Assessing quality in qualitative research

Despite its quantitative tradition, demography has become more aligned with qualitative research over the past 15 years. There has been a growing recognition that quantitative research offers little information about ideals, motivations, intentions, cultural aspects, and processes that surround demographic events. Therefore, many of the important questions relating to demography cannot be answered through the sole use of a quantitative approach. The objective of the paper is to investigate the production of qualitative research in demography during the 21st century. The analysis is based on the articles published in four major journals: Demography, Demographic Research, Revista Brasileira de Estudos de População - REBEP, and Revista Latinoamericana de Población- RELAP. We quantify the papers that use qualitative techniques, their authors and institutional affiliations, countries/regions under study, while also qualifying the findings by answering the following question: what have we learned from these qualitative studies that we would not have learned from quantitative data? Using content analysis, we investigate the papers published in all volumes of the journals between 2001 and 2013, except for RELAP, which was first published in 2007. The papers published in these four jorunals are predominantly quantitative.

A standard methodological assumption in social and demographic surveys is that interviewers should be strangers to respondents. Bias is feared should the interviewer and respondent know each other prior to the interview. We refer to this assumption as the “stranger-interviewer norm” and note that it has never been systematically tested. In order to subject it to scrutiny, we fielded an experimental survey in a town of the Dominican Republic countryside in the summer of 2010. We employed a mix of local and outsider interviewers and hired enough locals to produce an adequate number of “insider” interviews, that is, interviews where interviewer and respondent knew each other. Systematic randomization in our sampling design gives our survey the rigor of an experiment. In this paper we use these data to evaluate how the accuracy of responses varies by the level of familiarity between interviewer and respondent, as we were able to validate a number of survey questions by checking official documents that confirmed (or disconfirmed) respondents’ reports. At the time of this submission our analyses have failed to find support for the stranger-interviewer norm. There is instead some evidence that respondents are more cooperative with interviewers when these are not outsiders.

Mexico has no genuine state public policies designed to ensure the treatment, everyday care and well-being of senior citizens. In view of this discouraging outlook, it is families, mainly women, who continue to be responsible for looking after senior citizens thereby increasing these women’s workloads. The previous situation leads directly to the theme of the work-family link, as a result of which this paper contains a proposal constituting an exploratory approach that attempts the simultaneous use of data sources clearly identified with qualitative and quantitative research styles. One of the main objectives of the paper is to analyze the interrelationship between several of the life trajectories (work, school, conjugal and reproductive ) comprising women’s life courses. A typology was drawn up to describe the link between family and work. In order to achieve this, the problem has been inscribed within the life-course approach that rejects homogeneity and temporal linearity and assumes a multidimensional conception of time. Our starting point has been a purely qualitative study of a group of women from the urban middle class in Mexico. The source of information comprises the Retrospective Demographic Survey taken by the National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics in 1998.

The quality of qualitative research and use of research findings to improve program is very limited. Little is known about the rigor and quality of qualitative research. Methods included secondary data analysis from study proposal, Terms of reference and in-depth interviews were conducted to know the real field experiences of the researcher that how they conduct research. The objective of this study was to understand the process and current practice of conducting qualitative research in a context of development in Bangladesh. The study explored that conducting research by following scientific methods is not a common practice. Data also indicated that poor quality of research, often research is conducted very quickly without following any ethical process. Lack of technical knowledge and pressure of implementers to find positive results influence in conducting research. Majority of informants stated that availability of fund; time and human resource limit the scope of ensuring quality of qualitative during designing of the research and evaluation. Most of the organization does not have fund and human capacity to conduct study by following scientific process. Researchers conduct research but many undertaken researches are not of good quality and findings of the research is not used to improve program.

What can say a qualitative longitudinal analysis about changes in the lives of workers, about the historical processes associated with them? To what extent is related the individual level of these narratives with social transformation processes? The aim of this paper will be showcase an exemplary study of Qualitative Longitudinal Research from the analysis of labour markets' insecurity and its ramifications for social uncertainty, based on interviews and ethnographic work, and aim to further codify principles that could guide this methodological innovation. To get this strategy, we focused on three methodological axes: life course perspective- trajectories analysis and cohort analysis. All these three developments (trajectories analysis, cohort analysis and life course perspective) are elements of a paradigm change in the social science toward the greater primacy of context, temporality, and process, in the studies of individuals, groups, and social organizations.

