After working on this large-scale quantitative project, Darla returned to her graduate student roots, in pioneering qualitative research at ISR. An early project, working with ISR Director Gordon Darroch, was a study of Toronto high school students’ decisions about which university to attend. A more recent project, for York’s Centre for Practical Ethics, involved focus groups with Canadian Immigration Officers, as part of the development of training materials. For another project on the “Future Patient” for researchers at St. Michael’s Hospital, Darla led focus groups with patients and family physicians, discussing the impact of patients’ increased use of the Internet, relations between physicians and alternative health practitioners, and changes in the delivery of primary care. Darla was also involved in a number of ISR projects on smoking, mainly working with the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit. One study was a series of focus groups following up a survey of schools about the impact of the ban on smoking on school property. The tricky issue was what to do when pushing student smokers off school property and putting them in danger from traffic exposed them to other risks or caused inconvenience in the neighbourhood.

A much larger project was the “Customer Service Surveys,” an interesting initiative by York University’s administration to develop indicators of the quality of service provided by units within the community. Each department defined which services should be evaluated and who used the service. As Darla pointed out, the tight web of connections between internal units required the researchers to limit the number of questionnaires addressed to one person to 15! Another highlight for Darla was her collaboration with Director Tony Richmond on a paper on ethno-cultural indicators presented to a UNESCO conference in Ottawa.

One of Darla’s stranger memories was a project with Professor David Reid designed to survey seniors with cognitive impairment, something normally measured with a long – and, in the context of a telephone survey, unworkable – battery of psychometric questions. Their marvellously simple solution was just to ask, “Do you find your mind is not working as well as it used to?”

Darla has taught in ISR’s spring seminar series since it began about 15 years ago, most recently giving courses on focus groups and on the analysis of qualitative data. These courses have found a broad audience, mainly among social science graduate students at York wanting practical skills for smaller scale research projects where they gathered their own data. “It’s all been fun,” she concluded.