Data collection in the field, whether by interviewing or other methods, can be carried out in a structured, systematic and scientific way. This volume compels field researchers to take very seriously not only what they hear, but what they ask. Ethnographers have often discovered too late that the value of their interview information is discounted as a consequence of poor sampling (of both questions and informants) and poor elicitation techniques.
The authors focus on the importance of establishing the right questions to ask through the use of free listing techniques; then they describe in practical terms the administration of an impressive array of alternative kinds of informant task. They conclude with a discussion of reliability and validity of various methods which can be used to generate more systematic, culturally meaningful data.
Dr. Weller’s PhD is in Social Science and her expertise is in the area of research methods (statistics, epidemiology, and data collection). She is skilled in both qualitative and quantitative methods. She has two books on methods: Systematic Data Collection (Sage Pub) covers a wide variety of interviewing and data collection methods and Metric Scaling (Sage Pub.) covers multivariate techniques of principal components, multidimensional scaling, and correspondence analysis. For over a decade, she has been the co-director and a teacher in the National Science Foundation’s Summer Institute for Research Design. Her research interests focus on minority health issues with a focus on the measurement of beliefs. She is the co-developer of the Cultural Consensus Model (Romney, Weller, &Batchelder 1986; Romney, Batchelder, & Weller 1987; Weller 2007), a formal mathematical model for the assessment of cultural beliefs. Her research (funded by NSF) concerns the measurement of beliefs and practices among Latinos in Guatemala, Mexico, South Texas, and Connecticut. Papers include studies of Latino beliefs about AIDS/SIDA, diabetes, asthma, the common cold, and folk illnesses, as well as comparisons between community and physician beliefs on AIDS, diabetes, and the common cold. Research on diabetes also has examined the effectiveness of diabetes screening guidelines using the NHANES data (in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dallo& Weller 2003). She is also the co-author on the meta-analysis of condom effectiveness for sexually transmitted HIV (Davis & Weller 1999; Weller & Davis 2001) and served on the federal consensus panel to summarize research concerning condoms and sexually transmitted diseases. Current work concerns decision-making of Galveston residents when asked to evacuate for hurricane Ike. Another project is examining beliefs about the common cold and H1N1 flu in the US and Mexico.
Professor Romney′s recent research has focused on human color vision ranging from cross-cultural studies of color perception to representing physical reflectance spectra in low dimensional Euclidean space (selected items available in pdf format below). Other research interests include comparative cognitive studies of semantic structures, the measurement of cultural knowledge using culture consensus theory, and multidimensional scaling. He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1956-57. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.
