I had a hard time sticking to 1 sentence for the significance :) Thanks in advance for advice.
Hi Sarah - great project!
A few comments re:
Question: really great question; wonder if you want to broaden that to ID facilitators-- you may be able to find that information helpful to your overall goal.
Method: direct observation and one-on-one semi-structured interviews are great methods to get to answering your question. One thing that I learned from Angeline's project that I really like is to collect documents so that you can triangulate your findings. I think we talked about getting policy documents, in class, as well, to help understand the situation (your barriers might be there, too?) Also, I wonder if focus groups may work to answer this question, as well. The focus group would get you a consensus on the big barriers and the discussion amongst peers may reveal something they might not be comfortable talking to a research person about. Maybe this is something I can ask Wendy and Dan to help me understand a little better.
Subjects: postpartum patients will be able to help answer your question. I was trying to think whether pregnant patients would be able to provide something that would be useful that postpartum patients can't but I don't think so. Providers will also add another source of information to ID'ing barriers and a great idea. I would also consider being open to interviewing other stakeholders in the process that may come up (i.e. clinic staff, etc.)
Thanks for your work! Looking forward to hearing more about your project plans.
Vicky
Echoing a few thoughts from Vicky...reviewing documents might be helpful to provide a broader sense of these issues within the setting context. Interviews, focus groups, and observations in the clinical setting may not provide that broad perspective of how IUD or LARC is understood or discussed outside clinic walls. In terms of sample size and logistics: I would think you'd learn very quickly from informants what is going on with IUD uptake, so you might want to plan on a small start to the study and ensure that you are able to ramp up, if needed, to pursue unexpected leads. Also bear in mind that observation can be time-consuming b/c you need to spend a lot of time waiting for an "event" of interest. All that said, this is an interesting topic well worth pursuing via qualitative methods and my hunch is that you'll make progress pretty quickly once in the field.
This is a great proposal- well written and easy to understand. Your research question was clear and I think your background justifies the question. It might be nice to include some numbers to get a sense for exactly how big the problem is. My main comments on the proposed approach is perhaps to have some prompts on common barriers that have previously been reported. This might encourage discussion of other barriers. Also, how many interviews are you planning to conduct (? a challenge still TBD).