Alexander Weinreb

The Limitations of Stranger-Interviewers in Rural Kenya

Virtually all survey data are collected by “strangers,” that is, individuals with no prior social relationship with respondents. Although it has long been recognized that attitudes toward strangers vary cross-culturally, there has been no systematic discussion of how this variation might affect survey data. This article attempts such a discussion, using data from a longitudinal research study in rural Kenya. It reviews qualitative impressions of insider-and stranger-related issues within the specific Kenyan field setting, drawing primarily on field notes. Relevant areas of social theory and the data collection literature are reviewed briefly. Finally, using the projects longitudinal survey data, empirical tests are presented which allow for an evaluation of differential data quality across insider-and stranger-interviewers on three dimensions: differential response rates, differential reliability of responses, and differential response validity. The results suggest that insider-interviewers increase response rates and collect more consistent data across survey waves. They also suggest that data collected by female insiders in particular appear to be superior for most questions and of equal quality for others.

Family Planning Programs for the 21st Century: Rationale and Design

This publication provides a roadmap to help policymakers and donors in priority countries implement high-quality family planning programs. The book explains the rationale for increased funding and support for voluntary family planning and outlines how reinvigorated programs should be structured to operate most effectively. Chapter One-Explaining the neglect of family planning programs since the mid- 1990s-argues for a reinvestment in publicly funded family planning programs and presents new evidence on fertility decline and its economic and health benefits. Chapter Two-The impact of voluntary family planning programs on fertility- provides proof that voluntary family planning programs reduce fertility and can lower the trajectory of future population growth. The second half explains how reinvigorated voluntary family planning programs can be structured to operate more effectively: Chapter Three-Family planning services and the strengthening of health systems- illustrates how family planning can be integrated into national health systems and proposes innovative strategies for reaching the most vulnerable individuals; and Chapter Four-Family planning communication programs-discusses the importance of behavior change communication campaigns to educate the general population and motivate potential users to adopt family planning.

Substitution and Substitutability: The Effects of Kin Availability on Intergenerational Transfers in Malawi

Although increasing analytic attention has been focused on intergenerational support structures of late, little of that attention has, thus far, been focused on the lateral components of those structures, by which I refer to relations among uncles and nieces, aunts and nephews, and so on. This is problematic from a broad sociological perspective for two main reasons. The first is that a relatively narrow focus on vertical intergenerational links overlooks the extent to which these microstructures are embedded in multidirectional and multigenerational support networks involving the elderly’s siblings, their nephews and nieces, other relatives, neighbours, friends, fictive kin, and so on. And the second is that, while the “structures of jural obligations” (Holy 1976:108)1 which underlie intergenerational support structures may be associated with kin proximity measured in terms of closeness of blood ties—thus, for example, the common assumption that a given person has a greater obligation to provide assistance to his parents than to his uncles, aunts, or some unrelated individual—there is considerable ethnographic evidence that across many societies this is not the case; that individuals may have, and often do have, more intensive structured ties with second-order blood relations like uncles and aunts than with first-order blood relations like fathers; or indeed, that they may have more structured ties with non-kin (e.g., Whyte 1943; Wilmott and Young 1962; Stack 1974; Fox and Fox 1984; Lewis 1994; Griffiths 1997; Meriwether 1999; Feinberg and Ottenheimer 2002). In short, overlooking lateral intergenerational transfers relations implicitly privileges biology over culture and also ignores a key premise of multiple theoretical approaches to the analysis of exchange relations: the idea that these relations are both emergent product and producer of normative systems of social relations (e.g., Mauss 1925, 1990; Homans 1958; Blau 1964, 1986).

Insiders, Outsiders, and the Editing of Inconsistent Survey Data

Data editing, a crucial task in the data production process, has received little scientific attention. Consequently, there is no consensus among social scientists about how data should be edited or by whom. While some argue that it should be left to data managers and data users, others claim that it is primarily a task for fieldworkers. The authors review these divergent approaches to editing and evaluate the underlying theoretical arguments. Results are reported from a methodological experiment in which different types of actors who are party to the data production and research process were asked to solve artificially generated inconsistencies in real survey data. Results are informative on two counts. First, the least accurate editors were the researchers with no field experience in the survey sites. Second, when provided with only partial information on which to make editing decisions, fieldworkers edited more accurately than both data managers and data users.

