The second part of the guide looks at how you can concretely develop qualitative research designs; starting from clearly defining your research question (one . of the most important steps in your research!) to how to develop a research protocol;. The survey defines the extent of the problem, and the interviews can be used to provide some details and the "story" of how user fees have affected people. The first step, however, is to clarify some situations in which qualitative methods might be chosen.
You want to know what your national staff think about MSF; whether they feel included in the decision-making process, what is their perception of the organization they work for. It is therefore essential to protect the identity of the person from whom you collect information. If collected, the identity of the participants must be protected at all times and not left in notebooks or unprotected computer files.
World Health Organization, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Daphne Program of the European Commission. This includes selecting key demographic variables that are likely to influence the participants' view of the topic. Some of the most common methods of data collection are various types of individual interviews (general or key informants) and group discussions.
This means that both the researchers and users of the findings can be as confident as possible that the findings reflect what the study sought to answer, rather than reflecting the researcher's bias, or a highly atypical one.
How to generate data
A topic guide usually contains a list of key questions that the interviewer would like to cover, with some helpful hints to encourage the interviewee to talk about certain questions if they don't come up spontaneously. Additionally, community leaders may not invite certain "fringe" community members - to include their voices, you may need other means of access. They will need to be comfortable and help them if, for example, they are weak or hard of hearing.
Keep in mind for focus groups what you will get is a measure of the interaction between people and your analysis will be done at the group level rather than the individual. Some sensitive topics work better with a group, if all the members of the group share an experience. Group interviews will also tell you more about the social structure of the community you will be working in and give you a more in-depth understanding of the context and social structure of the community, and of what opinions and knowledge are like. formed in social contexts.
You can also invite one person to invite their colleagues or other members of the household. The role of the moderator is crucial: you must provide a clear explanation of the purpose of the group, help people feel comfortable and facilitate interaction between group members. These are some of the questions used in a focus group discussion guide in Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya as part of a study looking at sexual violence.5 1) What problems have women and girls experienced with health and safety in your community ?.
Therefore, a key feature of the discussion starter question is that one should be able to answer it easily. Examples might be to have each participant say their name and something about their experiences with the topic, such as the last time they used the local clinic or how long they have lived in the camp. Include diagrams or maps of the surroundings and outline your own movements and the movements.
Other providers may have published summaries of service users, or surveys of the local population. Think about the stigmatization of the person, the further humiliation, the additional trauma, the victimization, your safety and the safety of your MSF team. In many settings, you will need to 'match' the gender of the interviewers and interpreters with that of the interviewees.
Even if the person being interviewed trusts you, they may not trust your interpreter, especially if they believe the interpreter is affiliated with one of the warring parties or is a member of another ethnic or religious group. You will need to explain that the reason you are recording them is to help you check that you have recorded their views correctly.
Data management and analysis
Be careful to choose a good interpreter and take the time to brief him or her and limit those present during the interview to a minimum. If you deal with particularly sensitive topics such as human rights abuses, make sure that if the information falls into the wrong hands, it cannot be traced back to a specific person. Always insist that your translator provide a literal sentence-by-sentence translation (a good translator uses the 'I' person, not 'he or she'), not a summary.
Recording/transcribing interviews You can either write notes at the same time as you speak (it's easier to have a transcriber do this), or write the notes afterwards (but you'll forget a lot of what was said, so not advisable not ) or even audio tape. The best method is generally to ask a transcriber to take notes while recording, and ask the transcriber to go through the notes he/she took afterwards to check if he/she forgot anything during the recording has. If an audio tape is to be used, the respondent's consent must be obtained in advance.
If people are worried about the tape recorder, reassure them that they will soon forget it's there. If you tape record, one common approach is to turn off the tape recorder at the end of the interview and continue chatting with the interviewees. You should be able to judge whether your respondent has slowed down or whether you want to be recorded.
It wasn't curiosity that killed the cat It was trying to make sense of all the data that curiosity generated Halcom8 Analyzing qualitative data is often seen as the hardest part of the exercise. Still, it's very nice to see patterns emerge and to be able to draw some meaningful conclusions from all the discussions. A thematic analysis is one that looks at all the data to identify the common issues that recur and identify the main themes that summarize all the views you have collected.
Read and annotate transcripts
Identify themes
Developing a coding scheme These initial themes can now be gathered
Coding the data
Initial symptoms 10 In the morning, my husband and
Responsibility 11 mother-in-law said we should
Advice Code 5 - Responsibility for decision
Formal Help-Seeking This is what another extract from the same
When all the data is encoded, you can "cut and paste" the codes into code piles. This is the point where you take data extracts out of their original context (interview or focus group transcript) and place them alongside other examples of data on the same topic to begin looking for patterns in the data. This is the point where you can ask questions such as: in what situations do mothers-in-law make the decision.
Of course it's vital to know where the extracts you're cutting and pasting came from. In the collection of extracts on this topic, we would have identified patterns across the data and perhaps some typologies. As well as the themes that run through the data, you will also want to look narratively within each case so that the 'story' of an individual's healthcare access is not lost.
Cutting and pasting can lose some of the narrative context, so you can also take a closer look at some cases to see how the themes fit together in a particular case. For any specific topic, group-to-group validation means that when a topic comes up, it generates a consistent level of energy among a consistent proportion of participants across nearly all of the groups. To ensure the reliability of your analysis, you must maintain careful records of all interviews and group discussions and document your analysis process.
You also need to ensure that the validity (or 'credibility') of your results is maximized. Be sure to look closely at the outliers and explain why they differ. You must be as rigorous as possible to get the most out of the information collected and for your results to be credible both inside and outside of MSF.
Provide a clear description of the process used, an 'audit trail' that others can follow (ie ensure that evidence - fieldwork notes, interview transcripts, etc. - can be independently reviewed and that data analysis procedures are clearly described and justified. ). Compare data between and within cases in a data set Compare findings with other studies. However, these packages do not do the analysis for you and you will still need to develop a coding system and code the data.
Evaluation of rigor in qualitative research10 Was the theoretical framework of the study and the methods used always explicit. These are resources on specific topics or methods that you may want to explore in more detail before conducting a qualitative study.
Good luck with all your (qualitative) research!
