ABSTRACT
To meet the challenges of both international and local health problems – many in need of urgent intervention – a number of new research techniques have been developed in medical anthropology, as well as in psychology and sociology. All of them aim to provide a new understanding of health and illness, especially of health-related beliefs and behaviours. Many of these take the form of qualitative techniques, though they are often now combined with more quantitative (or measurement-based) techniques within the same project.1 These may include large-scale population surveys of morbidity and mortality, and of the prevalence and incidence of certain diseases. Furthermore, a problem is frequently researched using several different qualitative techniques at the same time, and as part of the same study.2 They are drawn from a ‘toolbox’ of several of the data collection methods mentioned below. Often these are combined with the more traditional participantobservation technique of ethnography,3 described in Chapter 1. Using several different techniques to examine the same research question has an important advantage. When analysing the data, a strong agreement between the findings from two or more of these different techniques is then usually seen as an indication (and a way of confirming) the validity of those data – a process known as triangulation (see below).4
