Systematic Data Collection

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Susan C. Weller - University of Texas Medical Branch-Galveston
A. Kimball Romney - University of California, Irvine, USA

Volume: 10

Series:
Qualitative Research Methods

Other Titles in:
Qualitative Research

96 pages | SAGE Publications, Inc

The message of this concise volume is that data collection in the field can be carried out in a structured, systematic and scientific way. This volume compels field researchers to take very seriously not only what they hear, but what they ask. Ethnographers have often discovered too late that the value of their interview information is discounted as a consequence of poor sampling (of both questions and informants) and poor elicitation techniques. Firstly the authors focus on the importance of establishing the right questions to ask through the use of free listing techniques, then they describe in practical terms the administration of an impressive array of alternative kinds of informant task. They conclude with a discussion of reliability and validity of various methods which can be used to generate more systematic, culturally meaningful data.

Introduction to Structured Interviewing

Defining a Domain and Free Listing

Pile Sort I

Single Sorts

Pile Sort II

Successive Sorts and the Construction of Taxonomies and Trees

Triadic Comparisons

Rating Scales

Rank Order Methods

Complete and Partial Techniques

Balanced-Incomplete Block Designs

Sentence Frame Formats

Other Common Structured Formats

Dichotomous, Multiple Choice, Fill-in-the-Blank, Matching, Direct Estimation, and Pick N

Reliability, Consensus, and Sample Size

Validity and Replication with Variations

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Susan C. Weller

Dr. Weller’s PhD is in Social Science and her expertise is in the area of research methods (statistics, epidemiology, and data collection). She is skilled in both qualitative and quantitative methods. She has two books on methods: Systematic Data Collection (Sage Pub) covers a wide variety of interviewing and data collection methods and Metric Scaling (Sage Pub.) covers multivariate techniques of principal components, multidimensional scaling, and correspondence analysis. For over a decade, she has been the co-director and a teacher in the National Science Foundation’s Summer Institute for Research Design. Her research interests focus... More About Author

Antone Kimball Romney

Professor Romney's recent research has focused on human color vision ranging from cross-cultural studies of color perception to representing physical reflectance spectra in low dimensional Euclidean space (selected items available in pdf format below). Other research interests include comparative cognitive studies of semantic structures, the measurement of cultural knowledge using culture consensus theory, and multidimensional scaling. He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1956-57. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences. More About Author

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