58 Chapter 3 session on longitudinal Q-studies, and sought counsel from the Q-methodology Listserv. We also had a meeting with experienced Q-researcher Job van Exel, who has published Q-studies with a longitudinal design. Based on the information we gathered, we created a guideline for analyzing change using mixed (quantitative and qualitative) methods. 1. We correlated participants at Time 1 (T1, data collected in 2018, when the students had just started medical training, published in Grijpma et al., 2021 (12)) and Time 2 (T2, data collected for this follow-up study in 2021, three years after T1) to explore the degree to which participants’ appreciation for small-group active learning changed, by looking at the mean and range of the correlations. This would give us a first insight if a change had indeed occurred; 2. We explored the extent to which participants changed in their association with the original factors by correlating the two Q-sorts of participants with the original factors. This would give us insight if participants moved away from the original factors; 3. We explored the transition that participants made from T1 to T2, by drawing lines from the T1 factors to the T2 factors. This would give us insight into the change that students go through; 4. We correlated the factor arrays of T1 and T2 (a second-order factor analysis) for a quantitative comparison of all factors (38). This would give us further insight into the differences between the T1 and T2 factors; 5. We summarized the two T2 factors, and compared those to the summarized four T1 factors, for a side-by-side comparison; 6. We asked students in the (optional) interview after the T2 measure to reflect on the changes they have gone through in the past three years. We asked two main questions: 1) if you reflect on the past three years, how do you think your appreciation of smallgroup learning has developed, and what do you think are the reasons behind these changes? 2) After being shown the statements on which a participant most changed in the two Q-sorts: what has changed for you? Answers were written down by the interviewer and used to understand and describe the key drivers that students reported causing a change in their appreciation for small-group active learning methods. Our approach mimics that of conventional content analysis used in qualitative research (44). We first reviewed our notes, highlighting parts of the text related to change and creating an initial list of key drivers. We then compared answers from participants, and clustered similar information together. Then, from the clustered information, we created a description of the driver. Lastly, we evaluated if the key drivers would fit in the same four categories as the factor descriptions. All but the ‘group’ category fit, which we deemed too narrow. A category called ‘social’ better fit the answers from the participants. Ethics We obtained ethical approval from the Ethical Review Board of the Netherlands Association for Medical Education (dossier number 1062).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw