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There
are many qualitative data gathering techniques,
only some are suited to symptom research. I will
describe three particularly suited to clinical
symptom research: interviews, focus
groups and narratives.
The bibliography
includes a list of some "how-to" books
on data gathering techniques.
Interviews
Well-designed
interviews with clinicians, patients, and family caregivers can
provide illuminating data. The important aspects of good interviews
are:
- To sample
the correct population;
- To ask
questions that give you the specific data you need;
- To ask
questions which the respondents understand as having the same
meaning as you (the researcher) understand in these questions;
- To have
well-trained and appropriate interviewers; and
- To conduct
the interviews at a time and place where both the interviewer
and the respondent can concentrate.
Closed
item interviews usually can be analyzed using quantitative
techniques. Semi-structured, open
ended and the instrument cognitive
testing technique discussed in this chapter require qualitative
techniques. Semi-structured interviews ask questions which suggest
short answers, but the instrument does not provide a set of choices
of answers. Sometimes semi-structured interviews can be pre-coded
and entered into quantitative databases. If not, content
analysis is the preferred technique for understanding your
data. Winters,
1997 is an example of research using semi-structured
interviews.
Open-ended
interviews invite long answers. Pre-coding loses the rich detail
in the data. Open-ended interviews always require qualitative
analysis techniques. (For a summary table of data analysis techniques
click
here). Any recent edition of Social
Research Update is always a good source of interview techniques.
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