Mixed Methods and Interdisciplinary Research Qualitative Doesn’t Mean Wimpy

1. Mixed Methods and Interdisciplinary Research Qualitative Doesn’t Mean Wimpy H. Russell BernardUniversity of Florida University of Massachusetts-Boston November 28, 2012

2. What this talk is about • 1. How social scientists contribute to interdisciplinary research. • It’s all about the science • Interdisciplinary must never mean undisciplined • 2. The mixed methods movement • Not forcing a choice between qual and quant • The qual in the qual-quant mix

3. About interdisciplinary research… • The first thing: be highly qualified in your discipline. • Maintain credentials in your discipline. • Publishing • This is not always easy to do

4. The ‘WHY’ questions • Researchers in the natural sciences bring social scientists onto project to address the social problems that are associated with their research. • Why don’t government policy makers heed the advice of scientists about how to stop pollution in the ocean? • Why do people waste water? What can we do about it? • Why do adolescents start smoking • Why don’t people in this village use their bed nets? • Why don’t people wash their hands after defecating.

5. The most important contribution a scientist can make to solving a problem is to be right about what causes it. • Causal inference comes from so-called qualitative work.

6. Statistical regularities • If a boy sees his mother beaten by his father this does not make him violent toward woman, but it increases the odds that he will be. • Being a democracy does not prevent a nation from going to war with other democracies, but it lowers the odds of it happening. • Still, no matter how strong the statistical association, we need a mechanism to explain how the association comes about.

7. The missing link • Nomothetic knowledge – theory – requires nonspurious correlation, a logical time order, and a mechanism that makes the correlation logical. • Qualitative research is the key in the search for mechanism in theory. • Explaining contradictions • Reviewing the literature • Responding to critiques • Ethnography

8. Networks and HIV/AIDS • Network size for people living with AIDS is a third that of homicide victims. • The diagnosis was so stigmatizing and traumatizing, people pulled back toward the number who could be trusted to know.

9. Kalymnian sponge divers • On Kalymnos, Greece, in 1965, young divers worked longer under water and came up faster than did older divers—and were at higher risk for the bends. • Young men, everyone said, have a lot of machismo—a need to show their manhood—and so they take risks by staying down too long and coming up too fast

10. “That’s just how young men are” • Where does machismo come from? • The culture ratified but didn’t cause the behavior. • The cause was the platikasystem. • By the time they went to sea, the divers were broke and their families had to go into debt for food and other necessities. • The price of sponge collapsed, but the diving labor supply collapsed faster.

11. Captains push the divers • Captains pressured divers to produce to stay down longer and produce more sponges. • Result: more accidents on the job. • Quantitative data: correlation; time order • Qualitative: Mechanism

12. What are mixed methods • Mixed methods refers to the combination of qualitative and quantitative data at all stages of research: • Design • Data collection • Data analysis • Presentation of results • Mixed methods without labels

13. The great false divide • The split in the social sciences is not just wrong, it’s pernicious.

14. Learning the crude art of irony • “real knowledge building versus story telling” • “the plural of anecdote is not data” • “deep understanding and the search for meaning versus superficial, numerical exercises” • “evidence-based research”

15. The first cut • The first cut in research is not qualitative-quantitative. The first cut is systematic-unsystematic.

16. Mixed Methods: A safe space for empiricists • The mixed methods movement is this generation’s attempt to deal with the qual-quant wars in social science. • It’s a safe-space where the qual-quant war is ignored. • But it requires varsity training in methods • More on that later, too

17. It’s nothing short of a movement • Of >2500 references to mixed methods in the SSCI (November 2012), all but 21 of them are since 2000. • None pre-date 1990. • Journal of Mixed Methods Research • Conferences on MMR • Handbook of MMR

18. Citations to mixed methods: 1997-2012

19. Qualitative-Quantitative: Data and Analysis

20. Galileo the Qualitative • He noticed that the moon had lighter and darker areas. The darker ones were large and had been seen from time immemorial. • “These I shall call the ‘large’ or ‘ancient’ spots” • The lighter spots, he said, “had never been seen by anyone before me.” • The moon “is not smooth, uniform, and precisely spherical” as commonly believed, but “is uneven, rough, and full of cavities and prominences,” much like the earth.

21. So, what are qualitative data? • Qualitative data are NOT phenomena. • Data are reductions of our experience. • When we reduce our experience of people’s behavior, thoughts, and emotions to numbers, we produce quantitative data.

22. And what are quantitative data? • When we reduce our experience of people’s behavior, thoughts, and emotions to words, images, or sounds, we produce qualitative data.

23. Kinds of qualitative data • Still images • Sounds • Moving images • Written words

24. Why don’t we use qualitative data more? • Most of the record of human thought and human behavior is qualitative and it occurs naturally. • Want to know about the evolution of sexual mores in the U.S.? • I Love Lucy (1950s) • Two-and-a-half men (today)

25. Enter technology • Two problems: collecting and analyzing qualitative data. • As usual technology is the game changer. • CAQDAS • Voice recognition • Visualization methods

26. Kinds of text analysis • Hermeneutics • Phenomenology • Schema analysis • Grounded theory • Ethnographic decision modeling • Analytic induction (QCA) • Content analysis • All are assisted by CAQDAS

27. Hermeneutics • Solving puzzles in texts. • What does this text really mean? • Can we find out the meaning of a text by systematically comparing it to others? • Can we apply analytic rules consistently in order to tease out the meaning of a text? • Who wrote this text? • In what order were these texts written?

