DBAX 9103 Week 2 Research Procedure Account Example

From "Will Be Collected" to "Was Collected": A Procedure Account for a Study of Caregiver Retention, Recording in the Past Tense What Was Actually Done With Hiring, Onboarding and Check-In Records at a Home Care Agency

Student Name

Walden University

DBAX 9103: Business Research Project Stage 3

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

From "Will Be Collected" to "Was Collected": A Procedure Account for a Study of Caregiver Retention, Recording in the Past Tense What Was Actually Done With Hiring, Onboarding and Check-In Records at a Home Care Agency

Plans and Accounts

Plans are written in the future tense and procedure accounts in the past, and the difference is more than grammar. A plan says what will happen if everything goes as expected. An account says what happened, including the parts that did not. Appelbaum et al. (2018) recommend that reports describe procedures fully enough for someone else to carry them out again, which a plan cannot do because it was written before the work met reality. This account describes how data were obtained, linked and checked for a study asking whether newly hired caregivers at a Kansas City home care agency stay longer when supervisors contact them early and when onboarding is finished on time.

Setting and Population

The agency employs about 900 caregivers who provide personal care and companionship in clients' homes. Caregivers work alone at client homes and are supervised by field supervisors, each responsible for about forty caregivers. The study population was every caregiver hired over a 24-month period, a total of 612 hires.

What Was Obtained

Table 1

Data Sources as Obtained

All files were stripped of names by the agency's data analyst before transfer; caregivers were identified only by an employee number.

How Records Were Linked

The four files were linked by employee number. All 612 hires appeared in the hiring list. Onboarding records matched 609; the three unmatched caregivers had completed onboarding on paper during a system migration, and the training coordinator supplied their dates from paper logs. Check-in logs matched 598; the 14 caregivers without logs had been hired during a two-month period when the scheduling system was being replaced and supervisors recorded contacts in personal notebooks that were not kept. Travel records matched all 612.

How Check-Ins Were Identified

The check-in log recorded every contact between a supervisor and a caregiver, including calls about schedule changes. The study defined a check-in as a contact about the caregiver's work, wellbeing or questions, excluding contacts solely about scheduling. Two readers, the agency's training coordinator and I, coded the note text of a random 200 entries independently and agreed on 186; disagreements were resolved by discussion and the rule was clarified. I then coded the remaining entries using the clarified rule.

How the Outcome Was Defined

Retention was defined as being employed by the agency 90 days after hire, taken from separation dates in the hiring list. Caregivers who transferred to the agency's sister company were treated as separated, since they left the role studied.

Why the Population Was Every Hire

Studying every hire, rather than a sample, avoided a selection decision the agency might have shaped. The training coordinator first offered a list of "typical" new caregivers; using it would have excluded people hired through a staffing partner, who tend to leave sooner. The full hiring list was requested instead. Bauer et al. (2007) found that newcomer outcomes vary with how people enter an organization, so leaving out one entry route could have distorted the result.

How Missing Logs Were Handled at This Stage

The 14 caregivers without check-in logs were not imputed or dropped at the point of obtaining data; they were flagged and carried forward so the decision could be made deliberately during preparation. Newman (2014) recommends recording the pattern and reason for missing data before choosing a method, since the reason determines which methods are defensible. Here the reason was a system change unrelated to the caregivers themselves, which the preparation note uses to justify its choice.

Approvals and Consent

The university's review board approved the study as research using existing records. The agency's chief executive signed a data use agreement. Because no caregiver was contacted, individual consent was waived.

What This Account Does Not Yet Cover

Exclusions, coding decisions and analysis choices are recorded in the deviation record and data preparation note that follow. This account covers only how the data came to exist in the form analyzed.

References

Appelbaum, M., Cooper, H., Kline, R. B., Mayo-Wilson, E., Nezu, A. M., & Rao, S. M. (2018). Journal article reporting standards for quantitative research in psychology: The APA Publications and Communications Board task force report. American Psychologist, 73(1), 3-25. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000191

Bauer, T. N., Bodner, T., Erdogan, B., Truxillo, D. M., & Tucker, J. S. (2007). Newcomer adjustment during organizational socialization: A meta-analytic review of antecedents, outcomes, and methods. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(3), 707-721. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.92.3.707

Newman, D. A. (2014). Missing data: Five practical guidelines. Organizational Research Methods, 17(4), 372-411. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428114548590