HD520 Unit 5 Mixed Methods Protocol Example

Three Questions, Three Methods, One Order of Work: A Unit 5 Mixed Methods Protocol for a Refugee Health Orientation Assessment

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

HD520: Health Education Program Assessment

Unit 5 Mixed Methods Protocol

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The agency, the partner clinic and all numbers are composite; the mixed methods, sampling and integration sources cited are real.

Question and Method Matrix

Question 1. Can graduates arrange a first primary care appointment through an interpreter line? Method: clinic-call performance task. Source: all consenting adults on the roster. Timing: within ten days of arrival and on day 42. Answer takes the form of a difference between early starters and adults waiting for a seat, with an interval.

Question 2. Do graduates keep first appointments? Method: record review. Source: the partner clinic's monthly counts of new-patient appointments kept and of interpreter requests for agency referrals, without names, plus confirmed first-visit attendance for adults who consent to release. Timing: through day 90. Answer takes the form of descriptive rates by cohort and month.

Question 3. When adults with the skill still miss care, or adults without it still get care, what explains the difference? Method: semi-structured interviews. Source: [18] adults sampled from the task and appointment results. Timing: days 90 to 120. Answer takes the form of themes, each tied to the group it explains.

Design

The design is explanatory sequential: quantitative results come first and shape the qualitative phase (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018). A convergent design, with both strands collected at once, would not fit, because the interview sample depends on task and appointment results that do not exist until day 90. The order of work is task data, then record data, then interviews, then integration.

Appointment records cannot compare cohorts cleanly. By day 90, adults who waited for a seat have taken the class too, so record data describe attendance among everyone who passed through the class, not a contrast between groups. The protocol states this so that no one later reads the record counts as an effect estimate.

Interview Sampling

Interviewees are chosen to explain the cases the numbers cannot. Four groups are formed from day-42 task results and first-visit attendance:

Group A: completed the task and kept a first visit. Group B: completed the task but missed a first visit. Group C: did not complete the task but kept a first visit. Group D: did not complete the task and missed a first visit.

Groups B and C receive six interviews each and groups A and D three each, because the mismatched groups hold the most to explain. Within each group, adults are chosen to cover the three main languages and the phone-interpreted group, following purposeful sampling for variation within a mixed methods study (Palinkas et al., 2015).

Educators do not choose interviewees, because an educator would tend to nominate graduates who speak well of the class, and the groups most needed here are the ones whose results do not fit the class's story.

Interview Guide Outline

Interviews open with the participant's first contact with a clinic in Calder City, told as a story. Probes follow for who made the call, whether an interpreter was requested and provided, what happened if a call failed, and what the person did next. A section asks what from the class, if anything, was used. A closing question asks what the class should teach that it did not. Interviews last about forty-five minutes, in the participant's language with a trained interpreter, and are audio recorded with consent. Transcripts are translated into English by a second interpreter, and a sample of passages is checked against the audio by a bilingual reviewer. Two analysts code the first four interviews separately and compare codes before coding the rest.

Integration

Integration happens in a joint display: one table setting each quantitative pattern next to the interview themes that account for it (Fetters et al., 2013). Each row is one group from the sampling scheme. Columns give the group's size, its task and attendance results, the main interview themes and a short statement of what the themes explain.

Rules for relating themes to groups are set in advance. A theme is listed for a group only if it appears in at least two of that group's interviews. Interview counts are never turned into percentages, since eighteen interviews chosen on purpose do not represent the whole roster.

When the strands disagree, for example if group B describes the class as useless although its members completed the task, the disagreement is reported in its own paragraph instead of being explained away. A disagreement may point to a gap between what the task measures and what real clinics demand.

Timing and Staffing

Task data are due by day 42 for each adult and record data by day 90. Interviews follow once both are available, so the qualitative phase lags the first arrivals by about four months. Interpreter hours are budgeted at [36]: eighteen interviews at about two hours each, including consent and debriefing. One interviewer is trained for all interviews to keep the approach consistent.

References

Creswell, J. W., & Plano Clark, V. L. (2018). Designing and conducting mixed methods research (3rd ed.). Sage.

Fetters, M. D., Curry, L. A., & Creswell, J. W. (2013). Achieving integration in mixed methods designs: Principles and practices. Health Services Research, 48(6 Pt 2), 2134-2156. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6773.12117

Palinkas, L. A., Horwitz, S. M., Green, C. A., Wisdom, J. P., Duan, N., & Hoagwood, K. (2015). Purposeful sampling for qualitative data collection and analysis in mixed method implementation research. Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, 42(5), 533-544. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10488-013-0528-y