Research Setting and Design

This chapter is dedicated to the research setting, which is Dearborn, MI. It explains why Dearborn is an ideal place to build the Arab American cultural model of diabetes. This chapter will take the reader on a journey that will make them experience life in Dearborn and how it looks from the people there to its streets and houses. This chapter argues that Dearborn is not like any other place in the Middle East; it is a unique city, where a combination of Middle Eastern countries is represented in the same place. In addition, this chapter discusses the data collection process and how the Arab American cultural beliefs model of diabetes was built. It includes two stages of data collection, where the data were collected in the first stage using participant observations as well as semi-structured and structured interviews and a cultural consensus survey was used in the second stage. The chapter also includes details related to the sampling techniques and data analysis tools.