Mixed Methods Valuable in Tackling Key Challenges in Wyoming

By Tim Freeman

Since August 2022, the Growth Lab has collaborated with the state of Wyoming to understand pathways to stronger economic growth across the state. The project, Pathways to Prosperity, has been conducted in close partnership with the Office of the Governor of Wyoming and the Wyoming Business Council in order to help state and local officials overcome key challenges. Together, we've examined Wyoming's economic landscape, and further delved into problems within the state's housing, grants, fiscal, workforce, and energy systems.

Wyoming's wealth of reliable data has been instrumental to project work, allowing the team to extensively leverage quantitative analysis to explore barriers to economic growth across the state. However, we've found that quantitative methods have their limits, especially as one moves from studying the economy in aggregate to understanding issues and opportunities in smaller, local economies. This is especially relevant when digging into complex problems and change processes. Mixed methods—the pairing of qualitative and quantitative research—has been crucial to making real progress in Wyoming. This pairing has been a two-way street. At times, qualitative analysis has built upon quantitative findings, by providing an intuitive, real-world explanation for statistical outputs. Other times, qualitative research has guided our data analysis, with qualitative hypotheses tested against the data.

Leaning into mixed methods approaches has been particularly valuable in tackling two key challenges in Wyoming:

1. Weak housing supply growth in the face of clear demand 
2. Severe difficulties that municipalities encounter in winning and implementing federal grants

The housing challenge in Wyoming is characterized by a shortfall of new residential construction. Demand for housing is rising across the state, but residential home builders face unique challenges and added costs in home construction. Identifying and now working to relieve those challenges to residential construction has relied on regression analysis and price elasticities to identify the most housing-constrained markets. The quantitative results worked in combination with iterative qualitative research between local housing stakeholders such as residential construction companies and city planners, with the goal of untangling the complex relations between housing policies, public goods provision, and private sector incentives.

The grants challenge centered on the underutilization of federal funds across the state, particularly in rural municipalities. Grants are one of the few lifelines for under-resourced municipalities to finance projects needed for community resilience and economic diversification, such as infrastructure, local capacity building, workforce training, and more. Our goal has been to identify and alleviate the hurdles Wyoming municipalities face in accessing the substantial federal grant funds available, including the challenges in crafting winning grant applications. Qualitative approaches became important very quickly in this work as quantitative analysis focused on the outcomes of grant applications, rather than the step-by-step process of winning and implementing grants.

Looking back at a year of work through the Pathways to Prosperity Project, a few lessons stand out regarding the mixed methods approaches key to our research:

History’s Staying Power

Policy is formulated to address current needs. However, policy designed to solve yesterday’s problems continue to be enforced today, even when said policy no longer matches present-day challenges. This policy holdover distorts the proper functioning of today’s markets and today’s public goods. Development researchers can use a historical lens to understand why certain policies are in effect today despite failing to address today’s needs. In the case of Wyoming’s grants system, the state’s institutional setup was designed to take advantage of federal funds as they were disbursed for the pre-2021 norm, primarily via state agencies. However, recent spending packages under President Biden asked communities to apply directly to federal agencies for access to the majority of funds, with Wyoming municipalities failing to adjust. This hypothesis was evidenced in part in official figures, showing that today just 20% of federal funds are disbursed via states, compared to 75% disbursement pre-2021. Understanding the historical origin of certain policies and how societal challenges have shifted allows researchers to gain an understanding on the mismatch between policy and today’s needs.

Positive Deviance

A surprising success story, such as the entrepreneur in a failing industry or the growing city in a struggling economy, offers insight into how other actors may overcome similar challenges. Positive deviance is the phenomenon of an individual agent overcoming a constraint holding back the broader group. Understanding the exact challenges surmounted and the mechanisms to success provide actionable insight into the fundamental nature of the development challenge, as well as a clue to what a feasible path forward may be. The housing workstream explored cases of positive deviance to understand why certain municipalities enjoyed cheaper residential land prices than the rest of the state. Although quantitative analysis allowed the team to identify the positive deviants (i.e. municipalities with cheaper residential land), deep dives into the positive deviants provided insight towards why certain land markets enjoyed cheaper prices than others. We found that positive deviant municipalities boasted robust arterial infrastructure, which allowed for a higher supply of land to be viable for residential construction, in turn lowering prices. In contrast, municipalities with high residential land prices struggled to expand their arterial infrastructure beyond city centers.

