TY - JOUR
T1 - Qualitative Interview Studies of Working Mechanisms in Electronic Health
T2 - Tools to Enhance Study Quality
AU - Holter, Marianne Ts
AU - Johansen, Ayna B.
AU - Ness, Ottar
AU - Brinkmann, Svend
AU - Høybye, Mette T.
AU - Brendryen, Håvar
N1 - ©Marianne TS Holter, Ayna B Johansen, Ottar Ness, Svend Brinkmann, Mette T Høybye, Håvar Brendryen. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (http://www.jmir.org), 06.05.2019.
PY - 2019/5/1
Y1 - 2019/5/1
N2 - Future development of electronic health (eHealth) programs (automated Web-based health interventions) will be furthered if program design can be based on the knowledge of eHealth's working mechanisms. A promising and pragmatic method for exploring potential working mechanisms is qualitative interview studies, in which eHealth working mechanisms can be explored through the perspective of the program user. Qualitative interview studies are promising as they are suited for exploring what is yet unknown, building new knowledge, and constructing theory. They are also pragmatic, as the development of eHealth programs often entails user interviews for applied purposes (eg, getting feedback for program improvement or identifying barriers for implementation). By capitalizing on these existing (applied) user interviews to also pursue (basic) research questions of how such programs work, the knowledge base of eHealth's working mechanisms can grow quickly. To be useful, such interview studies need to be of sufficient quality, which entails that the interviews should generate enough data of sufficient quality relevant to the research question (ie, rich data). However, getting rich interview data on eHealth working mechanisms can be surprisingly challenging, as several of the authors have experienced. Moreover, when encountering difficulties as we did, there are few places to turn to, there are currently no guidelines for conducting such interview studies in a way that ensure their quality. In this paper, we build on our experience as well as the qualitative literature to address this need, by describing 5 challenges that may arise in such interviews and presenting methodological tools to counteract each challenge. We hope the ideas we offer will spark methodological reflections and provide some options for researchers interested in using qualitative interview studies to explore eHealth's working mechanisms.
AB - Future development of electronic health (eHealth) programs (automated Web-based health interventions) will be furthered if program design can be based on the knowledge of eHealth's working mechanisms. A promising and pragmatic method for exploring potential working mechanisms is qualitative interview studies, in which eHealth working mechanisms can be explored through the perspective of the program user. Qualitative interview studies are promising as they are suited for exploring what is yet unknown, building new knowledge, and constructing theory. They are also pragmatic, as the development of eHealth programs often entails user interviews for applied purposes (eg, getting feedback for program improvement or identifying barriers for implementation). By capitalizing on these existing (applied) user interviews to also pursue (basic) research questions of how such programs work, the knowledge base of eHealth's working mechanisms can grow quickly. To be useful, such interview studies need to be of sufficient quality, which entails that the interviews should generate enough data of sufficient quality relevant to the research question (ie, rich data). However, getting rich interview data on eHealth working mechanisms can be surprisingly challenging, as several of the authors have experienced. Moreover, when encountering difficulties as we did, there are few places to turn to, there are currently no guidelines for conducting such interview studies in a way that ensure their quality. In this paper, we build on our experience as well as the qualitative literature to address this need, by describing 5 challenges that may arise in such interviews and presenting methodological tools to counteract each challenge. We hope the ideas we offer will spark methodological reflections and provide some options for researchers interested in using qualitative interview studies to explore eHealth's working mechanisms.
KW - data collection
KW - eHealth
KW - health care evaluation mechanisms
KW - interviews as topic
KW - mHealth
KW - mobile health
KW - telehealth
KW - telemedicine
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85065798230&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.2196/10354
DO - 10.2196/10354
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 31066683
AN - SCOPUS:85065798230
SN - 1439-4456
VL - 21
JO - Journal of Medical Internet Research
JF - Journal of Medical Internet Research
IS - 5
M1 - e12054
ER -