Virtual Seminar: Topic 5 Reading Seminar Group 2

I can agree with David that it is unclear how the initial selection of true domestic violence victims among the volunteers were recruited although it sort of implies there was a process.

However, I was more interested in the attempt  to reflection of the diversity of age, ethnicity, diagnosis and experience. It seems they relied their selection on the 2001 census but it looks too simplified when the representation is by one case for the various ethnicities. It is therefore superficial on elaboration of cultural difference.

On the other hand , I think it is a good paper as it answers its research question in the sense it elaborates on the barriers. It gives a useful information for the service at the time all the focus of ‘’holistic approach’’ is more emphasised and mental health should be the most prominent  speciality beside general practice to take this as a virtue. It is surprising to see the mental health team leaving domestic violence issue to the hands of ‘’others’’.

I find it very difficult to appraise a qualitative work by looking at methodology when the findings are very informative as it is in this study. Larger sampling with better presentation of the age, gender, ethnicity, employment status is always better but this piece of work is encouraging a change in the training hence, as good as it could be! 

I agree with Zoe - it was interesting that they included those who HAD perpetrated the violence, but one could potentially assume that they might have had some violence back? Not too sure on that - but it would make for a further interesting study, dependant on if you could get them to talk.

The lack of males does indicate the nature of domestic violence and the fact that they talk about the gender issue - men are scared to talk about it.

In their limitations, they talk about the population being "very socioeconomically deprived setting where there is a high proportion of people from Black and minority ethnic groups; our results may not therefore be generalisable to other settings." This is good to state, but in the introduction they seemed to be more general about their findings and what they hoped to achieve with this rather than leaving the results to relfeclt one area. I feel that certain areas have differing opinions and experiences of domestic violence and a contrast with another area would have been better for them to make some generalised statements as they did.

Hi, its been thorough analysis of the sampling up here. The coverage of this sampling is giving me some concern. i feel that a sample should be broad enough to capture the many facets and dimensons of the subject matter, as such their should have been inclusion of the possible observers or witness from the street or family members of the mental health users to cross examine the findings.

i wish also to comment on the use of purposive sampling. It is basically judgmental or selective. In this work, i was tempted to point out the sex ratio of 2:8, but on the second thought which i stand to be corrected, i looked at the purpose of selecting the participant to ensure diversity in age, ethnicity, diagnosis and experience; and i feel that the sex ratio will be difficult to be addressed condisering the availablity of the partcicipant with reference to the nature of the subject matter. and moreover, sex might not really affect the outcome. Unless there are other reasons for sampling few men which the auto didnt disclose in the work.

Cheers!

Thanks for starting off the discussion David.  A range of perspectives are highlighted regarding sampling in qualitative research.  For me sampling in qualitative research links strongly to what you want to do in the analysis.  David picks up on this in his query about whether the research team have done any other analyses of the data.  I'm going to pick up on this in another thread.

I wanted to flag up a useful paper by Sarah Curtis et al on sampling in qualitative research.  She is a health geographer who does both quantitative and qualitative research and used to work at QM.

Curtis et al.  (2000) Approaches to sampling and case selection in qualitaitve research: examples in the geography of health.  Social Science & Medicine.  1000-1014.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953699003500

The paper discusses sampling in three papers in relation to six criteria set out by Miles and Huberman:

1. The sampling strategy should be relevant to the conceptual framework and the research questions addressed by the research.

2. The sample should be likely to generate rich information on the type of phenomena which need to be studied.

3. Thes sample should enhance the 'generalizability' of the findings.

4. the sample should produce believable descriptions/explanations.

5. Is the sample strategy ethical?

6. Is the sampling plan feasible?

It sounds like some of these have been fairly adequately addressed in the paper, and others not.  What do you think?  

(I should say that Curtis et al don't use the 6 criteria as a checklist but reflect and discuss)  

Hello all - great posts!

The study was carried out with minority groups from low socioeconomic backgrounds.  Can this be extrapolated to the wider population (bearing in mind service users were given £20 for attending) and of course the main recruitment methods included advertising in the media – what type of people responds to such methods of recruitment?

Ethical approval was obtained and all participants remained anonymous throughout.  However, the study did not explore ethical consequences of collecting personal experiences and opening them to public scrutiny.  Can this be used to guide clinic practice (the gender representation issue is important I think.)?