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 I will post an update blog index. 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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