Qualitative Research in Practice : Stories From the Field - Blogs Unpad

Mixing methods
and how they would explain it, what they thought
about it and what ideas they had about how it could
have been done differently.
Then with the inter-agency, we initially sent a
questionnaire to 200 voluntary agencies but we didn’t
get a very good return—that was supposed to be a
two-stage questionnaire, one at the beginning and one
towards the end again to look at change and contact
with the project and we decided that instead of doing
that, we would do telephone interviews with 20 or 30
agencies that the project had had the most contact
with.
Using mixed methods
We asked Liz to elaborate on one of the strands of the project in
more detail, to show how the methods interrelated and what each
brought to the evaluation.
Liz:
Okay, let’s talk about the crisis intervention. It couldn’t
just rely on the database. What the database would tell
us was, how many women, did [the response] happen
within 24 hours, as it was supposed to, which other
agencies they were referred on to, and how many
times subsequently they were in contact with the
project. That’s basic information, but it doesn’t tell you
much about the process. It doesn’t tell you whether it
made a difference to women, how or in what way.
They are the kind of benchmarking performance
things that people measure, but those measures tell
you they performed at that level—they don’t tell you
anything about the quality of the work and what
impact it had on anybody.
It couldn’t just rely on talking to the workers, or
even observing the workers, because they are obviously
going to want to believe that their work has an
impact, as they should; and they are going to know
what their interaction was, but they are not going to
know what that meant to the person they were interacting
with. And also I think they didn’t necessarily
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