It is mission critical for us to move beyond speculation and assumptions about how people generally conceptualize mental health and mental illness. As project director of NASNIcares, I believe that the only way to validate these assumptions is to conduct in person surveys. It is important that people self-define these terms in response to a small number of very carefully designed questions. Methods other than in person questionnaires may compromise the goal of the survey in that it is likely that individuals may web search definitions of the subject terminologies. A recitation of one of these definitions may mask the conceptual ideas that the survey would seek to reveal.
Unfortunately, during this pandemic, in person surveys may not be viable. Can your advisors offer any insights on how to grapple with this dilemma?
Hi Jennifer,
Welcome to the Community Tool Box and Ask an Advisor, we're glad you're here. Thank you for a most interesting and timely question, one I'm sure other researchers are grappling with; I would imagine you're not alone in dealing with this conundrum. However, I think I have a viable solution that will allow you to collect data in an equally rigorous way as you would in a face-to-face interview. I've developed and implemented many surveys in my own work and like you have encountered situations in which it's just not feasible to do so in-person. So, what to do? Well, the answer in short is phone interviews. Obviously focus groups are out, and I wouldn't suggest on-line surveys using one any of the known platforms (e.g. Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey) because your participants would have more time on their hands to look up the terms as they can control their own response pace. My arguments for using phone interviews in this situation are: 1) although you can't totally control participant behavior, you can have a reasonable amount of control over the research context by controlling the pace at which the interview is conducted so there's no time for the participant to look up terms, theoretically I suppose they could, but it's not likely; 2) you can actually increase your sample size by extending your reach via phone, the larger the sample the more power you have to detect an effect if one is present or to give your findings more validity; 3) it is more cost-effective to conduct phone interview than in-person interviews anyway, and a lot less germy, you don't have travel costs which add up fast and eat up a lot of the research budget; 4) you can offer prompts when participants don't understand what you're asking, just like you would in a face-to-face interview, as well as probe for more in-depth answers depending of course on your research questions and the design of the survey (e.g., structured/closed); 5) bias is less likely because the researcher is not part of the research context in which there is greater potential for unduly influencing participant responses through body language or other cues; 6) there is no more susceptibility to response rate or premature disengagement problems than in face-to-face interviews; 7) conducting phone interviews is a well-regarded and viable data collection method in the qualitative research field; and 8) you can obtain a high degree of inter-rater reliability if you're using more than one phone interviewer. Make sense? If you go he phone interview route I would steer away from using text or IM functions because it leaves pace in the hands of the participants. One thing you can do. in the participant instructions, is to be clear that they are not to use external reference sources to look up the terms, and reinforce that throughout the interview. All that said, the Community Tool Box has a really nice resource regarding phone interviews, it may be a tad over simplistic for someone well-versed in qualitative methods, but if you scroll about half-way down the page the authors provide a good overview, and a refresher in other qualitative methods certainly wouldn't hurt. Here's the link: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-n....
So, Jennifer, I hope that helps clarify your thinking about alternative methods to face-to-face interviewing. I think, given your situation, phone interviews are about the best option you have at your disposal. As in all research there are trade-offs and challenges, but this is the way I'd go if I was in your shoes. With that I thank you for question and for visiting us here at the Community Tool Box. Best of success to you, and if you have further questions do not hesitate to ask, that's what we're here for!
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