28. Constitutional law • What did the writers of each phrase in the U.S. Constitution mean when they wrote it and how can we interpret that meaning now? • Slavery, abortion, women's right to vote, the government's ability to tax income, …

29. Criminal investigations • The Susan Smith case 1994 • Susan Smith: “My children wanted me. They needed me. And now I can't help them.” • David Smith: “They're okay. They’re going to come home soon.” • Signals of deception: • The mixing of tense in two people’s stories about the same event. • Like switching from “I” to “we” in the middle of reporting events leading up to a crime.

30. CAQDAS the new SPSS • Text management software • SPSS brought stats to the masses. • Atlas/ti, Nvivo, MaxQDA, QDA Miner, Dedoose • Coding and analyzing themes. • But again: It takes varsity training in research methods to work with all kinds of qualitative and quantitative data. • This is not “mere technology” – it’s a game changer.

31. Systematic text analysis is used in many fields • Medicine • Education • Political science • Marketing • Organizational studies • Psychology • Anthropology

32. Grounded Theory • GT is a set of techniques for: • 1) identifying categories and concepts (themes) that emerge from text; and • 2) linking the concepts into substantive and formal theories to build theories to account for the facts in a single case.

33. Margaret Kearney’s Study • Sample: 60 women who used crack cocaine during pregnancy. • Data: Semi-structured interviews about childhood, relationships, life context, last and previous pregnancies • Initial Coding: Read transcript as they were produced. Looked for social psychological themes. Asked: “What is this an example of?” • Emerging themes/categories • VALUE: The degree to which women valued their pregnancy and baby-to-be in relation to their own priorities. • HOPE: Expressed varying degrees of hope that their pregnancies would end well and that they could be good mothers. • RISK: Women were aware that cocaine use posed risks to their fetus, but perceived that risk differently. • HARM REDUCTION: Women tried in various ways to minimize the risk to their fetus • STIGMA MANAGEMENT: They used various strategies to reduce social rejection. [Kearney et al. 1994 ]

34. “If I ever lost my children…to me that would be the worst thing that could ever happen to me” “That’s what makes me think I don’t need this baby…because I’m using. I like drugs.” Value “I know if I get pregnant, I could stop the drug.” “I might as well smoke the next six months if I already have screwed him up.”” Hope Facing The Situation “I was really concerned that he might have something wrong with him, some deformity.” Salvaging Self Risk “It’s okay to use drugs, but in that last month you better stop or you ain’t gonna bring your baby home.” Evading Harm “I been drinking a lot of pickle juice…I’m gonna make sure there ain’t nothing in my system with this one.” Harm Reduction “I’d lie. I’d say [that crack] wasn’t for me, it was for another person out of town or something.” Stigma Management “The last time I went to the doctor, they were like looking at me funny. So I kind of knew something was wrong and I didn’t go back.” After 20 Interview After 30 Interview After 40 Interview

35. Checking the validity of the model • Models are not the final product of the grounded-theory approach. • Present the model to knowledgeable informants: pregnant drug users, project staff, health/social service professionals familiar with the population. • When this step is included, grounded theory is rigorous and produces results that are replicable and valid … at least for emic data. • Kearney, M. H., S. Murphy, K. Irwin, and M. Rosenbaum. 1995. Salvaging Self—A Grounded Theory of Pregnancy on Crack Cocaine. Nursing Research 44(4):208–213.

36. Content Analysis • Content analysis: procedures to make replicable and valid inferences from text data – advertisements, films, or answers to open-ended questions in surveys. • Like grounded theory, CA reduces the information in a set of texts to a set of themes, or variables. • But classic CA is confirmatory research, and tests explicit hypotheses.

37. The Pelley Case • In 1942, the U.S. Department of Justice accused William Dudley Pelley of sedition. • Independent coders classified 1,240 items in Pelley’s publications as belonging or not belonging to one of 14 identified Nazi propaganda themes • Harold Lasswell: 96.4% of the items were consistent with the propaganda themes. • Goldsen, J. M. 1947. Analyzing the contents of mass communication: A step toward inter-group harmony. International Journal of Opinion & Attitude Research 1:81–92.

