How did you decide on the # interviews FGDs that you did? How was the sampling decided?

Past Events Evaluating With & For Youth Webinar
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Q: How did you decide upon the number of interviews and focus group discussions that you did? Is there some sort of sampling involved? This is an enormous amount of interviews to analyze. Was saturation considered? And could you assess with less?

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Stefanie: One thing that I think is important to frame that question, and to frame the number of entries that we did, is to say that these were conducted over several years. So we did three or four rounds of the process evaluation and the analysis. I think we could roughly say that we did about a quarter of those number of interviews and focus group discussions each year. And then the results, which were conducted across four geographies, the two sites in Nigeria, and then Ethiopia and Tanzania.

So, our analysis was really in buckets, around each of the solutions associated with each of the geographies. And with each year that we were doing the evaluation for, we produced findings for each year for each geography.

I recognize that 700+, interviews is a huge number. But the way that the process evaluation was conducted over several years for each geography, it really meant that we were looking at four separate process evaluations. When we got to the end of it, we obviously looked at synthesize across the geographies. And our final process evaluation report is a summative report, which does that. We organize the data around the different evaluation questions, and we used some qualitative evaluation software to help us with that.

I wouldn’t say that we that we reached or that we surpassed saturation. I think the the number of interviews that we had, in each of the geographies for each of the years, for each of the solutions, really provided us with a comprehensive view of what was happening in each of the locations.

The sampling was also looking at different groups of stakeholders: We spoke with:

  • Adolescent girls who had been receiving the intervention or participants in the A360 solution
  • Government stakeholders
  • Key community influencers
  • Husbands and parents
  • PSI, Country staff and Global staff

So there were a range of various stakeholder groups who were included in that. I think I’ll leave it at that for that question.