Innovating Community Engagement in Rural Health: A Quali-quantitative Research Method

This paper aims to explore ways in which an innovative method—a form of Quali-Quantitative Analysis (QQA) developed by Charles Ragin (Qualitative Comparative Analysis or QCA)—can help bring innovation to community engagement methods. The paper first identifies the key issues of internal and external validity that are important to effective community engagement research for rural health. The main challenges (definitional, technical, and ideological) relevant to these issues of validity are explored. The limitations of existing research methods for meeting these challenges of internal and external validity are highlighted. The key steps for delivering the QCA method are explained with reference to a typical situation of researching community views on the nature (attributes and outcomes) of a proposed mental health service. The paper concludes that QCA could help innovate rural healthcare development primarily through the systemacy and robustness it would bring to small-N situations where complex community perceptions need to be captured.