Boston Research
name: label: Collection Correspondent
content: Conklin, Harold C., 1926-2016
label: Collection Correspondent
content: Greenberg, Joseph H. (Joseph Harold), 1915-2001
label: Collection Creator
content: Harwood, Alan
setName: label: See more items in
content: Alan Harwood Papers
unitdate: label: Date
content: 1993-1996
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: National Anthropological Archives
identifier: label: Identifier
content: NAA.2006-25, Series 3
objectType: label: Type
content: Archival materials
arrangement: label: Arrangement
content: SUBSERIES: INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS

SUBSERIES: PROJECT FILES
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents
content: Boston Health and Well-being Project --Funded by the Kaiser Family Foundation through the Health Institute at the Tufts New England Medical Center in 1994-95, this study focused on people's ideas of health and well-being in four ethnic groups in the Boston area (Irish, Puerto Rican, African American, and Mandarin-speaking Chinese; a fifth group, Jamaicans, was dropped early on in the project for lack of appropriate interviewers).  The data were gathered by means of two open-ended interviews with eight respondents per ethnic group, four each from lower and higher income families within the group.  I was leader of the Irish team, with interviews carried out by Ann Rath, Ed.D., and Jamie Saris, Ph.D.  The planning group for the study was interdisciplinary (epidemiologists, medical sociologists, a social psychologist, a psychologist, and myself).  Except for the social psychologist (Elliot Mischler) and myself, all planners were quantitatively oriented, though the project was supposed to be qualitative in design. Largely for that reason, data analysis proceeded by creating a coding system using categories established before reading and analyzing the interviews, so that the bulk of analysis time for the study was consumed transcribing and coding interviews, rather than digesting what the interviewees' ideas and concerns were.  So far as I know, only a few scattered articles, each one treating a single ethnic group, were published from this rich data cache.  However, my strong conviction is that nothing valid can be said about any one ethnic group without comparing interviews across groups and across income categories.  Thinking I would do such an analysis in about 1999, I requested copies of a complete set of uncoded interviews. However, I never published anything from this project.  The bulk of the archive consists of these uncoded interviews.  Additional material includes code books, coded interviews from Irish-American respondents, and correspondence regarding the project.  

Clearly, the value of this archive is its trove of unanalyzed material on concepts of health and well-being from respondents in the two income and four ethnic groups, with the  
consequent possibility of comparing the relative importance of socioeconomic vs. cultural forces in creating different perspectives on these matters.  - Alan Harwood

Filed in the beginning of Subseries: Interview Transcripts is the complete set of interview transcripts that Harwood had collected.  While most of the interviews in this set are uncoded, some coded interview transcripts are also mixed in.  The coded set of interviews with Irish American respondents begins with folder "IA001 #1."  Several computer disks that were filed with the coded Irish American interviews have been separated and are restricted.  The disks contain the Irish American interview transcripts, all of which exist in hard copy form in this series.  The disks also contain files from Ethnograph, the software used to code the interviews.  A description of the background and methodology of the study can be found toward the end of the series.  To make sense of the folder titles for the interview transcripts, please refer to the key below:  

AA = African Americans
CA = Chinese Americans
IA = Irish Americans
JA = Jamaican Americans
PR = Puerto Ricans

M = Male
F = Female

AR = Ann Rath
JS = Jamie Saris
AH = Alan Harwood