Data quality is an important issue with all data, be they observational records, survey data or specific checklists. There is a universal requirement by many governments around the world for data to be high quality and be better documented. Maintaining good quality of data is always a challenge in any survey. Therefore, the broad objective of the present study is to assess the quality of data in terms of misreporting and to understand the internal consistency using National Family Health Survey and District Level Household and Facility Survey. For this study, we have selected six states like Utter Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Age accuracy will be measured by different methods such as Whipple’s Index, Myer’s Index, U. N. Joint Score, and Pullum Method. To check the quality of data the selected indicators are age reporting, women’s education, maternal health information (Contraception use, visit of ANC and other routine checkup, menstruation). Results indicate age misreporting in all the states and inconsistency is obtained for reporting of ANC visits and problem related to menstruation. Quality differs considerably by states. In terms of respondent’s characteristics, literacy comes out to be the highly influencing factor in reporting accurately.

This paper uses the newest census data, the 6th census of China in 2010, to check the data quality of the death. Analysis about the 4th and the 5th census of population in China shows that the death usually suffers obvious heap in some specific ages. Compared with the precious two censuses, this tendency in the 6th census decreases a lot, though still exists. Focusing on the infant mortality indicator, it is only about 3.8‰ computed by using data from the 6th census, which is almost impossible for present China. Based on the result and the infant mortality revealed by the National Ministry of Health in 2010, the 6th census omits about 140 thousands, even more than the registered number of death which is just 60 thousands. What’s more, with data of age-specific death rate of respective sex from the 6th census, the life expectancy at birth in 2010 of China can be computed using the life table method. However, the results are obviously too high, more than about 4 years old to the data from the United Nation, which means the death number suffers omission not only in the 0 years old but also in others. In addition, the omission has difference depending on when the death occurred.

Introduction: Researchers have begun conducting online Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) as a qualitative research tool; however, there is scant methodological literature examining the data quality of online versus in-person FGDs.
Methods: Two online FGDs were compared to two randomly selected in-person FGDs (of 8). Both formats used identical guides are were conducted by the same moderator. FGDs were transcribed, coded thematically, and analyzed comparatively.
Results: In-person FGDs were shorter than online FGDs (mean: 120 v. 93 minutes) but resulted in larger word counts (mean 15,907 v. 4,981). However, FGD content was similar: of 27 thematic codes identified, 23 appeared in both, 2 in in-person only, and 1 in online only. Discussion: Online FGDs were acceptable and methodologically successful. In-person FGDs generated greater data depth; online FGDs generated greater data breadth. Codes identified in online FGDs only suggest that sensitive topics may emerge more candidly in online FGDs due to heightened anonymity. However, technical constraints of online FGDs led to less sharing of in-depth stories among participants, and probing for detail proved difficult. Online FGDs, particularly for sensitive subjects, may be an effective method of increasing data breadth and should be considered for parallel use with in-person FGDs.

Reliable and valid data on sexual behaviour and socio-demographic characteristics among socially marginalised populations, such as female sex workers (FSWs) remain challenging to collect. Particularly little is known about FSWs working in rural areas. This paper uses the example of a comparative mixed methods study of rural and urban FSWs in Indonesia, to (1) describe how qualitative and quantitative methods can be combined to overcome research problems accentuated in studies of sexual behaviour within the context of transactional sex, and (2) to discuss the strengths, limitations and implications for practice of such an approach. Mixed methods in this study include a survey of rural and urban FSWs (n=310), in-depth interviews (n=11), key informant interviews (n=5) and ethnographic assessments. The sample of FSWs was drawn up using a novel combination of purposive sampling techniques. Findings show how the use of mixed methods can enable the collection of context-specific behavioural and socio-demographic data and can serve as a tool for internal validation. In addition, failure to include the hardest to reach and often most vulnerable FSW sub-groups, such as those working in rural settings, can be avoided through the use of combined purposive sampling techniques.

The focus of this paper is to highlight how the convergence of two methodological strategies of qualitative research – working in 'teams’ and with 'insiders' –can come together to facilitate access, efficiency and insights into research questions of interest to demographers. Much of the extant literature utilizing a team-based approach tends to focus on teams of two or more professors acting as co-principal investigators. Similarly, it is often “lone” ethnographers, usually from a Northern institution, who use local research assistants with “insider” status to serve as interpreter/key informant. Here we draw on projects embedded in a demographic surveillance site in rural South Africa that integrate both approaches. These projects make use of teams of local, “insider” research assistants, who, although not academically trained in qualitative and ethnographic methods, assume roles beyond translating for the investigators and administering focus groups or in-depth interviews. The three projects conducted in the MRC/Wits Rural Public Health and Health Transitions Research Unit (Agincourt) site in Mpumalanga, South Africa, vary in their use of “teams” and “insiders”, but each brings to light the benefits and limitations of employing the integrated approach.