Suchergebnisse

"Mastering the Semi-Structured Interview and Beyond offers an in-depth and captivating step-by-step guide to the use of semi-structured interviews in qualitative research. By tracing the life of an actual research project-an exploration of a school district's effort over 40 years to address racial equality-as a consistent example threaded across the volume, Anne Galletta shows in concrete terms how readers can approach the planning and execution of their own new research endeavor, and illuminates unexpected real-life challenges they may confront and how to address them. The volume offers a close look at the inductive nature of qualitative research, the use of researcher reflexivity, and the systematic and iterative steps involved in data collection, analysis, and interpretation. It offers guidance on how to develop an interview protocol, including the arrangement of questions and ways to evoke analytically rich data. Particularly useful for those who may be familiar with qualitative research but have not yet conducted a qualitative study, Mastering the Semi-Structured Interview and Beyond will serve both undergraduate and graduate students as well as more advanced scholars seeking to incorporate this key methodological approach into their repertoire."--Publisher's description.

In this case study, I describe my experiences of conducting research interviews with young people who used inhalants (also known as volatile substances or solvents). My intention in conducting the study was to give some measure of public voice to young people in debates around inhalant use policy responses. I knew that as the author of the study (which I submitted as my PhD thesis), I could only offer an interpretation of these experiences. Nonetheless, the study generated new and nuanced ways of understanding both the pleasures and perils of inhalant use to inform policy and intervention. I accessed participants through drug treatment and homelessness agencies, and they were generally acutely marginalized and disengaged from education and employment, often homeless and many with mental health, juvenile justice, or past child protection involvement. The study design was interpretive and collaborative, and I used follow-up interviews to check my findings with participants. Study methods evolved in response to barriers and opportunities that arose. I describe how in-depth semi-structured interviews can be adjusted when interviewing marginalized young people. For example, acknowledging differences between the researched and the researcher can make the exchange more comfortable than pretending they do not exist. This case study also highlights how attending to the emotions aroused in research interviews can provide useful insights into the meanings of social practices. I conclude that alongside the potential for harm, research involvement can offer benefits for individuals who receive little social acknowledgment that their experiences are important.

ABSTRACTAlthough classroom cheating violates academic standards of behavior, it occurs frequently. Although the research on cheating is extensive, few researchers have interviewed students directly involved in cheating behaviors. We explore interview responses gathered from a cohort of graduate accounting students, some of whom colluded on an assignment, whereas others did not. We use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a powerful text mining algorithm, as our primary tool to explore the underlying topical structure of the interviews and to demarcate subtle differences among students' reactions to and explanations of their experience. Because LDA does not impose or require a priori theories, we use it to provide ideas for future research rather than to test extant theories about classroom collusion. We identify five primary topics that emerged from the accounting students' reflections: (1) general course context (including honor code), (2) the rigor of the assignment, (3) student teams as support mechanisms, (4) the perceived repercussions of cheating (colluding), and (5) personality differences between the tax and audit track students. We find subtle language differences between colluders and noncolluders. Colluders considered the nature of the assignment and the difference between tax and audit majors more significant than noncolluders did. Additionally, the role of teams and the general institutional context were somewhat less relevant for colluders than for noncolluders. We conclude by exploring ethical and pedagogical implications of structuring courses as heavily team based for teaching and future research purposes.

Dieser Aufsatz dokumentiert die computergestützte Sekundäranalyse des Interviewbestands aus dem Oral History-Projekt Lebensgeschichte und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet. Durch Anwendung des Text Mining-Verfahrens Topic Modeling wurde das Interviewkorpus statistisch vermessen und anschließend entlang inhaltsbeschreibender Keywords explorativ untersucht. Auf diese Weise konnte systematisch vom Allgemeinen - der Erfahrung von Industriearbeit im Ruhrgebiet - zum unter der Oberfläche der Sammlung schlummernden Besonderen vorgedrungen werden: die Rolle von Frauen, die in der Nachkriegszeit zunehmend in die Verwaltungen der Industrieunternehmen des Ruhrgebiets einzogen, bei der Automatisierung und Computerisierung von Verwaltungsvorgängen. In einem anschließenden Close Reading der gefilterten Interviews fielen die nach Geschlecht divergierenden Narrative und Wertungen von Modernisierungsprozessen auf.

AbstractClimate change is not just a topic for the future—it is already producing real consequences. Economically, the issue has three principal dimensions: impacts, that is, how vulnerable are we; adaptation, that is, what can we do to reduce the impacts by altering operations; and mitigation, that is, what can we do to reduce the drivers causing climate change and thus the long‐term extent of climate change? All of these issues have economic dimensions, including appraising damages and the value of effects reducing actions, as well as the formulation of efficient policies. Thus, it is not surprising that this is both an active agricultural economic research area and one with many more research possibilities. We review the impacts, adaptation, and mitigation literature, identifying issues, summarizing main findings, commenting on methods, and pointing out research needs, with a special focus on what agricultural/applied economists have to offer.

