[MUSIC] There are seven phases you have to go through to make an interview study that produces trustworthy results. The phases can overlap in practice, but often there's a natural order. I will now give you an overview of the different phases, and then you'll go into detail with them in the next modules. The first thing you need to do is to define the aim, why are you making your study? Which problem are you trying to solve? The problem can be rooted in your own clinical practice. You might have made a survey among your psychiatric patients and discovered they are not satisfied with the medical treatment, but you don't know why. In this case, the aim of your interview study will be to find out why they're unsatisfied. The problem could also exist at a societal level. For instance, in your country, there's a high consumption of antibiotics. To tackle this, you need to find out why many patients purchase antibiotics without a prescription. Although different, these oppose situations in which a better understanding of the patient's perspective could help you resolve a problem with medicines. Describing the problem or challenge will help to realize what it is you want to know and how you could use this knowledge to improve how we use medicines in society. It's a good idea to phrase the aim or you into your study as an open question. For example, why don't patients follow national rules and gets antibiotics through prescription? Or why are psychiatric patients not satisfied with their medical treatment? It's useful to be specific when phrasing the research question. Does my aim or research question cover all patient groups or some groups more relevant to me than others? What is it precisely about the antibiotic behavior patients that I want to understand better? Before deciding on your research question, you should try to find out what we already know about the problem. This information can be found in reports from health authorities, books and the scientific literature. Perhaps there's quite a lot of knowledge already about your specific topic. And rather than creating a new study, you might rely on the results of others. Other studies can therefore help you become more aware of the specific knowledge you're interested in. Perhaps you want to repeat a study in your own specific setting to make sure it's relevant for you. You can also specify your aim by reading theories of factors about influencing patient's intake on their medicine or how patients perceive medicines. You should always be sure of your aim before deciding which method to use. Even though the modules of this course focus on qualitative semi-instructed into use, you should not decide which methods to use before you know what you're striving for. Only then you'll be able to pick the most suitable method. It's also important at the early stages of an interview study to know the national ethical requirements that you need to comply with. Otherwise, you risk not having time to get the necessary permits. Every country has different rules. If you live in a country which belongs to the European Union, you have to live up to the GDPR rules, which regulate which type of personal data could be collected and how it can be stored and shared. If your country or your type of study does not require specific permit, you still have to do the interview study in an ethical way. More about this in the following modules. In the early stages, you also have to reflect upon your resources, that is the time and money required to undertake the interview study. To plan and carry out a good interview, you need to prepare an interview guide. Before writing the guide, you must have read as much as you can about your topic to make the questions in the guide as relevant as possible. If the guide is only based on your own experience, you might miss something important. Your interview guide will become more relevant when it's based both on the literature you have read, and also on your own knowledge and experience in the field. A good interview guide will have all themes that are divided into specific questions. This provides you will acute overview of the interview. But a good qualitative, semi-structured interview should be flexible. You should address all these themes in your interview guide during the interview, but the precise phrasing and order of your questions could vary depending on the interviewee. That is to make sure that you can adjust the interview to the interviewees' experiences in order to understand them better. The answers in an interview study depend entirely on the participants. If they don't have specific experiences with your research topic, you can't get elaborate answers. So think carefully about the profiles of the participants you'd like to invite. There are different ways of recruiting people for your interviews. When recruiting, you have to inform them about the topic of the interview, what it will be used for, who will have access to the results, and so on. Be sure to obtain an informed consent, preferably in writing. It's extremely important to create a trustful atmosphere when doing an interview. So make sure that the interview takes place at a location where the participant is comfortable. Start the interview with some easy questions. For example, can you tell me what to do in a usual day? This will help the participant getting into the role of being an interviewee. Often, participants don't go around thinking about the topic, which is of interest to you, so you need to support them in reflecting about the matter. Easy startup questions also helps you to get a good background understanding of the participants. After some easy startup questions, then you can start asking your real research questions.There are different techniques to ensure that you'll get rich and nuanced answers. Be aware of the asymmetry of power when doing interviews. As an interviewer you have the power to decide what to talk about. Try to be open-minded. Perhaps there are other relevant factors to explore than the ones you anticipated. You might not share the view of the participant, but be open-minded. Otherwise the participant will notice, and you won't get their perspective. To do a good analysis it's helpful if you can first transcribe the interview that is, to put down on paper everything that was said in the interview. Also by whom and in the right order. This is also known as verbatim transcription. Then the analysis can begin. In order to understand what patients are really telling us, it's necessary to analyze.Of course, you already have a better understanding of the participants perspective after you have done the interview as compared to before. But when you start looking at your transcripts, you might be able to understand even more. There are different types of analysis to choose between, however, all of them usually require coding the interview. This means carefully reading the entire transcript and marking where each interviewee said, something which is important to you. The coding process can be bottom up, meaning that you try to be open to any new, important aspect given by the interviewee. You may have also looked for specific answers to predefined research questions, a more, top down approach, even if you have really justified top down approach questions, being open to new, important themes in the data will give you the best results. Content analysis is often used when trying to sum up what are the patients' preferences, experiences, perceptions and so on. Usually you carry out several interviews. In this case, you should do the analysis of one interview before trying to compare with the others. Otherwise there might be important aspects that you miss out on. In order to implement the results of your study, you need to sum up and often present the findings. What are the patterns looking across all the interviews? For example, what are the most common reasons for why patients buy antibiotics without a prescription? Interview results can both be disseminated in writing and orally. Determine what is the most appropriate way for your study findings and target audience. When reporting, you should consider whether to report only the results, or also to include the methodology. That is the way in which you conducted the study. This depends on the purpose of your study. Now it's also time to think about how to best use your results. This has to do with your aim. Why did you carry out this study? What was the problem or the challenge that you started up with? This is where you start improving services, processes, policies, guidelines of your daily practice. It's not easy to change existing practices, but there are tools to help you implement your results into real life to improve the way we use medicines. We all learn by doing, so take one step at the time. Good luck. [MUSIC]
