Biruk puts her citations to her raw data in her footnotes. She indicates for example: "1. Dr. Jones, interview with author, SEptember 20, 2007, Lilongwe, Malawi. Of course, the only person who has access to her footnotes is herself so I wonder if this is 1) more for her own memory and archiving purposes and 2) to give credibility to her study and book. If someone (demographer working in Malawi?) questions this as "cooked," she can say, no, I spoke to this person on this day in this place, see! So in some way, she has absorbed some of the assumptions of the epistemic community she studied.... which need to demostrate that their version of the truth is grounded in reality.
Biruk includes photos she took, excerpts from her field notes, includes many vignettes, includes figures and graphics from the surveys she administered, tables of team members roles, direct quotes from informants, sketches that the author drew, composite sketches of “typical” research encounters. However, there is not a more reusable form of her data that could for example be used by another for alternative future analysis.
Biruk writes that she hopes the book will reflect the potential of anthropology's commitment to "slow research" but also prompt anthropologists to "reflect on how our own data activities likewise cook data." She writes: "A granular analysis of research worlds in a particular place at a particular time, the book suggests, encourages us to more critically engage with the kinds of evidence we too often take for granted, whether inside or outside our discipline or training." (27).
My own project is a direct answer to Biruk's call here, doing an explicit study not on anthropology or any other discipline per say but on the multiple disciplines (including work outside of the academy) that use and produce qualitative data.
Biruk notes her own complicity in the systems she is critiquing highlighlighting how "anthropologists make global health in the process of studying in, and continue to be as "doubly ambivalent, perhaps, as our colonial predecessors - in quiet collaboration with power and institutions even as we critique them." (page 18). She also notes how because she was in the field and administering the questionnaires together with the demographers she also has another level of complicity in the actual work she is critiquing as well.
In Biruk's appendix, she includes a questionnare titled "sample household roster questions" (pages 217 - 219). These are the questions that the quantitative researchers she was studying were using (and which she also helped them to administer). However, she does not include any of her own analytic data gathering questions that she used to guide her own study other than the initial 3 research questions that she details in her introduction ("How do raw units of information - numbers written into a questionnaire by data collectors - acquire value as statistics that inform national AIDS policy and interventions? How do on-the-ground dynamics and practices of survey research cultures mediate the production of numbers? How are qunatitative health data and their social worlds coproduced and with what consequences for local economies, formulations of expertise, and lived experience?") (page 6).
Biruk's first footnote states: "All project and personal names in this book are anonymized. ... Researchers were, for the most part, amenable to being mentioned by name and having their projects mentioned by name, but I maintain anonymity as much as possible in line with my IRB protocol. Data from my field notes or events that may put any of my informants at risk in any way are not included in the book." (page 223).