Abstract
How can we know how health interventions – the dissemination of health knowledge and the promotion of behavior change – are received by the people whom our interventions address? In this paper, we describe a practical methodology that contributes to the project of studying collective meaning making as it unfolds and changes. By fixing episodes of public discourse as texts, rather than directly interrogating respondents in interviews or focus groups, conversational journals convey a sense of spontaneous issues that comprise the dynamic world of publicly available, collectively constituted meanings. While several theoretical traditions, from the Durkheimian to the symbolic-interactionist, posit such a dynamic public realm, few methods capture its texture.
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Notes
- 1.
We are not the first to recruit “insiders” as research collaborators to avoid the distortions that come from local participants’ interactions with outsiders. Williams and Kornblum (1985) had high school students keep diaries of their everyday lives to capture the texture of their daily experience. These moving documents convey the interior sense of life as it is lived by youth in poor neighborhoods with great poignancy; they do not attempt to capture the flow of public discussion. Power (1994) and Elliott et al. (2002) provide examples of the use of “indigenous fieldworkers” – current or former members of “covert communities” such as commercial sex workers or injecting drug users – recruited as “temporary research staff.”
- 2.
See (Noelle-Neumann 1993) who explores how survey questions can capture this public aspect of public opinion. Focus groups are also meant to capture this collective property of cultural meanings (Gamson 1992). Some ethnographers, such as (Eliasoph 1998), give explicit attention to the group contexts in which public discussion occurs.
- 3.
The MDICP has conducted four surveys in rural Malawi (1998, 2001, 2004, 2006). The initial sample consisted of approximately 1,500 ever-married women and their husbands; in 2004, a sample of approximately 1,500 adolescents (aged 15–24) was added. Semi-structured interviews with randomly selected subsamples of the initial sample were also conducted. More detail is available at www.malawi.pop.upenn.edu.
- 4.
Few who go to school in rural Malawi attend high school, although men are more likely to do so than women. Those who complete high school hope for social mobility and thus try to leave the rural area for a city. Many who are unsuccessful in finding urban employment, like our journalists, remain in their village.
- 5.
This excerpt is identified by the survey identification number of the respondent.
- 6.
Malawian men have long traveled to South Africa to work in the mines.
- 7.
Following a study of monogamous, heterosexual discordant couples in Rakai, Uganda, Gray et al. (2001) estimate the overall probability of transmission per coital act was 0.0011. It is important to remember the transmission rate of HIV varies; some factors proposed to effect the variance in rate of transmission include: presence of sexually transmitted infections, male circumcision, and viral load of the HIV-positive individual. For example, a study of men who had acquired a sexually transmitted disease from a group of prostitutes with a prevalence of HIV infection of 85% found an overall cumulative HIV transmission rate of 0.03 Cameron et al. (1989). Still, the estimated rate from the Cameron et al. (1989) study is much lower than that estimated by respondents in the MDICP.
- 8.
The “window period” after a person is first infected, when viral load is very high but antibodies have not yet developed, makes even joint HIV testing less-than-perfect protection. See Epstein (2007).
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Watkins, S.C., Swidler, A., Biruk, C. (2011). Hearsay Ethnography: A Method for Learning About Responses to Health Interventions. In: Pescosolido, B., Martin, J., McLeod, J., Rogers, A. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Health, Illness, and Healing. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7261-3_22
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