CHAPTER FOUR: Methods and Limitations

Methods

The team examined general demographic information about Alamance County at the beginning of the community assessment process. As the community assessment progressed, appropriate secondary data sources were identified with the help of the preceptor, community members and service providers. Secondary data sources were located in the Burlington Library, on the internet, and provided by community members and service providers. These sources were examined for information relevant to the themes identified through interviews and focus groups and were incorporated into this document.

Data Collection

Primary data was collected through in-person interviews and focus groups. Due to Institutional Review Board (IRB) regulations, (the IRB is an organization at the University that makes sure all study participants are treated fairly) permission to call potential interviewees was necessary prior to contacting them. Our preceptor made the first round of the initial contacts. During interviews we asked for referrals of other people who would be helpful to interview. We then asked the interviewees if they would be willing to contact the person(s) to ask if we could contact them. Once permission was obtained, we called the next potential interviewees to schedule an interview.

Recruitment of Interviewees

To select who would be interviewed, the team decided to focus on key informants, or those people who are familiar with the community and know the community's thoughts and feelings about issues. To start, the team interviewed the key informants suggested by the team's preceptor. The team had the advantage that the preceptor is both a service provider and a community member and knew of many important people in Snow Camp to interview. From there, the team then asked interviewees who they thought were key people in Snow Camp. As the team conducted interviews, the circle of key informants grew and a wider sample of Snow Camp service providers and community members was interviewed.

The team first developed the interview guides for each interview and focus group using very general questions (see Appendix A). The interview guides were piloted with a service provider and a community member. As the interviews were completed, the team adjusted the interview guides to include questions about issues that came up but were not on the interview guide and to delete questions that were answered the same way each time or were not deemed appropriate. In addition, for the focus groups, the questions were tailored to fit the group that was interviewed.

Two team members attended each interview and focus group. One team member conducted the interview or focus group and the other team member took notes. The interviews were also taped. Prior to beginning the interview, each participant was asked for his or her permission to tape the interview. In addition, each participant read and signed a consent form prior to beginning the interview (see Appendix A for consent form).

Forty-five people were interviewed during the community assessment process. Twenty individual interviews and one focus group were conducted with community members and two focus groups and four individual interviews were conducted with service providers (See Appendix B for a description of interviewees).

Data Analysis

Data was analyzed in several stages. First, after each interview the note taker would type up the notes that he or she took. Then, he or she would listen to the tape and add any information that was missed to the typed notes. Each team member then analyzed the interviews that he or she had taken notes on to uncover potential themes. After coming up with themes for each interview, the group met and compared observations. The group then developed themes that spanned across all of the interviews.

The team came up with eighteen themes. From those eighteen themes, each team member took one single theme to analyze in depth, which meant that five themes were analyzed in greater detail at that point. The five themes that were chosen for further analysis had each appeared more frequently in the interview data. Each team member then looked at all interview data to extract any relevant additional information about his or her assigned theme. After that step, the team met again as a group and discussed the information for each theme.

Once the six community meeting themes were decided upon (see Planning Committee section above), each team member was assigned a theme to review more closely so that he or she could present the theme at the community meeting. The team also created a summary sheet containing information about all of the themes, in case any of the team members needed to switch themes at the time of the meeting.

Presentation of Data

To present the themes at the forum the group decided, with the input of the planning committee, to use Force Field Analysis, an empowerment technique developed Kurt Lewin (Hope & Timmel, 1996). Force Field Analysis helps people to list, discuss, and evaluate the forces that both help and hinder a desired change. Therefore, the purpose of Force Field Analysis is to identify both the helping and hindering forces of getting to a desired outcome. The process helps people to begin thinking about what they can do to reduce the forces that may be preventing the group to getting to the outcome and increase the forces that may be helping them reach the outcome. Force Field Analysis allows the participants to examine the entire problem by looking at all of the aspects of the problem.

The first step in the force field analysis process is to identify a current problem. Then, from that problem the group identifies a goal that they would like to work towards. After identifying the goal, the group brainstorms the helping and hindering forces of the current problem. Once helping and hindering forces are identified the strength, or how much influence that force has on the problem, is indicated by the use of an arrow. The length of the arrow represents the strength, the longer the arrow, the more influence that force has on the problem (see Figure 1).

Limitations

Although the data collected does represent many of the opinions and feelings of the community members and service providers in Snow Camp, the team was not able to conduct enough interviews to have a representative sample of the entire Snow Camp community. The team encountered several limitations in conducting the community assessment. First, due to the IRB regulations, the team was restricted in ways to contact potential interviewees. The team's preceptor made all initial contacts with the community and therefore the team was limited to the preceptor's circle of acquaintances. If the community assessment process was conducted over a greater length of time the team could have continued conducting interviews and would have been able to contact a more diverse population of interviewees. In addition, due to IRB revisions, the team was not able to start conducting interviews until February, so the team did not have time to complete as many interviews as they would have liked.

The Snow Camp Community Meeting

Recommendations and Conclusion