Gillette and Casper enjoy cheaper residential land than predicted. Both cities boast comparatively robust water and sewage systems. Source: Pathways to Prosperity Housing Note

Process Tracing

Quantitative analysis often overlooks dynamics within the change process, as numerical data tends to measure development outcomes rather than the process itself. Dissecting the underlying sequence of change with local actors elucidates when and where blockages impede the development process. Within our project work on housing, interviews with residential construction companies noted many issues that cropped up in the process of building a new subdivision. However, tracing the process of unsuccessful subdivisions identified two persistent blockages:

1. When the developer was obligated to cover infrastructure costs that often are provided by the local government 
2. When the parcel was zoned to prohibit denser market-rate housing

Other difficult aspects within the construction process, such as finding a workforce, interest rate increases, or supply chain delays were problematic (and at times costly) but did not fully block construction. Conversely, we observed specific instances in which a parcel of land that was not hindered by these two blockages suddenly became available for sale. These cases enjoyed a comparatively smooth subdivision build-out.

Stakeholders as Analysts

Development researchers often do not belong to the society in which they are working. Although outside technical support is key for capacity-strapped governments, the loss of important local context should be minimized. The field can better leverage the contextual knowledge of local actors by incorporating a range of stakeholders into the research process itself. Local stakeholders add depth and uncover key insights often unseen by researchers arriving on assignment, such as providing intuitive explanations to data results. Better yet, any policy recommendation will be vetted for implementation feasibility and potential political support early in the research process. Our project work on grants grew out of biweekly task force meetings with grant applicants, grant funders, consulting firms, state government representatives, and local economic development officials. Joint research with the task force–including process tracing, discerning patterns in the evidence, trips to the field, and general brainstorming–ensured research findings leveraged the on-the-ground knowledge of stakeholders.

Concurrent and Existent Action Steps

When researchers take the time to explore what individuals and groups are already doing to try to overcome the problem, hard-won and innovative initiatives that could scale up or be stitched together often emerge. Similarly, piloting solutions oneself and iterating towards success identifies fundamental drivers of specific challenges and builds a targeted policy response. Problem-solving around the grants problem in Wyoming benefited from studying the different grant support programs already underway across the state, even though no existent initiative was intended to be a comprehensive solution. Key findings pointed to direct support as more useful than online webinars. Our team even worked through a live federal grant application with stakeholders to understand what type of support was most needed. Development research greatly benefits from studying action steps already taken to resolve the problem, as well as piloting initial solutions.

Growth Lab researchers visit the Wind River Indian Reservation in February 2023.

Targeted Surveys

The solution to a lack of targeted data can be to gather data, often quickly. Although a large-scale, fully representative survey is time-intensive and costly, surveys leveraging existing membership groups are straightforward and target a relevant group of respondents. Online tools such as Google Forms make the leg work minimal. Research on grants in Wyoming leveraged an existing state-wide conference on federal funding opportunities to run surveys with attendees, comprising grant writers and administrators from across the state. Although a state-wide representative survey would have been infeasible, our limited and targeted survey provided quick insights from relevant stakeholders with targeted research questions such as the number of staff dedicated towards grant writing, the grant sources they were most familiar with, and the prioritization of specific challenges in the process of winning a grant. The survey results were, in turn, analyzed with existing figures such as federal grant disbursement by municipality to give more complete and relevant quantitative analysis to pair with qualitative findings.

Targeted surveys allowed the team to gather pointed and unique data from key beneficiaries. Source: Pre-Summit Survey Results

Complex development challenges are only partially understood through data analysis. Mixed methods approaches have allowed the Wyoming team to explore constraints in the development process with added rigor and depth. Importantly, mixed methods not only allow for a more comprehensive analysis but facilitate policy action by building a sense of ownership among local actors. The relationships established during the research process develop the political capital and on-the-ground partnerships crucial for implementing proposed initiatives. Development researchers employing mixed methods approaches will dissect and address complex challenges with new clarity, ensuring their research leads to practical, impactful solutions.

Top photo: Growth Lab team members visit the Capitol Building in Cheyenne in September 2022.