Chapter 3: Participant Selection (qual and mixed methods)

Today's section, participant selection, is only used for qualitative and mixed methods. First, you need to identify who your population is, it is often a good idea to think about it as who does the study generalize to? So if you are interviewing victims of domestic violence in your small rural town, your population may be victims in rural areas. 

Next, you will want to identify and justify your sampling strategy. There are a number of ways to recruit your participants, a couple of examples are placing flyers in areas that you suspect they frequent (don't forget hair salons, churches), another example is snowball sampling where you ask each participant to suggest others that might be interested. You need to explain why this is a good method for your study, perhaps you have a hard to reach group and this will ensure a sufficient sample size. 

Now you need to state your inclusion and exclusion criteria. Be very detailed, think about who can participate – people who are native English speakers? Able to read and speak clearly? Only people who have been divorced for over a year? Clearly articulate who can be in your study and also who cannot be in the study. Then you want to discuss how you will know if they meet the inclusion criteria- will you ask them? Do you assume if they can read your consent form they can read English? 

How many people will you have participate, why did you select that number? For mixed methods, you will need to go further and indicate how many people will be in the quantitative portion and do a power analysis (more on this next time). 

Then you need explain how you will be recruiting people and how you will identify they are appropriate for your study. This is similar to the section above, but here you are more specific in how it will be done. 

Part of all qualitative studies is the concept of saturation, whereby you continue to sample until you are consistently getting responses you have heard before. You will need to discuss this and how it relates your sample size. 

Next time we will give thanks. Do you have an issue or a question that you would like me to discuss in a future post? Would you like to be a guest writer? Send me your ideas! leann.stadtlander@waldenu.edu