Why don't people do what is good for them? That is one of the questions that health behavior specialists and health educators consider.
I was thinking about this very issue during a bike ride (I have a couple of earlier posts reflecting 'bike think.') Supposedly this worked for Einstein, so maybe I am in good company. But what occurred to me today is that the role of chance and unpredictability in disease is perceived as pretty high. Actually a lot of people are aware of the role of genes, but that still tends to come off as 'the hand you are dealt.' I believe that this attributional leaning toward chance results from a lot of the health information that is provided to people. Even if your risk factor is quite low, you are advised to get certain screenings based on chronological age. (There is some sense to this because age is a risk factor.) There is a nice video I used to show my health classes of Sir Thomas Shakespeare, a researcher who has worked a lot in disability studies, talking about the role of stories versus statistics. According to Sir. S., people tend to place more value on stories. For instance, people can be told that eating a lot of high fat foods is associated with chronic conditions late in life, yet many tend to recall old cousin so and so who ate bacon and eggs (and smoked, and had shots of Jack Daniels 4 times a day) and lived to be 102. The latter, according to Shakespeare's thesis, is more powerful than the former. Watch the video if you like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOjG5RJznto
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...is the name of the latest addition to the continuing adventures of Qualitative Ninja Girl. This short episode provides our first glance at the nemesis mentioned in the prior animation.
Unlike some of the pictures on this blog copied from questionable web sources, this portrait of Alessandro Manzoni painted by Giuseppe Molteni is allegedly in the public domain. Manzoni wrote "The betrothed" in the 19th century although the action takes place in the 17th c. Eco discussed this novel in "Six walks in the fictional woods" (1998, Harvard University) which I mentioned in a couple of earlier posts . Eco actually included a long passage from "The bethrothed" as a sort of 'teaser' and he hooked me. I checked out the book from my university library and am about halfway through reading it. You may be wondering why, if this is my research journal, I am writing about reading (and writing, as you will see, if you keep reading). "Because (qualitative findings) are derived from 'small' and 'non-representative' samples and 'subjective' procedures, these findings are supposedly neither 'reliable' nor 'valid.' Because they are putatively not generalizable, qualitative research findings, can, therefore, not be used to resolve real-world problems. The irony here is that qualitative research is conducted in the real world -- that is, in 'natural' as opposed to the artificially controlled and/or manipulated conditions of quantitative research -- yet it was viewed as producing findings not applicable in that world."
from: Sandelowski, M. & Barroso, J. (2007). Handbook for synthesizing qualitative research, New York, NY: Springer, p. 2. I am going to eventually work through a practice meta synthesis, in stages. As I said in the prior post, the idea of doing this for real is intimidating and less than exciting. But I set myself a goal of giving it a trial run at the beginning of the semester, so I am planning to work through a 'mini' meta synthesis and describe the steps as I complete them. The first thing I wanted to do to initiate this process was to obtain the assessment form used by Sandelowski and Barroso in their 2007 book Synthesizing qualitative research (New York, Springer). This was not so easy; the web link from the book was dead. I did eventually find the website that contained the articles generated by and cited in the meta synthesis project the book describes. It is an analysis of qualitative research about women with HIV/AIDS who are also mothers. The justification for and sample of the form is actually contained in a 2002 article from the International Journal of Qualitative Methods ("Reading qualitative studies," by M. Sandelowski & J. Barroso, 2002; volume 1, issue 1, article 5). This journal, by the way, is open access. Check it out at: http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/IJQM/index Using Acrobat Pro, I separated out the appraisal form pages from the rest of the article. Since this is not a fillable form, I sent it to a free file conversion service (http://www.zamzar.com/) to be converted to a docx file. Unfortunately, due to the tables and formatting, it is still a mess. I am working through it line by line to clea it up, but I may quickly decide it is just as easy to recreate the form from scratch. Below is the PDF version from the 2002 article so you can get an idea of what this form looks like. Next stage in this process is to identify for certain the articles I am going to 'test pilot' for meta synthesis. I have some in mind but I am also going to consider some other alternatives that might be more directly relevant to my (revised plan for) dissertation research.
I read most of this book (Springer, 2007) yesterday. I think it is a useful description of the process of any systematic (or meta-analytic) type review. The description of how to initiate and conduct a persistent and comprehensive search is especially helpful. I decided after reading this book that I really do not have a lot of desire to conduct a meta-synthesis, or other qualitative systematic review, or a similarly systematic review of quantitative studies. I uploaded a new Qualitative Ninja Girl on page 3. She suspects that an old adversary has returned.
I recently made a very difficult decision to revise my dissertation proposal. The stress over this process is partially responsible for my lack of posts during the last couple of weeks. I even received a 'where have you been?' email from GoAnimate, which suggests that QNG has been dormant for too long. The good news (?!) is that the monsters will remain with me and will still represent (some of) the same challenges. Rather than jumping right into an intervention study, I am going to do some exploratory statistical (yes, statistical!) analysis while keeping a qualitative, probably interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) piece to this research. Nope - I am not talking about the network that carries just about the only television coverage of European cycle racing (including the TdF going on now!).
In Saldana's book "The coding manual for qualitative researchers" (2nd ed., Sage), one of the coding schemes is called 'versus' coding. This is something I am experimenting with in a book review so it is on my mind right now. Versus coding sets up contrasts: ethics versus ambition; flexibility versus rigidity, knights of the round table versus the fierce white bunny, etc. Just during the last week, I have heard two distinct viewpoints about qualitative inquiry (as social science), from two different people, affiliated with two different universities, and representing two different roles (faculty/administrator and student). One person expressed to me that use of qualitative inquiry was acceptable as long as examples of the type of inquiry I want to pursue (I took this to mean both design and subject matter) had been published in respectable scholarly journals. One other interesting thing about this viewpoint is that it is relatively open-minded, when using as comparison the peer group of this individual. The other, contrasting view was that all social science should matter -and be planned to try to work toward positive change or improvement in some conditions. So, on one side, I have the reluctantly willing to acknowledge the value (I would go so far as to say reluctantly willing to acknowledge the need) of qualitative inquiry contrasted with the other side - that qualitative inquiry is only meaningful if it is designed to eventually go beyond inquiry. I am not certain how to set up that 'versus' in simple terms, in fact, both represent a type of conditional acceptance of qualitative inquiry as a legitimate research methodology. The committee monster (green with eyes) is here because I think I now have an intact and complete dissertation committee. This should not be (is usually not) such a 'monster' process but it was for me. I think it is all OK; this should be the last time this monster shows up for awhile - and hopefully future visits will also mark positive events!
The participant monster is here, too, to represent some progress in recruitment. Maybe promise is a better word than progress, but either is better than nothing! |
AuthorI am Sheryl L. Chatfield, Ph.D, C.T.R.S. I am a member of the faculty in the College of Public Health at Kent State University. I also Co-coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research and I am a member of the Design Innovation Team at Kent State. Archives
February 2024
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