Qualitative Research Methods in Public Health

Posted: January 4th, 2023

Qualitative Research Methods in Public Health

Student’s Name

Institutional Affiliation

Qualitative Research Methods in Public Health

Question 1

The social problem being addressed in this study is the lack of crisis management skills among healthcare professionals. Crisis management is the process of dealing with unprecedented events that threaten an organization or its stakeholders (Coccolini et al. 2020). Specifically, it involves being prepared for disasters and reducing their effects. It can be a social problem if it affects a significant section of society. In this regard, the affected segment of society is the healthcare professionals.  

The lack of disaster preparedness in the healthcare sector in China was exposed by the crisis management difficulties experienced during the early stages of Covid-19 pandemic. In Hubei, which was the epicenter of the outbreak, professionals with no prior experience in handling highly-infectious diseases managed the patients (Liu, et al., 2020). Many of healthcare workers were drawn from other parts of the country, were young, and had never experienced or been prepared to deal with the rigors of a pandemic (Liu, et al., 2020).

Although the research question is not articulated in the study explicitly, it can be inferred in the context. In this case, the project sought to describe the experiences of the physicians and nurses caring for Covid-19 patients in the early stages of the outbreak (Liu, et al., 2020). Previous studies had revealed that healthcare personnel attending to similar outbreaks, such as the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and Covid-19 had exposed frontline healthcare professionals to unprecedented challenges; yet, qualitative studies on their experiences had not been conducted (Liu, et al., 2020). By describing the experiences of the healthcare professionals in Hubei, some of whom had been quarantined at the peak of the initial outbreak, the researcher sought to gain insights that would help the frontline workers improve the crisis management preparedness in the future (Liu, et al., 2020).   

Question 2

The interpretivist paradigm was employed in this study as the philosophical underpinning. A paradigm is philosophical foundation or ideological standpoint about the nature of the world. In research, a paradigm is the basis of the assumptions by which knowledge is the produced (Saks & Allsop, 2012). Interpretivism is a set of theories explaining how knowledge is gained from the world though understanding the meanings of human actions. Saks and Allsop (2012) explain the interpretivist perspective as positing that the reality is subjective because knowledge is a social construct.

This study provides some evidence of the application of the interpretivist paradigm. For instance, the project employs a qualitative approach to unearth the experiences of the participants. This methodology derives data from the sentiments of the participants, which express their perceptions pertaining to a phenomenon, which, unlike the quantitative one, utilizes numerical data (Brannen, 2017). In this regard, the study focuses on establishing the understanding of the lives, experiences, and subjective meanings of healthcare professionals as they attend to the Covid-19 patients. The in-depth interviews employed thereby facilitate the unearthing of the participants’ understanding of their experiences within the pandemic environment (Liu, et al., 2020). Therefore, the intention was not to quantify any aspects of their experiences but rather uncover their understanding of their scenario. In addition, the study relies on phenomenology, which seeks to represent unusual events as they occur or appear without attempting to understand their causation or consequences (Saks & Allsop, 2012). In this regard, it tries to capture the experiences of physicians and nurses as they attended to those affected by Covid-19. These experiences are captured at a time when the respondents were not prepared to manage the crises and disposed of no knowledge about the unfolding disease.   

Question 3

Human research ethics deals with the ethical handling and engagement of human beings as study participants. They stipulate the research misconduct and abuse of human participants and provide guidance on how they can be avoided to protect the participants’ welfare and rights (Page & Nyeboer, 2017). Usually, research ethics boards are authorized to uphold human research ethics, and are sometimes known as Research Ethical Committees or Institutional Research Boards (Page & Nyeboer, 2017).

The researchers obtained their ethics approval from the Institutional Review Board at the Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University (Liu, et al., 2020). Since the study did not involve any human subjects as recipients of any medical intervention, the concerns surrounding this ethics area were minimal (Chenhall, Senior, & Belton, 2011). In this regard, the scholars ensured that the participants who were in quarantine during the duration of the project were not exposed to unnecessary risks of contracting the virus. The use of telephony to conduct the interviews ensured that the individuals involved were adequately distanced from each other and from the researchers.

Additional ethical considerations included ethical reporting. The study adhered to the standards for reporting qualitative research guidelines to direct the ethical conduct and handling of data and findings, as described by O’Brien et al. (2014). Informed consent was sought before the project began. Also, individuals were permitted to exit the study at any moment because their participation was voluntary. The privacy of the participants and their responses was guaranteed by removing any personal identifier information. Numbers rather than names were used on the transcripts. Data, in the form of audio recordings and interview transcripts, were stored in a password-protected computer to deter an unauthorized access (Liu, et al., 2020).