A test of the stranger-interviewer norm in the Dominican Republic

We offer the first empirical test of the ‘stranger-interviewer norm’, according to which interviewers in social, demographic, and health surveys should be strangers—not personally familiar with respondents. We use data from an experimental survey in the Dominican Republic that featured three types of interviewer: from out of town (outsiders); local but unknown to the respondent (local-strangers); and local with a previous relationship to the respondent (insiders). We were able to validate answers to up to 18 questions per respondent, mainly by checking official documents in their possession. Contrary to expectations derived from the stranger-interviewer norm, respondents were more reluctant to show the documents needed for validation when the interviewer was an outsider. Furthermore, and again at odds with the stranger-interviewer norm, we found no difference in accuracy by type of interviewer. Our results have important implications for the selection of survey interviewers in less developed and non-Western settings.

Family Planning for Strangers: An Experiment on the Validity of Reported Contraceptive Use.

Sterilization levels reported in the Dominican Republic appear well above what we would normally expect given prevailing patterns in the region. We suspect that the use of strangers as interviewers—the normative approach in data collection in both developed and developing country settings—may be partly responsible for this result, and may underlie a long history of bias in family planning data. We present findings from a field experiment conducted in a Dominican town in 2010, where interviewer assignment was randomized by level of preexisting level of familiarity between interviewer and respondent. In our data, sterilization use is higher when the interviewer is an outsider, as opposed to someone known to the respondent or from the same community. In addition, high sterilization use is correlated with a propensity of respondents to present themselves in a positive light to interviewers. These results call into question the routine use of strangers and outsiders as interviewers in demographic and health surveys.

Own‐Choice Marriage and Fertility in Turkey

Goodes foundational work on the fertility transition identified own-choice marriage as a factor driving fertility decline, part of a widening repertoire of choice pertaining to marriage and childbearing. Yet research supporting this connection in todays transitional societies is scarce and somewhat contradictory, and it is unclear how other marital traditions, such as consanguineous marriage, shape this relationship. This study evaluates Goodes theorized connection using pooled Demographic and Health Survey data from Turkey, comparing children ever born, use of contraception, and parity progression across four types of marriage: own-choice and arranged marriage; and marriage to a cousin versus an unrelated spouse. Results are largely consistent with the idea that a move towards own-choice marriage reflects a widening repertoire of choice that also leads to fertility decline. However, they also show that hybrid models like own-choice marriage to a cousin tempers these effects.

Military westernization and state repression in the post-Cold War era

The waves of unrest that have shaken the Arab world since December 2010 have highlighted significant differences in the readiness of the military to intervene in political unrest by forcefully suppressing dissent. We suggest that in the post-Cold War period, this readiness is inversely associated with the level of military westernization, which is a product of the acquisition of arms from western countries. We identify two mechanisms linking the acquisition of arms from western countries to less repressive responses: dependence and conditionality; and a longer-term diffusion of ideologies regarding the proper form of civil-military relations. Empirical support for our hypothesis is found in an analysis of 2523 cases of government response to political unrest in 138 countries in the 1996-2005 period. We find that military westernization mitigates state repression in general, with more pronounced effects in the poorest countries. However, we also identify substantial differences between the pre- and post-9/11 periods.

Hottentot b-b-blues:

In this short article I describe the experience of being a stuttering academic, drawing on what I jokingly describe as my longue-durée, multi-sited ethnography of stuttering — that is, my personal identity and experiences as an exotic stutterer moving through space and time. The article plays with the nominal equivalence between Hottentots as the group that long serviced Europeans and their imagined Africa and Hottentots as stutterers (hotteren-totteren in German). Throughout, I discuss the nature of Hottentot community, reflect on Hottentot paranoia and the lure of the Hottentot (suggesting a Hottentot twist to Simmels foundational stranger), and engage with some other themes arising from the lived experience of these particular speech deviants.

Strangers in the Field: A Methodological Experiment on Interviewer–Respondent Familiarity

Evaluating a long–term methodological norm – the use of interviewers who have no prior social relationship to respondents – we compare response patterns across levels of interviewer–respondent familiarity. We differentiate three distinct levels of interviewer–respondent familiarity, based on whether the interviewer is directly acquainted with the respondent or their family, acquainted with the research setting, or is a complete outsider. We also identify three mechanisms through which variability in interviewer–respondent familiarity can affect survey responses: the effort a respondent is willing to make; their level of trust in the interviewer; and interview–specific situational factors. Using data from a methodological experiment fielded in the Dominican Republic, we then gauge the effects of each of these on a range of behavioral and attitudinal questions. Empirical results suggest that respondents expend marginally more effort in answering questions posed by insider–interviewers, and that they also lie less to insider–interviewers. Differences in responses to “trust” questions also largely favor insider–interviewers. Overall, therefore, local interviewers, including those whom, in blatant violation of the stranger–interviewer norm, have a prior relationship with the respondent, collect superior data on some items. And on almost no item do they collect data that are measurably worse.