Design Decision #4 – Participants
Participants will be needed to take part in pre- and post-module surveys; however, how many should I recruit?
At the beginning, it was the idea to choose six dental staff to participate in the study. However, upon discussions with the sponsor and the academic advisor, a purposeful sample of ten participants were selected to ensure an adequate sample size for the modified action research, and to meet time constraints of the project and requirements of the blanket ethics for the MA course that this research was required to be conducted. Purposeful samples are samples where each group is homogenous and are examined within these groups (Ames, Glenton, & Lewin, 2019). Therefore, clinical staff, including clinic coordinators; part-time staff, and full-time staff were selected as a representation of the different roles’ perception of the DLR. Non-clinical staff were not chosen for this study, since they did not partake in the face-to-face training sessions and would not be able to give insight on this particular topic.
To recruit participants for the research project, it was decided to send an email to the target population to invite eligible dental health staff to voluntarily participate. Eligibility in this research project included participants that were over the age of 18, not of a vulnerable population, and were able to give consent. The target population were informed that participants in the study would be provided with a token of appreciation, a $15 dollar Tim Horton’s gift card, for their volunteered time. If a participant chose to withdraw from the study at any point, they would still receive the gift card as a token of appreciation for their time.
Since a state of emergency was declared in the province on March 17th, 2020, this meant that all in-person classes were suspended until further notice. This gave faculty an opportunity to transition face-to-face delivery to online which began on March 23rd, 2020. Because of this, the recruitment process was delayed by three weeks which led to a lower number of part-time staff who participated in the study.
Reference:
Ames, H., Glenton, C., & Lewin, S. (2019). Purposive sampling in a qualitative evidence synthesis: A worked example from a synthesis on parental perceptions of vaccination communication. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 19(1), 1-9. doi:10.1186/s12874-019-0665-4