HS860 Unit 7 Recruitment Seminar Reflection Example

Why Would She Answer Our Call? A Unit 7 Seminar Reflection on Recruiting Women Who Never Came for Lymphedema Surveillance

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

HS860: Doctoral Project I: Project Proposal

Unit 7 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The seminar, project and classmates are composite and described by role; the studies cited are real.

What I Brought to the Seminar

My proposal at that point had a tidy second strand. After the records review identified the step where most women left the surveillance pathway, the breast program's research coordinator would call women who had left at that step and invite them to an interview about why. I estimated that [40] women would be eligible and that I would need [12] to [15] interviews. I had assumed, without writing it down, that about half the women called would agree. I presented the plan in five minutes and asked for comments on my interview guide, which followed the usual sequence for this design, with interview questions built from the records results (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018).

Moment One: The Question

A classmate who works in community outreach for a federally qualified health center did not comment on the guide. She asked why someone who had not come back for measurements would answer a call from the place she had not come back to. In her experience, people who disengage from a service often do so for reasons that also make them hard to reach: they changed phone numbers, they are overwhelmed by treatment, they felt unwelcome, or they simply see the caller as part of a system they have stepped away from. She said the women I most needed to hear from were the least likely to pick up.

I had no answer. My acceptance estimate came from nowhere. Worse, I realized that the women who would agree might be the ones with the least serious reasons for leaving, those who simply forgot, so my interviews could miss the explanations that mattered most.

I had designed the interview strand to explain why women left, and then planned to recruit only the women most willing to come back.

Moment Two: What Others Had Tried

Another classmate, a physical therapist studying missed cardiac rehabilitation, described what had worked in her pilot: a letter from the patient's own surgeon before any call, an option to answer by text or a short online form instead of an interview, and calls at varied times of day. A third classmate added that offering a modest gift card for an interview's time is common and, if the review board approves it, can raise participation without being coercive. The seminar leader pointed out that recruitment plans for hard-to-reach groups should state a minimum acceptable sample and a fallback before data collection begins, not after the calls go badly.

Moment Three: Reading After the Session

After the seminar I looked for evidence. A review of the adherence literature describes how time, expense and thin support make lymphedema self-care hard to sustain (Ostby & Armer, 2015), which suggested that women missing surveillance may be dealing with similar pressures. Methods guidance on explanatory sequential designs notes that the qualitative sample should be chosen to explain the quantitative results, which means seeking out the cases that matter for the explanation rather than the easiest to reach (Ivankova et al., 2006).

The Revised Plan

My recruitment plan now has four changes. First, a brief letter signed by each woman's breast surgeon, explaining the study and that taking part will not affect her care, will precede any call. Second, women can choose an interview by phone or video, or a shorter written response with five open questions. Third, the research coordinator will make up to three calls at different times, and a text message will be sent where the record shows consent to text. Fourth, if the review board approves, participants will receive a [$25] gift card.

The plan also has a floor and a fallback. The floor is [10] interviews or written responses from women who left at the main step. If, by a set date [eight] weeks after recruitment begins, fewer than [six] have agreed, I will widen eligibility to women who left at an adjacent step and add interviews with nurse navigators who handled those women's referrals, while reporting the shortfall as a limitation.

What Changed in My Thinking

I came to the seminar thinking about my interview guide. I left thinking about who would never hear it. The session changed my view of the interview strand from a step that follows the records review to a strand with its own sampling problem, as demanding as the first. It also made me notice an assumption I had made throughout the project: that women who leave the pathway are absent from the research only because of the design. Some may be absent because of the same reasons they left, and the study has to be built to reach them.

References

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

Ivankova, N. V., Creswell, J. W., & Stick, S. L. (2006). Using mixed-methods sequential explanatory design: From theory to practice. Field Methods, 18(1), 3-20. https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822X05282260

Ostby, P. L., & Armer, J. M. (2015). Complexities of adherence and post-cancer lymphedema management. Journal of Personalized Medicine, 5(4), 370-388. https://doi.org/10.3390/jpm5040370