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? 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 generalizability.
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 we will continue our review - Chapter 3:
Instrumentation in qualitative studies. 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
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