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Methodological Note
to a major national event to strengthen their memories (for example, a natural disaster, a change of government, the end of a conflict, or an epidemic). We based several data collection modules on specific visual displays or material to encourage richer discussion, such as the ladders of power and freedom created by each group, list of characteristics for a good and bad wife and husband, and causes and consequences of domestic violence. For contexts where participants’ literacy was limited, the research teams substituted symbols for text. For example, a face with a big smile was used to represent “very happy” to respond to a question on happiness in one of the modules. The closed-ended questions included in the focus group guide required individual responses from the group members, rather than a consensus response, so that the members of a group could not bias each other’s responses. The responses to these questions were recorded in a standardized spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel). We also electronically taped many focus group discussions, but due to limited budgets and limited time for full transcription, note-takers attending the discussions recorded the majority of the documentation. Regardless of recording, all focus groups included note-takers, and their notes were added to transcripts of focus groups findings. The note-takers, as well as facilitators, were the same sex as the participants in each focus group. The final dataset from the field work is narrative and numerical data. The study’s principal findings rest on systematic analysis of the content of the narratives, comprising more than 7,000 pages of text in the global dataset. The text was treated like a single database and coded with NVivo9, a social science software. We populated thematic nodes with portions of narrative text following a predetermined node tree designed by the lead research team. In addition, free nodes were inductively coded according to specific categories: generational differences, relevant information, notable case (or gem), rural-urban differences, and gender or generational differences. The closed-ended questions (where all participants gave their own opinions on a set scale of possible responses) were treated as a numeric dataset, where we used weighted frequencies and averages. Similar treatment was given to the database generated by the community questionnaire. Throughout this report, we give coding frequencies derived from NVivo—both the number of focus groups and number of mentions of a specific study topic—as guidelines for findings on certain themes. In order to understand specific pathways for explaining the change in levels of power and freedom (from the ladder of power and freedom activity presented in chapter 4), we developed a model for qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). QCA is based on a Boolean method of logical comparison that represents each case (which in this study was a community) as a combination of causal and outcome conditions (Ragin 2008). The analysis allows identification of different combinations of conditions that produce a specific outcome; in our study, this was the perceived changes in power and freedom during a 10-year period for women and men in a community. On Norms and Agency • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-0-8213-9862-3