Challenges of Using Collaborative Methodologies in Surveying Political Trust in Haiti

Abstract

The introduction to this symposium highlights that collaborative methodologies (CM) invite “people affected by the research puzzle [...] to participate in concept formation and methodological decisionmaking, regardless of whether the methodologies are quantitative or qualitative, or positivist or interpretivist” (Firchow and Gellman 2021; emphasis added). There are, however, practical issues that limit opportunities for meaningful collaboration with participants in large-N surveys. The collaboration may not be as thorough and meaningful as in smaller-sample surveys due to time and accessibility constraints. This article focuses on how these limitations become even more apparent when fielding a survey in a politically unstable environment. Practical constraints and political volatility made it unfeasible to use CM in the implementation of our survey of political trust in Haiti; however, in various ways, we worked “with” rather than “on” local participants. We discuss how collaboration was achievable and ultimately mattered. The highly uncertain political environment led us to rely on a Haitian research team to better evaluate local understanding of trust and to effectively design our study. Collaboration with the Haitian researchers helped us to address the idiomatic language, norms, and cultures of local communities as well as the variation in local awareness of peace-building organizations. In the autumn of 2019, we fielded a survey in Haiti with the aim to examine trust among Haitians in external organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) as contrasted to local community organizations (LCOs) and local churches. Haiti was flooded with foreign intervention following political upheaval in the 1990s and even more so after the devastating earthquake in 2010. The failures of foreign interventions in Haiti have been documented extensively, but little is known about how Haitians trust—or distrust—foreign organizations in contrast to local organizations. Collaboration with Haitians is clearly essential to deliver the local perspective, which was the aim of our study. To measure what political trust means for Haitians, CM proposes to involve participants to define criteria and indicators that are accurate, complete, and relevant for them. When implementing a large-N survey, in practice, such involvement requires multiple iterations—for example, initial collaboration via focus-group meetings to design the survey to be subsequently fielded.1 A highly uncertain and volatile political environment, however, risks framing the evaluation of political trust and priming responses. To explain our rationale for not directly involving the survey participants in our study via CM, we illustrate how political trust is shaped in Haiti via positive and negative framing. Questions about political trust prime respondents to give negatively rather than positively worded responses, which indicates that participants are fundamentally affected by instability in the country. In addition to creating obvious practical problems, (political) instability thus undermines the collaborative measurement of trust. Therefore, in our case, the applicability of CM for large-scale population surveys remained limited.