38. Content analysis has evolved • CA has evolved since then: • creating a text-by-theme matrix • sampling design • checking inter-rater reliability • testing hypotheses about association

39. Hypotheses Men Women Resource Seek Offer Physical Status Offer Seek Money Offer Seek Education Offer Seek Occupational Offer Seek Intellectual Seek Offer Love Seek Offer Entertainment (non-sexual) Seek Offer Demographic " " Ethnic Info " " Personality Hirschman’s hypothesis: men and women seek complemetary qualities in personal ads [ Hirschman, E. C. 1987. People as Products: Analysis of a Complex Marketing Exchange. Journal of Marketing 51:98–108. ]

40. Hypotheses Confirmation Men Women Men Women Resource Seek Offer Seek Offer Physical Status Offer Seek Offer Seek Money Offer Seek ns ns Education Offer Seek ns ns Occupational Offer Seek ns ns Intellectual Seek Offer ns ns Love Seek Offer ns ns Entertainment Seek Offer ns Offer Demographic " " " " Ethnic Info " " " " Personality Hirschman’s Findings Hirschman, E. C. 1987. People as Products: Analysis of a Complex Marketing Exchange. Journal of Marketing 51:98–108]

41. By 1998…things were changing • Internet personal ads were taking over from print, but men continued to seek a particular kind of body in women and women continued to offer a particular kind of body. • Men and women alike mentioned their financial status, but women still were more likely to explicitly seek someone who is financially secure. • Evidence of a major shift … in Spain: Men of all ages sought physical attractiveness in women. • Women under 40 sought physical attractiveness in men. • Gil-Burman, C., F. Peláez, and S. Sánchez. 2002. Mate choice differences according to sex and age: An analysis of personal advertisements in Spanish newspapers. Human Nature 13:493–508.

42. And today … • Today, personal ads continue to inform us about preferences in mate selection among heterosexuals, but also among gay men, lesbians and bisexuals. • Obituaries of business leaders contain data about men’s and women’s management practices and about how people in different cultures memorialize the dead.  • Smith, C.A. and S. Stillman 2002a. Butch/femme in the personal advertisements of lesbians. Journal of Lesbian Studies 6:45–51. • Phua, V. C. 2002. Sex and sexuality in men’s personal advertisements. Men and Masculinities 5:178–191. • Kirchler, E. 1992. Adorable woman, expert man: Changing gender images of women and men in management. European Journal of Social Psychology 22:363–373. • Alali, A. O. 1993. Management of death and grief in obituary and in memoriam pages of Nigerian newspapers. Psychological Reports 73:835–842.   • de Vries, B. and J. Rutherford 2004. Memorializing loved ones on The World Wide Web. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying 49:5–26.

43. Content dictionaries • To build a coding machine: assign words to categories according to a set of rules. • Write a program that reads text and assigns words to categories. • Phillip Stone –1960: The General Inquirer and the Harvard Psychosocial Dictionary Stone, P. J., D. C. Dunphy, M. S. Smith, and D. M. Ogilvie, eds. 1966. The General Inquirer: A Computer Approach Tto Content Analysis. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.

44. Stone’s first test • 66 suicide notes—33 by men who had taken their own lives, and 33 by men who produced fake suicide notes. • The program parsed the texts and got it right 91% of the time. • Today’s dictionary can tell if “broke” means "fractured," "destitute," "stopped functioning," or (when paired with "out") "escaped."

45. Content dictionaries get better • Rosenberg: 71 speech samples from people with psychological disorders (depression, paranoia) or cancer. • The human coder beat the computer in diagnosing patients who had cancer. • The computer beat the human coder in identifying psychological disorders. • Today, just two decades later, every time you hear “this call may be monitored” … • Rosenberg, Stanley D., P. P. Schnurr, and T. E. Oxman 1990. Content Analysis: A Comparison of Manual and Computerized Systems. Journal of Personality Assessment 54(1 and 2):298–310.

46. Analytic induction • Think of the difference between saying: “whenever you see X you will see Y” and “whenever you see X, there is a 92% chance that you’ll see Y”. • The method is based on Mill’s work on logic and the methods of agreement and difference.

47. Analytic induction – Ragin’s QCA method • Charles Ragin formalized the logic: • With one dichotomous variable, A, there are 2 possibilities: A and not-A. • With two dichotomous variables, A and B, there are 4 possibilities. • Ragin, C. C. 1987. The comparative method. Moving beyond qualitative and quantitative strategies. Berkeley: University of California Press.

48. Haworth-Hoeppner’s QCA of eating disorders and body image • 30 women, 21 either anorexics or bulimics • Asked about body image and eating problems • Four Themes • (1) Constant criticism in the family = C • (2) Coercive parental control = R • (3) Feeling unloved by parents = U   • (4) Family discourse on weight = D • Code transcripts for these concepts. • Find the simplest set of features that account for the dependent variable. • Haworth-Hoeppner, S. 2000. The critical shapes of body image: The role of culture and family in the production of eating disorders. Journal of Marriage and the Family 62:212–227.

50. Eating disorders = CR + CD + r u D • Eating disorders are caused by the simultaneous presence of C AND R (Constant criticism in the family and Coercive parental control), AND by the simultaneous presence of C AND D (Constant criticism in the family and Family discourse on weight), AND by the presence of D (Family discourse on weight) in the absence of R and U (Coercive parental control and Feeling unloved by parents). • Haworth-Hoeppner, S. 2000. The critical shapes of body image: The role of culture and family in the production of eating disorders. Journal of Marriage and the Family 62:212–227.