Margaret Zuriekat

University of Jordan | UJ · Special Surgery Department/ ENT Division

I'm conducting a cross-sectional KAP survey exploring a specific population's knowledge attitude and practice in a particular area of healthcare. There is an informational intervention in the survey after answering the KAP questions. After the KAP questions and the intervention, the knowledge and attitude questions will be asked again to study the short-term benefit of the intervention.

My questions are:

1. The general population of the study group is around 3000. What's the best way to calculate the sample size?

2. Should I include a control group for the intervention (they will be asked the knowledge and attitude questions again at the end of the survey without seeing the intervention.?

3. If I include a control group, do I have to double the sample size?

Thanks

It is common in qualitative research to interview for example patients and their partners or their health professionals to talk about the same topic and explore the perspectives of all the people involved in the issue under investigation. For example, interviewing people with a disability to talk about the support they receive from their health care professionals, at the same time interviewing health care professionals to talk about the support they offer to their disabled patients.

Many published papers show the authors have done this but it is rare to come across a paper that mentions the word triangulation in their methodology, or mixed methods.

I would love to hear the opinion of people working in this area of research regarding considering this form of research mixed methods or triangulation. I would also appreciate it if you shared resources talking about this type of research. thanks a lot.

After thematically analyzing my research interviews to answer a research question, an unexpected theme was developed which was common, intense and has a surprising depth. In addition, the information developed from this theme is new to the literature and are perceived important by the study participants and the researcher. Therefore i'm thinking about taking that unexpected theme and write an article to publish and a chapter in my PhD thesis about it using the same interviews which are saturated by this concept. I thought that if the study participants think its important and very influential this is a motivation by itself to look into this in depth. in addition, this is a completely new information to the literature in the field, therefore it seem worth further attention.

Do you think this is reasonable from research methodology point of view and academic (PhD) practice?

Many thanks

Member checking or participant checking is done to validate and improve the credibility of quallitative research results. I am planning to ask my participants to help with that (will ask them to comment on the results and if they agree or disagree), but i need a clear plan before doing this regarding how to deal with disagreenments if there was any. My results came from thematic analysis of my participants experiences and reflect the important issues they discussed and include common and uncommon perspectives. so not every theme was mentioned by everyone. so i would expect some disagreenment from particiopants because the results came from the analysis of all the interviews. How do you think i can deal with disagreenments and how member checking could possibly lead to change in my results. Any advise would be appreciated.

Hello,

I conducted a qualitative study using interviews, and they were thematically analysed. my research looked into professionals experiences and views regarding their work with a certain population of patients. And currently i'm exploring the patients experiences in a second study.

I would like to use my results of the two studys to conduct a third study. one thought was doing a survey to see how common are the proffesionals and patients perspectives .

Are there any other ideas?

Thanks