Volume 58, No. 2, Summer 1999
Participant Recruitment for Qualitative Research: A Site-Based Approach to Community Research in Complex Societies
Thomas A. Arcury and Sara A. Quandt
Key words: participant recruitment, sampling, research methods
The process used to locate and recruit participants in a qualitative study is important for controlling bias and for efficiently obtaining a representative sample. In complex societies without clearly bounded groups from which to sample, participant recruitment requires especially careful consideration. Yet few qualitative researchers discuss their recruitment methods. This paper describes a site-based procedure for locating, selecting, and recruiting participants for qualitative research for community-based research in contemporary societies. An example of this procedure applied in a study of nutrition and health among older adults of two rural counties in North Carolina is presented. Additional uses for this procedure are discussed.
Popular Journalism and Artistic Styles in Three Oaxacan Wood-Carving Communities
Michael Chibnik
Key words: artisans, popular culture, economics, wood carvings, Mexico
Journalists’ descriptions and photographs of various crafts can influence the market for "ethnic" and tourist art. What purchasers have read about and seen shapes their perception of what is available, what is well made, what is collectible, and what is valuable. This paper examines the effects of the publications of Shepard Barbash and Vicki Ragan on the flourishing trade in wood carvings from three communities in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Barbash has written an article for Smithsonian magazine and a popular art book that includes striking photographs by Ragan. The book is prominently displayed in artisans’ workshops and is advertised in mail-order catalogs distributed widely in the United States. Many artisans now specialize in pieces similar to those shown in the book, which at one time was a quasi-catalog for some buyers. The magazine article and book have clearly affected the sales of wood-carvings by certain individuals. Nonetheless, most artisans and dealers downplay the direct economic consequences of these publications. They point out that the carving boom began before Barbash started writing and many other people and institutions have given publicity to Oaxacan artisanry.
Community Partnership Research with the Yakama Indian Nation
Noel J. Chrisman, C. June Strickland, KoLynn Powell, Marion Dick Squeoch, and Martha Yallup
Key words: Participatory Action Research, community organization, Native Americans, early detection of disease, women
Community organization has been an important part of applied anthropology for much of its history. Recently, fields such as health education and public health have made contributions to this area of knowledge. This paper reports on a participatory action research (PAR) project using principles from various fields as they apply to the early detection of cervical cancer through Pap smears. The project was carried out with the Yakama Indian Nation through a partnership between university researchers and practitioners and tribal members and officials. Working with a community board, the investigators conducted collaborative research to design programs to increase both women’s use of Pap smears and the tribe’s capacity to manage future projects. Through open-ended interviews with Native American women we learned their primary interests are in family, community, and spirituality, rather than cancer. For that reason, programs were designed to meet these broader needs. Successes in a variety of projects support our belief that PAR is a valuable design for community capacity building research.
Is This A Women's Movement? The Relationship of Gender to Community-Supported Agriculture in Michigan
Laura B. DeLind and Anne E. Ferguson
Key words: community-supported agriculture (CSA), gender relations, new social movements, United States, Michigan
Over the last 10-15 years, community-supported agriculture (CSA) has captured the imagination of farmers and eaters across the country. CSA is both a model for marketing fresh, locally raised produce as well as an instrument for generating social and ecological responsibility through the food system. CSA promises greater economic opportunity and security for small-scale producers. At the same time, it advocates relationships that extend beyond the marketplace and transform consumers into citizens and community activists. Despite the dual nature of CSA, public promotion and research have largely focused on the technical aspects of farm and member management. However essential, this orientation overshadows other lines of inquiry and hides equally interesting patterns emerging within CSA, their possible origins and implications. One of these issues is the role of gender within CSA. Women, it now appears, constitute a majority of the active membership. What attracts them to CSA? What is the nature of their involvement and how can this gender relationship be explained? Using a Michigan CSA as a case study, this paper explores these questions and finds preliminary answers within the wider context of new social movements.
Access to Sterile Syringes by Injection Drug Users om Puerto Rico
H. Ann Finlinson, Héctor M. Colón, Rafaela R. Robles, Sherry Deren, Mayra Soto López, and
Aileen Muñoz
Key words: AIDS prevention, sterile syringes, injection drug use, needle exchange programs, Puerto Rico
A variety of studies have concluded that a primary reason injection drug users (IDUs), their sexual partners, and children continue to be infected with HIV is the lack of access to sterile syringes. The present study employed ethnographic interviews and observations to examine access to sterile syringes by IDUs in Puerto Rico between July 1995 and June 1997, a time characterized by the absence of legal restrictions on the sale and possession of syringes and the presence of a government-sponsored needle-exchange program. Sources of sterile syringes identified by severely addicted drug injectors in two metropolitan San Juan communities are described and compared, and the reasons IDUs access one source rather than another are explored. Detailed descriptions of sources of syringes and syringe acquisition provide a basis for discussing: 1) challenges that confront the needle exchange program; and 2) the potential use of private syringe sellers and pharmacies to increase IDUs’ access to sterile syringes, referrals to social and medical services, and information about blood-borne pathogens (including HIV) and hygienic injection practices.
