according to previously established crteria, and the number of interviews conducted within each community was large enough to permit extrapolation to the community (but not regional or national) level.

Community approach. It is important to note that the research teams obtained community support before field work commenced. Research teams spent at least the first day in each community with local leaders in order to explain the objectives and methodology of the analysis, and when appropriate, the community was offered a formal presentation of the results of the field work.

Data prosing. Field information was processed in three steps. First, notes were taken during the conversations after permission was obtained. Second, hand-written summaries were prepared each day. Third, the summaries were computer-processed using a pre-defined standard text-file shell, and were accompanied by information about each household. Summaries of group discussions were similarly entered into the data base. The next step consisted of tabulating the answers for most individual sub-themes at the community level. This task was simplified by the relatively small range of responses to each question; in cases where the range was greater, answers were classified according to their underlying content. We applied two methods to quantify the qualitative data. First, we used person-based (instead of frequency-of-answer-based) aggregation for those cases where community members gave varying numbers of answers to a question. For these questions (i.e. what the most important obstacles to better life was for a family) we standardized the weight of each answer so that they total to one per person. Second, if the respondents supplied an explicit ranking in their answer (i.e. _"the most important obstacle is access to land; less importan, is that w have only few animals"),_ we took this ranldng into account by giving the first option a higher weight than the second.

# 4. The Communities

# _4.1 Community Charactenstics_

Table 1 presents an overview of the seven communities in order to provide a backdrop for the perceptions expressed by their residents. The first panel presents data on basic characteristics (region, ethnicity, and size), access to health care (in terms of the presence or absence of a health center), and access to basic services (potable water system, electricity, and latrines). The second panel summarizes the household activities employed in the communities (agriculture, labor migration, commercial activities, and handicraft production). The third panel adds an educational profile of one community in each region.

Four general tendencies can be observed. First, regional location in this study is coterminous with ethnicity: the Sierra and Oriente communities are inhabited by indigenous households, while the residents of the coastal communities are mestizos. Second, the coastal communities are much larger than in the other tNw regions. While the tables do not reflect it, these communities are also much more complex in terms of economic and social infrastructure. Third, nearly all of the households secure their sustenance through agricultural production but migration (either permanent or temporary) plays an important role for income eaming, too. Fourth, almost 7