Credibility
- Activities in the field that increase the probability of high credibility
- Prolonged engagement: taped interviews for about 2 years, kept participants involved until 1996 (4 years of engagement)
- Persistent engagement: attended retreat in addition to support group meetings, phone and email communications, also attended many personal events- "holiday and birthday parties, camping trips, retreats, hospital rooms, funerals, baby showers, and picnics" p xix
- Traingulation:2 researchers; methods: group & individual (phone/email) interviews, research journal, context research (factoid boxes); sources: 4 support groups
- Peer debriefing: between the 2 researchers, I can't think of anyone outside of the 2 researchers that they explicitly noted consulting with
- Negative case analysis: I think that in the women's stories there is plenty of disconfirming evidence; a variety of women's stories are included so that the message is this can happen to anyone and HIV+ women are different.
- Data corpus/referential adequacy: I looked for an explicit description of the data corpus and couldn't find one. :( We do get the impression that a considerable amount of data went into this book, but I wanted to know exactly how much!
- Member checks: There were both in process (1994) and terminal (1996) member checks. Some of the women's "checks" or "reflections" were printed in the book. The Epilogue deals with the final member check and the researchers reaction to it.
- Thick description: I think that lots of information about the women and their context was included. At times, when I would read the interviews (top) first, I would have questions about the context. Then, I read the bottom and the researchers had usually provided more of the women's histories that illuminated their interviews.
- Dependability audit: We have no information on this.
- Confirmability audit: Patti didn't even seem to know what this was. Ha. Also, we don't seem to have any information on this in the book.
- Reflexive journal: I felt that the reflexive journaling by the two researchers was a strong point of this book, although I did not love the split page format.
Please add comments to add to these points or to disagree with them!
Dude. Erica, you rock. I don't have much to add, except for:
ReplyDeleteIn Chapter 13 -- Patti mentions that their material turned out to be repetitive with the work of other researchers; those similarities are "a kind of validity."
In class last week, I asked Patti to clarify this, but I never got an answer. Tear. :( To me, it seems that the repetition of themes is a kind of reliability, not validity. . . but I'm also not the one who is famous in the world of qualitative research.
I would be remiss if I did not mention that I LOVED the split format. ;) I thought the "troubled" layout of the text represented the troubled nature of living with an HIV+ diagnosis very well. When I established a routine for getting through each chapter's layout, it seemed to highlight the way each woman had to create her own way of coping with the disease. Love, love, LOVED the format!
ReplyDeleteI agree the constant 'back and forth' of the text was certain to cause mild discomfort in trying to read the text. Of course it was intentional. VERY effective.
ReplyDelete