Exaggerating Environmental Health Risk: The Case of the Toxic Dinoflagellate Pfiesteria
David Griffith
Key words: environmental health, media, risk analysis, water quality, mid-Atlantic
Despite mounting evidence that Pfiesteria picicida, a marine organism that releases a neurotoxin, poses no serious threat to public health, its threat continues to be exaggerated by journalists, popular writers, politicians, and scientists. After presenting evidence against the public health threat that the organism poses, the author discusses four reasons that such evidence was initially questioned, rejected and vehemently opposed by journalists, politicians, and scientists engaged in research on Pfiesteria. The argument contains several implications for past and current trends in anthropological research, analysis, and reporting.
Cattle and the Cash Economy: Responses to Change Among Tibetan Nomadic Pastoralists in Sichuan, China
Nancy E. Levine
Key words: pastoralism, Tibetans, China, economic development, decollectivization
This paper discusses how Tibetan pastoralists living in Sichuan Province, China, have responded to recent state-initiated economic reforms. Individual households have increased their involvements in the new market economy, although the nature and extent of those involvements has been conditioned by local resource availability and proximity to markets. People have begun purchasing a varied array of modern consumption goods, they have increased their sales of pastoral products and sold more products whose prices have risen. Younger men also have begun working for wages in local towns. However, households have continued to resist government outreach offices’ directives on herd management and marketing, to treat animals as commodities to be bought and sold to achieve some target herd size. The paper evaluates these findings in light of long-standing anthropological debates about the economic rationality of pastoralist practices.
"Beyond the Dumping Ground": A Critique of the Basic Ecclesial Community Model as a Strategy for Development in an Urban Site
Kathy Nadeau
Key words: liberation theology, development, poverty, Philippines
Basic Ecclesial Communities (BEC) are small communities of Christians organized by church workers seeking to transform the prevailing society into a more equitable and just society. The paper looks at an organized "scavenger" community located in an urban dump site. The untenable conditions of the site work against the organizers’ intention to develop a self-sustaining community. Hence, they overemphasize income-generating strategies, instead of social transformation, because they must help to meet the basic needs of the residents. Unlike rural BECs which may opt to lessen their contact with the capitalist marketplace to develop more communal agrarian modes of practice, urban BECs may not so easily meet their daily subsistence needs outside the market system. This raises other questions: Are church-led and "bottom-up" initiatives enough without material support from the government? Is there a point at which capitalism becomes a sufficiently dominant ideology to render ineffective alternative courses of action, hence BECs become inadequate modes of intervention on behalf of the oppressed?
Only Time Can Tell if Geography is Still Destiny: Time, Space, and NAFTA in a U.S.-Mexican Border City
Victor M. Ortiz
Key words: globalization, NAFTA, maquiladoras, economic development, U.S.-Mexican border, El Paso, Texas
This article highlights sociopolitical implications of local responses to globalization as reflected in their time and space orientations. It illustrates two local responses in El Paso, Texas, to the ongoing integration of the U.S. and Mexican economies: 1) an economic strategy promoted by a group of labor advocates to address social dislocation caused by plant relocations; and 2) an economic plan embraced by the local business community in relation to regional infrastructural needs for international production. This article explores developmental implications of these responses regarding sharp discrepancies among local groups as well as between local and global entities. These discrepancies entail complex sociopolitical dynamics influencing the allocation of resources not only in terms of local groups but, increasingly, in terms of international operations. In theoretical terms, the case study provides a vivid illustration of contrasts and changes that suggest tangible new insights about the temporal and spatial dimensions of globalization.
Assessing the Impact of the Rwandan Refugee Crisis on Development Planning in Rural Tanzania, 1994-1996
Tony Waters
Key words: refugees, UNHCR, development, Rwandan refugees, Tanzania, Ngara
It is generally recognized that refugee movements are related to development policy in the world’s poorest countries. In particular, solutions to refugee crises are regarded as rooted in the reintegration of refugees voluntarily into their own societies or that of a host country. For these reasons, efforts at refugee resettlement and integration became closely tied to development assistance programs in the 1980s. However, this situation changed with the Rwandan refugee crisis of 1994-1996. Explicit relief policies emerged separating refugee relief from development assistance programs. The implications for a local population resulting from the separation of development and relief in Ngara, Tanzania, are examined in this paper. Ngara hosted over 400,000 Rwandan refugees in 1994-1996, and refugee relief programs costing hundreds of million dollars were mounted. Because of the "relief only" policy, much of this expenditure was on semipermanent infrastructure, institutions, and programs without regard for local development planning.
Comment on "Defining Indicators Which Make Sense to Local People: Intra-Cultural Variation in Perceptions of Natural Resources" (Virginia Nazarea et al., Human Organization 57:159-170)
Chantelle Marlor, Russel Lawrence Barsh, and Levita A. Duhaylungsod
Defining Culturally Relevant Indicators: What Are We Waiting For?
Virginia Nazarea, Robert Rhoades, Erla Bontoyan, and Gabriela Flora
