive vs. Deductive DEDUCTIVE • Theory • Hypotheses • Observation/Tests • Confirmation INDUCTIVE • Observation • Patterns • Hypotheses • Test hypotheses against data (deductive) • Theory

Inductive vs Deductive: Does access to affordable housing increase compliance with HIV medication regimes? (Hypothesis: Yes) Inductive: • How do HIV positive adults experience housing affordability challenges? • How do housing challenges shape disease management among HIV positive adults?

Inductive vs Deductive Inductive: How do the social geographies of small urban areas in CT contribute to HIV risk among MSM? Deductive: Do MSM in small urban areas rely more heavily on the internet for meeting sexual partners, than MSM is large cities?

Iterative vs. Sequential • QUANT: Hypothesis, sample, data collection, analysis • QUAL: Start with a broad question, collect some data, do some analysis, refine question, adapt sampling strategy, collect more data, do more analysis, etc. It is important to analyze data while you go. In fact, analysis and data collection are interconnected.

Qualitative researchers are less concerned with how many people said X or Y. • In part, this is because we often do not design our samples to be representative of the population (if X people in our sample say Y, we can’t say that X people in the population said Y) • Also because the questions we ask aren’t about the numbers. • Though we aren’t concerned about numbers, we do want to be careful to capture a range of experiences with regards to the topic of interest. (If we only interview white/old/young/closeted/out gay men, we can’t assume that we have captured the experiences of a broader group).

Relishes vs. Reduces Complexity • Quantitative: use statistical techniques to control away differences, nuances and contexts to isolate variables of interest. • Qualitative: Holistic approach. Nuances and context are essential to accurately representing and understanding lived experiences and for explaining processes.

Social Constructivist VS Positivist • Interested in understanding subjective experiences, meanings, perceptions and motivations. Also interested in understanding how this subjective knowledge interacts with or shapes actions. • Considers knowledge to be socially constructed and context dependent. (In other words, there isn’t one “truth” or “reality”)

Social Constructivist vs Positivist How does demolition of public housing shape civic engagement among relocated public housing residents? Positivist: What were levels of civic engagement before and after demolition? Did they go up or down? What are the formal opportunities for civic engagement? Are there more or less in post demolition communities? Constructivist: Residents perceive a loss of civic engagement. They perceive many barriers to civic engagement including the stigma that they experience as former public housing residents. Their perceptions represent their subjective reality and this subjective reality is an important determinant of their actions and their well being.

Reflexive, and Self Critical • Because data involve interpretation, they are produced out of an interaction between the researcher and the participant • The researcher is reflexive about their own role in producing and interpreting data • Always asking- am I accurately representing the social world of my participants?

WHAT ARE QUALITATIVE METHODS GOOD FOR?

When are qualitative methods useful? • To explore areas that we know little about (can be used to generate hypotheses to be tested in mixed methods studies) • To understand participant experiences and attitudes • To generate rich and comprehensive descriptions of phenomena • To understand processes and mechanisms

Qualitative methods and Public Policy • Stories are more powerful than numbers. They put a face to a problem and can be very useful in advocacy. • Qualitative research (in particular ethnography) can show what life is like in all its complexity and thus can help to uncover unintended consequences of policies. Example: Welfare Reform put time limits on receipt of cash assistance and emphasized job training. However, ethnographies of welfare recipients showed an interconnected web of working and no working households. Welfare recipients often provided child care for working parents. Removing welfare, removed childcare (Edin and Lein; Stack).

Developing Models or Theories that… q. Define underlying processes q. Generate hypotheses pertinent to: q. Direction of effect q. Potential confounders q. Mediating effects q. Guide statistical model

What is grounded theory? • Emphasis on theory development (and offering explanations for why and how things occur) • Emphasis on an iterative and inductive processes that are used to extract meaning from text • Concepts are “grounded in” or derived from the data

Mixed Methods: Getting the Full Picture • Qualitative: • What is it like? • What does it mean? • How does it work? (through what mechanisms)? • Quantitative • To what degree (in the population)? • How common? • How large an effect? Mixed methods core premise: the whole is more than the sum of the parts (Curry and Nunez-Smith)

Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty (Desmond, 2016)

Eviction: the whole story Qualitative questions: • What is it like to have to spend 90% of your income on rent? • What is it like to be forcibly evicted from your home? What does this experience mean for renters and their families? Quant questions: • How common is the experience of eviction? (MARS survey) • Who is more likely to experience eviction? (MARS survey? ) • What role do the courts play? (court records) • What role do landlords play? (landlord survey) • What is the link between eviction and well-being? (MARS survey and existing data sets? )

ASKING QUALITATIVE RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Qualitative Research Questions (C & S) • Necessary to frame questions in a manner that provides the investigator with sufficient flexibility and freedom to discover things in the data • Broad, but not so broad as to give rise to unlimited possibilities. • Although the initial research question starts out broadly, it becomes progressively narrowed and more focused during the research process as concepts and their relationships are discovered.

Research Question Pitfalls: Leading • Openness to unexpected findings is a strength of qualitative research. Leading is a threat to openness. • Example: “How do student schedules and stresses of adjusting to school create barriers to physical activity”

Grand Tour Question (Creswell) • GT question=“A statement of the question being examined in the study in its most general form. This question, consistent with the emerging methodology of qualitative designs, is posed as a general issue so as not to limit the inquiry” • Avoid directional wording (affect, influence, impact, determine, cause)

Sample Research Questions • Grand Tour (1): What are the life circumstances and decision making processes that precede reverse mortgage loans? • Sub question: • How might health vulnerabilities play a role in this process? • How do family members participate in these decisions? • How do older homeowners learn about reverse mortgages? • Grand Tour (2): How do homeowners experience reverse mortgage loans? Sub question: -How can loans create or constrain freedom/stability? - How can loans contribute to or alleviate financial strain?

Resources • RWJ Qualitative Research Guidelines (contains many links to great sources) http: //www. qualres. org/ • NIH Best Practices for Qualitative Research http: //obssr. od. nih. gov/mixed_methods_researc h/ • Basics of Qualitative Research, Strauss and Corbin (grounded theory approach) • CIRA qualitative research core.

QUESTIONS