Dear All, kindly spare some few minutes of your time to share your technical expertise with me to clarify a research methodological challenge (see below)
Preamble:
You intend to conduct a qualitative field study (data collection) among a homogenous group (say expectant mothers). You have observed that these women are not adhering to 2 different health interventions - A & B and you want to know their reasons/challenges behind this fallout trend.
You discover 3 groups of defaulters:
1. those not taking intervention #A only
2. those not taking intervention #B only
3. and the intersection as well (those not taking #both A&B)
Now, you have chosen to constitute focus groups to discuss the issue. WHat is the #best way to constitute the group?
Is it better to constitute the groups respectively using only category A and then B so that the responses can be combined ?
Or
It would be best to constitute one focus group, consisting members of the intersection category ?
Assume that this qualitative aspect is a follow-up to quantitative study on same subjects.
I would suggest you complete two focus groups particularly as your intention is also to compare the participants. Perhaps, first you could do focus groups with the participants in each of the listed groups in order to explore their perspectives pertaining to a single intervention. Based on the analysis, you can conduct second focus groups with equal participation from all of the groups to gain a comprehensive understanding. The analysis from the first focus group could guide the development of questions for the second focus group.
My recommendation is counter to Ahtisham's (that's the power of debate and alternatives on RG and elsewhere) and would be to interview all together. There is a danger here, in having seperate focus groups per intervention, that you are more quantifying the data and deviating from main qualitative principles. Qualitative research does not look to compare and contrast interventions as parts of the whole - it looks to the collective experience of the whole. The interventions (and their differences etc) should not dictate. The overall topic, that the interventions sit within, should be the focus - and hence just the one group. Regardless of the intervention, the whole group should have experienced similar overall.
With your post-note Frederick - by qualitative follow-up - do you mean that this is a mixed methods approach overall?
Thank you very much Ahtisham Younas and Dean Whitehead for the insightful responses.
It's exactly the case that it's a sequential explanatory mixed methods approach:
Dean Whitehead the quantitative part has been completed, based on which the qualitative stage is to follow.
First perform it on two groups then do an overlapping. You can also consider categorical plotting for visualizing the intersection of both groups.
Not a problem Frederick. Knowing that it is mixed methods is good to now - but still doesn't change my suggestion for the qualitative focus group phase of the study.
Best,
Dean
Thank you all, so much, for the intervention. Thank you greatly Polina Lemenkova
These are very significant insights and I am sure juxtaposing them will be a clearer way out.
Kind regards
FGs are deliberative exercises so the key issue is what do you want them talking to each other about? If the overarching research question is decision making about maternal health care in general, then you can mix things up because A, B, A+B are just conversation starters, they are not the focus of the research question.
However, if your research question is focused on evaluating these specific interventions then I'd suggest you do at least 3, one for each adoption scenario. If you mix you may end up with people arguing for the superiority of their respective decisions rather than getting into detailed discussion about how they came to their decisions.
Another issue to consider is that people are likely to be inclined to discuss their actual experience with the programs rather than their decisions to participate. A challenge will be to separate out how much of what they say is based on current experience or on what they remember actually thinking or knowing at the time of making the decision. All the more reason to keep the groups uniform with regard to the three scenarios.
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