Chapter 3: Participant Selection- qualitative and mixed methods

The section on participant selection for qualitative and mixed methods is similar to the quantitative, except you need to think of it in terms of the methodology. So again, identify your population – to whom will the results generalize (or to use the qual term - transfer)? In qualitative/ mixed method studies the population is generally smaller than quantitative, so if you are interested in women who have been in domestic violence relationships, think about what age range will be included? What geographic area? All of these issues limit the transferability. 

Identify and explain your sampling strategy. For example, will you use snowball sampling? How will that happen? How will you do your initial recruitment? Why is this the best method for your specific study? How will you know participants meet your inclusion criteria? Using the previous example, how will you know that they have been in abusive relationships? 

How many participants do you need? Why did you decide on that number (support it with literature)? For mixed methods studies, you will also need to explain how many participants you need for each aspect, and you will need a power analysis for the quantitative portion. Talk to your methodologist about this. 

Carefully describe how you will identify, contact, and recruit your participants. Be very detailed. Remember if you plan to rely on any other people/ organizations for referrals or help in any way, you will need a letter of agreement from them, spelling out exactly what they will do and provide. 

In qualitative studies, you need to consider the idea of saturation, meaning when you are not getting any new information from participants. How does this fit with your sample size? If you have not reached saturation by the time you have talked to all of your required sample, what will you do? (hint, keep doing interviews). 

Next time, in honor of Friday the 13^th I will talk about how long should a dissertation take. 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