Question 4

Population is a group of individuals represented by the participants in a study (Hennink, Hutter, & Bailey, 2020). In this case, the population comprised health care professionals working in a hospital setting in China. Specifically, physicians and nurses were considered because of their pivotal role as frontline workers and first responders during an infectious disease pandemic, such as Covid-19 (Liu, et al., 2020). These professionals are appropriate for the study because they were involved extensively in the containment of the virus in China. A sample is a segment of people or items draw from the population under investigation (Hennink, Hutter, & Bailey, 2020). The sample comprised four physicians and nine nurses as the representatives of the frontline healthcare workers. Their explanations of their experiences are directly connected to the research question.

Purposive sampling followed by snowball sampling was used to identify the participants (Liu, et al., 2020). Purposive sampling is suitable for this study because the researchers can choose participants that are expected to possess valuable and relevant information. Similarly, snowballing helps the researcher to recruit more participants using the few initial recruits. The study saves time by having participants that present minimal possibility of refusing to take part in the project due to their familiarity with the already engaged people (Hennink, Hutter, & Bailey, 2020).

Data was collected using interviews, which were conducted for five days, from February 10 till 15, 2020. They lasted between 20 and 60 minutes each and were performed over the telephone (Liu, et al., 2020). In-depth details were drawn out of the participants by means of open-ended questions. The open-ended questions allowed everyone to express their feelings, perspectives, emotions, concerns, and any other pertinent information that would contribute to a description of such experience, thus answering the research question.

Question 5

Firstly, the study reveals that the participants feel that it was their duty to attend to Covid-19 patients as they are responsible for the wellbeing of those ravaged by the strange virus (Liu, et al., 2020). This aspect explains why the healthcare professionals located outside Wuhan enlisted to volunteer to slow down the pandemic before it spread to other parts of the country. This outcome is related to the perception part of the experience, as pointed by the research question. Secondly, the front-line healthcare workers faced numerous challenges that had a physical, emotional, and social toll (Liu, et al., 2020). The heavy workload from the overwhelming numbers of infected patients and the continuous wearing of personal protective equipment fatigued and injured them. The scare of infection and infecting others, alongside the feeling of hopelessness due to the inability to change the deterioration of patients’ health conditions, and the strain on relationships, had emotional ramifications on the participants. These findings explain the emotional experiences of the medical staff, which corresponded with the focus of the research question. Thirdly, although the respondents were inexperienced in handing pandemic crises, they exhibited some personal coping mechanisms alongside becoming resilient towards a beyond-natural or abnormal experience. Watching colleagues succumb to the disease was a surreal practice for the youthful professionals, who had to develop resilience promptly using the available support system (Liu, et al., 2020). These findings provide some insights into the cognitive responses of the front-line experts as they lived their experiences with the pandemic, which was another target of the research question.

The findings answered the research question by yielding three insights into the experiences of healthcare professionals. The researchers described the healthcare professionals’ experiences from an emotional and a cognitive angle. However, despite these harrowing experiences and the resilience built thereafter, the risk of post-traumatic-stress disorder in the long term was likely among the healthcare workers, which projected the experiences that were likely to linger in the future. 

References

Brannen, J. (Ed.). (2017). Mixing methods: Qualitative and quantitative research. Routledge.

Chenhall, R., Senior, K., & Belton, S. (2011). Negotiating human research ethics: Case notes from anthropologists in the field. Anthropology Today, 27(5), 13-17. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8322.2011.00827.x.

Coccolini, F., Sartelli, M., Kluger, Y., Pikoulis, E., Karamagioli, E., Moore, E. E., … & Damaskos, D. (2020). COVID-19 the showdown for mass casualty preparedness and management: the Cassandra Syndrome. World Journal of Emergency Surgery, 15, 1-6. doi:10.1186/s13017-020-00304-5.

Hennink, M., Hutter, I., & Bailey, A. (2020). Qualitative research methods. SAGE Publications Limited.

Liu, Q., Luo, D., Haase, J. E., Guo, Q., Wang, X. Q., Liu, S., … & Yang, B. X. (2020). The experiences of health-care providers during the COVID-19 crisis in China: a qualitative study. The Lancet Global Health, 8, 790-798. doi:10.1016/s2214-109x(20)30204-7.

O’Brien, B. C., Harris, I. B., Beckman, T. J., Reed, D. A., & Cook, D. A. (2014). Standards for reporting qualitative research: A synthesis of recommendations. Academic Medicine, 89(9), 1245-1251. doi:10.1097/acm.0000000000000388.

Page, S. A., & Nyeboer, J. (2017). Improving the process of research ethics review. Research Integrity and Peer Review, 2(1), 1-7. doi:10.1186/s41073-017-0038-7.

Saks, M., & Allsop, J. (Eds.). (2012). Researching health: Qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods. Sage.

Weller, S. C., Vickers, B., Bernard, H. R., Blackburn, A. M., Borgatti, S., Gravlee, C. C., & Johnson, J. C. (2018). Open-ended interview questions and saturation. PloS one, 13(6), e0198606. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0198606.