HD520 Unit 6 Seminar Reflection Example

The Quiet Ones Would Never Be Nominated: A Unit 6 Seminar Reflection on Who Chooses the Interviewees

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

HD520: Health Education Program Assessment

Unit 6 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The seminar, the classmates and the agency are composite; the sampling, response bias and critical reflection sources cited are real.

The Plan I Brought

My first draft of the interview sampling said this: "Bilingual educators will nominate [18] graduates who can speak thoughtfully about their experience of the orientation and of using primary care afterward." I thought it was sensible. The educators know every graduate, they speak the languages, and they could arrange interviews within a week. I expected the seminar to spend its time on my analysis plan, not on a sentence I had written in five minutes.

The First Challenge: Who Would Be Left Off

Priya asked a simple question: who would an educator leave off the list? Before I could answer, three people in the session answered for me. The quiet ones. The ones who missed sessions. The ones who argued with the educator about what clinics in their home country did better.

My first response was defensive. I said educators would choose people who could talk at length, which is what an interview needs. Priya pointed out that "can talk at length" and "liked the class" would overlap heavily in practice, and that the people least likely to be chosen were the ones most likely to have struggled. Palinkas et al. (2015) describe purposeful sampling as choosing cases for what they can explain. My rule chose cases for what was convenient.

It took me most of the session to admit that convenience was a large part of why I liked the plan. Recruiting through educators would have saved me weeks.

The Second Challenge: Pleasing the Person Who Chose You

Marcus raised a different problem. Even if educators chose fairly, a graduate who knows an educator nominated them is likely to tell a story that reflects well on that educator. He compared it to asking a patient about a nurse while the nurse sits in the waiting room.

I argued that a trained interviewer from outside the class would reduce this. Marcus agreed it would help, but said it could not remove the knowledge of who had nominated the participant. Research on sensitive questions finds that people adjust answers toward what they think the listener, or the people around them, would approve of (Krumpal, 2013). In a resettlement setting, where the same agency controls housing and benefits, that pressure is strong. I accepted his point by the end of the discussion.

A sample chosen by the people whose work is being assessed will tend to confirm that work, not because anyone intends it, but because both the choosing and the answering lean toward a story everyone in the room would welcome.

The Third Challenge: A Group With No Voice

The last point came from Joon, who noticed that my plan had no interviews with adults who speak languages served only by telephone interpreters. Their educators were the same as everyone else's, and none of those adults would have been nominated because no educator could talk with them easily.

This was not a bias in the way the first two were. It was an omission, and I conceded it at once. The group is small, but the class reaches them least well, and leaving them out of interviews would have left their experience entirely to numbers too small to interpret.

What I Changed

The revised protocol selects interviewees from four groups built from how adults did on the day-42 call and whether they went to a first visit, with more interviews in the two groups whose results do not match: those who completed the task but missed a visit, and those who did not complete it but attended anyway. Within groups, adults are chosen to cover each main language and the phone-interpreted group. Educators play no part in recruitment, and contact comes from the assessment team.

What I Still Hold

One classmate suggested equal numbers of interviews in each of the four groups, for balance. I kept more interviews in the mismatched groups. The aligned groups have less to explain: an adult who could book a call and then went to the appointment confirms what the task predicts. Equal numbers would spend interviews on cases that tell us least.

What I Learned

Brookfield (2017) writes that assumptions are hardest to see when they make our own work easier. My nomination rule was an assumption of that kind, the belief that the people closest to the program would choose fairly. I now ask, of every sampling decision, who benefits from it being made this way. The habit I am trying to build is simple: before keeping a convenient rule, name whose voice it removes.

References

Brookfield, S. D. (2017). Becoming a critically reflective teacher (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Krumpal, I. (2013). Determinants of social desirability bias in sensitive surveys: A literature review. Quality & Quantity, 47(4), 2025-2047. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-011-9640-9

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