Suchergebnisse

Anthropological and other approaches to women's natal kin links demonstrate a relationship between these linkages and the reproduction of social inequality, in addition to noting implications for the social standing of women themselves. Few studies have, however, dynamically considered the simultaneous dimensions of individual history, community context, and interfamilial politics influencing such contact. Using data from two Tamang communities in Nepal, this article examines the impact of changing individual experience and interfamilial relations on home visits in the first year of marriage. Explicit attention is given to these forms of social action as a critical moment in the construction of social inequality. Informant testimony is combined with statistical analysis to demonstrate the salience of these natal visits in the early months of marriage for individual and wider social relationships. The visits are shown to be strongly related to the nature of interfamilial relations organized by marriage in addition to earlier life‐course experiences of women. Different community contexts, however, condition the direction of effects for these variables in ways consistent with enduring structures of relationship.

Problems of maintaining respondent rapport in surveys are exacerbated when respondents are asked to participate repeatedly over time or when several members of a family are interviewed. This article details the techniques used to maintain respondent rapport in a longitudinal study involving six interviews over eighteen years, which, after being expanded to include a second family member, still included 85% of the original respondents. The article describes techniques designed to assist and motivate the interviewers to do an effective job and those utilized to make the interviewing process pleasant and rewarding for the respondents.

A recognized problem in mounting longitudinal surveys concerns the costs and difficulties in maintaining response rates over time. This article details the techniques used to minimize response loss in a longitudinal study which maintained an 89% response rate over five interviews covering a fifteen-year period. These techniques centered on two problems common to all longitudinal studies: the difficulties involved in relocating respondents for subsequent interviews, and the necessity of maintaining respondent cooperation over repeated interviews.

This article uses a panel study of children and mothers to examine how parents and children conceptualize, perceive, and report on their relationships with each other during the children's transition to adulthood years. The article provides strong support for the reliability and validity of reports of parent-child relationships. The article documents generally positive and supportive relationships between parents and children, more positive relationships with mothers than with fathers, and an improvement in relationships as children mature from age 18 to 23. Further, parent-child relationships are perceived differently by parents and children in that there is not just one perception of the relationship between child and parent, but a relationship as perceived by the child and a relationship as perceived by the parent.

Survey methods have been criticized for producing unreliable, invalid data and for failing to provide contextual information to test complex causal hypotheses. We discuss a technique that combines survey and ethnographic methods at every stage of the data collection process to overcome these shortcomings. We use ethnographic and survey evidence to show how the combined approach reduces coverage errors, nonresponse errors and measurement errors arising from the interviewer, the questionnaire, and the respondent. Complete integration of the two methods during data collection can uncover information that a survey alone would have missed. Ethnographic data can also be used to understand the meaning behind relationships among survey variables that would have otherwise been unclear. Finally, although the combined approach is intensive, it is flexible enough to be used in a variety of settings to study many different research questions.

This paper examines the reliability and stability of developmental idealism (DI) measures in Nepal. DI is a set of cultural schemas that contains beliefs and values favoring modern societies and families over traditional ones and that views modern families as causes and effects of modern societies. It also views the world as dynamic, with change from traditionality toward modernity. Earlier studies have shown that DI has been disseminated widely internationally, but provide little evidence concerning whether individual views of DI can be reliably measured or the extent to which such views are stable across time. We estimate the reliability and stability of DI measures using panel data collected in Nepal. Our results indicate substantial reliability, equal or nearly equal to the reliability of standard value and belief items measured in general American surveys. There is also considerable stability of DI views across our study interval from 2008 to 2011.