3.2 Sequential Mixed Methods
3.2.5 Data collection
the 2015 fieldwork. This method of collaborating with community-based representatives is common for research, particularly in public health, where the researcher does not have cultural competency in the community where the research is conducted (Pérez and Martinez 2008).
people, women, or minority religious members may be less likely to speak up due to hierarchy/seniority.
And I recommended that the field researchers should talk to the Community Mobilizer (CM), the on-site representative from the NGO who is the liaison with the community. Dr.
Anam’s team was directed to shadow and observe the CM in the community with the goal of understanding the CM’s role, daily activities, and relationship to the community. The field team was asked to make notes about what tasks the CM performed throughout the day, how he interacted with the community, etc. This would add observational data to the interview data. I also asked Dr. Anam to conduct interviews with DPHE engineers who were responsible for construction of the MAR, either at their sub-district offices, or opportunistically if they happened to visit the communities. I asked Dr. Anam to inquire about the process of MAR construction, opinions of other stakeholders including the community members, Professor Matin, UNICEF, and the local NGOs. I also asked him to observe how DPHE interacted with the communities.
Dr. Anam collected data in a pilot site that was excluded from the final 12 sites. We used this site to refine the data collection effort together. Dr. Anam and I communicated virtually during his research trip, to check in about whether the timeframe was working, what they were finding, how the data was being compiled, and any issues that came up in the field.
Since communities have pre-existing power hierarchies, inequalities, and barriers to development, when we observe these in the field, it is not necessarily indicative of the
preferences or values of the development actors. Accordingly, as part of my research design I developed an interview guide to get at how aid actors interacted with the challenges they faced in the field, and whether their choices and actions were in line with their stated approach. When possible, NGO staff were encouraged to in interviews identify the challenges they faced, how
they chose to overcome them, and with what values or principles they use to justify their choices.
This method was intended to reveal their preferences for certain development approaches and/or development goals, even as they might fall short in practice due to what they may have perceived to be, or what were actually, very difficult or even insurmountable barriers.
For the interviews with the CM and DPHE I asked Dr. Anam to have his researchers try and walk them through something like a logic model. A logic model is an understanding of the shared relationships among the inputs, activities, and outputs to the short and long-term
outcomes and impact of an intervention or project (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2018). I was interested in whether they could explain the processes that led to the MAR being implemented, challenges that occurred in implementation, how the challenges were addressed and possibly overcome, and the benefits to the community that taking such actions were intended to have. Since development is complex and projects rarely go exactly as planned, I wanted to create space for people to talk about a non-ideal version of the project (e.g., where the benefit of the MAR goes to only a few and excludes many) without missing the intention that may not have been successful in practice despite earnest attempts (e.g., to distribute the benefits more
equitably). See Appendix E for the modified logic model guide I provided to Dr. Anam.
I was particularly interested in the intent of the stakeholders, and whether the NGO workers on the ground understood the intent of those above them – NGO Executive Directors, Professor Matin, UNICEF, etc. I wanted to understand how actors communicated their intent to their partners to ensure that their vision for development is communicated down the chain of command, so to speak, to the level of implementation.
Finally, I created a report rubric for Dr. Anam and his team to guide them in producing what was the main data output from this fieldwork effort, which is a roughly 30-page report of
what they observed and what they were told for each of the 12 research sites. Rather than have each interview translated for me to use as original data, in the interest of time and cost, I asked Dr. Anam to work with his assistants to create these reports in Bangla that would synthesize their interviews and organize the data as it relates to the five elements of the RBA. These reports did include some direct quotes from interviews. I then hired Bangladeshi translators to translate these reports into English, rather than translating each interview transcript, which was not feasible given my time and resource constraints. I hired a Bangladeshi proofreader who was a student at VU who proofread and edited 10 of the 13 reports in 2016 (three of the reports were clear
enough in their first translation that they did not need to be proofread). The final version of these reports served as a source of qualitative data, and are the most important and primary data source for my dissertation. Developing this report rubric for Dr. Anam and his team for data collection was my first attempt at creating a field-based rubric for the rights-based approach. I used Ackerly’s (2012) five elements of the RBA to create this rubric. For the full report rubric see Appendix D.
The ethnographic fieldwork took place over four months from January to April 2015 and included a sample of 12 communities out of a total of 75 (plus one pilot site that I did not
ultimately include in my analysis) where DPHE had listed the MAR’s construction start date between March and August 2014. Across the 12 communities, 12 village transect walks VTWs were performed, 323 people were interviewed including 150 individual interviews and 185 people who were part of 27 focus groups of either all women, all men, or mixed gender groups.
For a summary table of interviews by community, see Appendix F.33 Additionally, in April 2016
33 There is data missing on the numbers of people who participated in the FGDs in sites 2, 20, 24, and 39 plus the pilot site 17, so more than 185 people participated in the FGDs but I am not sure how many more.
Dr. Anam conducted eight interviews with DPHE engineers. Among those eight engineers, five were sub assistant engineers, two were assistant engineers, and one was an executive engineer.