The general assumption that it is better to have office coders categorize information from interviews than to have interviewers assign codes at the time of the interview, is challenged. This research was integrated into a study of family planning done in 1969 in 9 US cities; interviews were conducted with 851 black & 846 white women. The analysis is limited to occupational status of the M household head. Most interviewers recorded a description of the job on the regular schedule; a random selection of others assigned a status score during the interview from a list of 458 occupations. R's who had been interviewed by an interviewer-coder were reinterviewed several weeks later by an interviewer using only the traditional procedure. In comparing scores assigned during the interview with those done by office coders, the criterion of "better" was which scores had the strongest correlations between both education of the M household head & family income, & occupational status. Correlations were the same for interviewers & office coders among whites. Among black, however, correlations for the office coder were significantly greater than those of the interviewer. The wide range of correlations obtained for blacks indicates that there may be a problem in occupational coding for blacks that is absent for whites. 2 Tables. H. Dorian.

Most seasoned human resources professionals are well versed in the benefits of exit interviews. These interviews provide an opportunity to learn what might be wrong with the workplace and identify potential problems, particularly as soon‐to‐be former employees are more likely to be candid in their responses. An effective exit interview program can also be a valuable tool for maintaining union‐free status. For example, problems underlying high turnover, which is frequently a topic of inquiry, may also uncover problems that commonly lead to interest in union representation.

A consensus emerged in the late 1990s among leaders in global maternal health that traditional birth attendants (TBAs) should no longer be trained in delivery skills and should instead be trained as promoters of facility-based care. Many TBAs continue to be trained in places where home deliveries are the norm and the potential impacts of this training are important to understand. The primary objective of this study was to gain a more nuanced understanding of the full impact of training TBAs to use misoprostol and a blood measurement tool (mat) for the prevention of postpartum haemorrhage (PPH) at home deliveries through the perspective of those involved in the project. This qualitative study, conducted between July 2009 and July 2010 in Bangladesh, was nested within larger operations research, testing the feasibility and acceptability of scaling up community-based provision of misoprostol and a blood measurement tool for prevention of PPH. A total of 87 in-depth interviews (IDIs) were conducted with TBAs, community health workers (CHWs), managers, and government-employed family welfare visitors (FWVs) at three time points during the study. Computer-assisted thematic data analysis was conducted using ATLAS.ti (version 5.2). Four primary themes emerged during the data analysis, which all highlight changes that occurred following the training. The first theme describes the perceived direct changes linked to the two new interventions. The following three themes describe the indirect changes that interviewees perceived: strengthened linkages between TBAs and the formal healthcare system; strengthened linkages between TBAs and the communities they serve; and improved quality of services/service utilization. The data indicate that training TBAs and CHW supervisors resulted in perceived broader and more nuanced changes than simply improvements in TBAs knowledge, attitudes, and practices. Acknowledgeing TBAs important role in the community and in home deliveries and integrating them into the formal healthcare system has the potential to result in changes similar to those seen in this study.

In 2006, researchers and decision-makers launched a five-year project - Response to Accountable Priority Setting for Trust in Health Systems (REACT) - to improve planning and priority-setting through implementing the Accountability for Reasonableness framework in Mbarali District, Tanzania. The objective of this paper is to explore the acceptability of Accountability for Reasonableness from the perspectives of the Council Health Management Team, local government officials, health workforce and members of user boards and committees.

Assessments of new health technologies in Europe are often made at the hospital level. However, the guidelines for health technology assessment (HTA), e.g. the EUnetHTA Core Model, are produced by national HTA organizations and focus on decision-making at the national level. This paper describes the results of an interview study with European hospital managers about their need for information when deciding about investments in new treatments. The study is part of the AdHopHTA project. Face-to-face, structured interviews were conducted with 53 hospital managers from nine European countries. The hospital managers identified the clinical, economic, safety and organizational aspects of new treatments as being the most relevant for decision-making. With regard to economic aspects, the hospital managers typically had a narrower focus on budget impact and reimbursement. In addition to the information included in traditional HTAs, hospital managers sometimes needed information on the political and strategic aspects of new treatments, in particular the relationship between the treatment and the strategic goals of the hospital. If further studies are able to verify our results, guidelines for hospital-based HTA should be altered to reflect the information needs of hospital managers when deciding about investments in new treatments.