Hello. I'm part of a team that is conducting a qualitative study about the perspectives and opinions around social development. The participants of this phase were members of a rural community in the Peruvian highlands, and for the next phase, we want to quantitatively capture the perspectives of professionals working on development projects within the Peruvian state.
We would like to know if it is also possible to measure these participants' agreement or disagreement concerning the rural community's perspective on social development. For example, items A, B, and C were important for the community. How could I capture the professionals' perspective about this, without having to worry too much about social desirability bias?
Any insights will be much appreciated,
Franco
Research Assistant
Can you say more about how you to chose to produce one set of answers to these questions qualitatively and the other quantitatively? Having two such different types of data can make it hard to compare them.
In mixed methods research terms, you might be following an exploratory sequential design, where what you learn from the qualitative study of the community members would be used to generate a questionnaire for the quantitative study of the professionals. But that usually involves working with the same general population in both portions of the study, so that what you learn from them in the qualitative study maximizes your ability to hear from them effectively in the quantitative portions of the study. So, I have not encountered the goal of using experience with one group to design a questionnaire for another group.
One thought would be that you could use your first study to hear not just what community members themselves think and prefer, but also what they believe that professionals think and prefer. That would allow you to generate a wider variety of statements that the professionals might agree or disagree with.
David L Morgan Thank you for the answer! Regarding your questions:
- Yes, we're trying to incorporate a mixed methods approach.
- We want to use what we have collected qualitatively with the rural community to measure quantitatively the closeness or level of agreement that may or may not exist with the views of the professionals working on the projects concerning social development.
- It would be really difficult for us to work again with the same population since the members of the rural community do not have easy access to online tools and can have difficulties when reading.
- Yes, we have collected the community's beliefs revolving around the professionals' views of development. Do you think it would be appropriate to use this information in a quantitative questionnaire for professionals?
Again, I'd appreciate your comments!
For the questionnaires to the professionals, do you plan to ask a series of "agree-disagree" questions, and if so, about how many?
My thought was that you could use a mixture of questions that reflected the community views and the professional views, based on your preliminary work.
- Badges
- Science topic