The Context of HIV Risk Among Drug Users and Their Sexual Partners

TECHNICAL ISSUES
Technical issues include those factors that affect the validity
(predictiveness) and reliability (consistency/generalizability) of research
findings. Quite obviously these issues have statistical as well as
procedural implications, and in some cases their classification here is
moot. Placing what is measured and how it is measured in context
requires that new methods be improvised or old methods be adapted or
readapted, always with a mind to preserving (not merely measuring)
reliability and validity.
The need to study HIV in the social contexts within which individuals are
embedded requires a wedding or merger between ethnographic and
quantitative statistical methods. In survey research in the “good old
days,” this combined approach was pro forma during the exploratory or
pilot stage in developing the larger survey. Site observation and
unstructured interviews were conducted to determine appropriate content,
wording, and sequence of the final survey items. A beneficial byproduct
of integrating these types of procedures in the early stages of research
was the investigator’s increased involvement in, and knowledge of, data
collection. Recent trends in computerization and specialization have led
to increased separation of data analysis from knowledge of how the data
were collected and from the raw data. The author speculates that this
separation has led at times to acceptance of erroneous results and
misinterpretation of findings-severely limiting both their validity and
reliability, Cronbach’s alpha notwithstanding (Nunnally 1978).
An example of a simple technique that demonstrates the ethnographicquantitative
merger is use of open-ended questions in developing
quantitative surveys. With such questions, categories are built up from
the responses. These categories can then be quantified. A case in point
from the author’s research concerns data collected beginning in 1975 in
reply to the simple question, “How have things been going for you?”
(very well/pretty well/so-so, etc.), followed by “How do you mean?”
Replies led to the development of a catastrophe scale, akin to what, in the
literature now, is usually referred to as a life events scale. Since then, the
author has used the scale in closed-end form as a measure of stress
(Brunswick et al. 1992). In the fifth round of study, now in the field, the
open-ended followup is being used again to identify new events and
circumstances wrought over time in the lives of an inner-city African-
American cohort. The categories of reply comprise a population
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