HLTH 6205 Week 7 Key Informant Interview Plan Example

Who Would Know Where the Binge Occasions Happen: A Primary Data Plan for Key Informant Interviews in Calumet County, Naming the Question, the Vantage Points, the Route to Each and the Protections Required First

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Walden University

HLTH 6205: Assessing Health and Wellness Needs for Communities

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Month Day, Year

Who Would Know Where the Binge Occasions Happen: A Primary Data Plan for Key Informant Interviews in Calumet County, Naming the Question, the Vantage Points, the Route to Each and the Protections Required First

The Question the Published Figures Left Open

The published estimate puts recent binge drinking at 20.4% of Calumet County adults for 2023, somewhere between 17.1% and 24.1% once modeling uncertainty is allowed for (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2025). It says nothing about the occasions themselves. The draft survey instrument would measure frequency, quantity and setting across a sample of households, but it would not explain why particular settings produce heavy drinking or what happens around them. This plan addresses one narrower question: in which settings and on which kinds of occasions does binge drinking among county adults most often take place, and what do people who work in or around those settings see of how the occasions begin and end?

The question is stated so that a modest set of conversations could plausibly answer it. It does not ask how many adults binge drink, which interviews cannot establish, and it does not ask what should be done, which is outside the assessment.

Informants and What Each Is Positioned to Know

The plan names categories of people, not individuals, and chooses each category for its vantage point rather than its convenience.

Tavern, supper club and restaurant operators and bartenders see drinking occasions from the inside: which nights are heavy, whether groups arrive already drinking and how patrons leave. Licensed premises in the county's cities, villages and towns are listed by the clerks who issue alcohol licenses, which gives the plan a public sampling frame.

Organizers of community events, such as the county fair, church festivals and summer celebrations, see occasions that never appear in a bar's records. They know how alcohol is sold or brought, how long events run and what volunteers notice.

Law enforcement officers and emergency medical crews see the end of the occasions that go wrong: crashes, falls, fights and calls to homes. They see few of the occasions that end safely, which is a bias the analysis would have to state.

Primary care clinicians and nurses at clinics serving county residents see the health side over time and can describe whether patients' drinking patterns come up in visits at all. Only about one binge drinker in ten meets criteria for alcohol dependence nationally (Esser et al., 2014), so clinicians may see the behavior mainly in people who never seek help for drinking.

County health department staff know what has been tried, what data exist and which partners have been involved before.

Adults who binge drink are the most direct informants and the hardest to reach. The plan would include them only through a consent question at the end of the household survey, asking whether the respondent would be willing to be contacted for a conversation.

How People Would Be Reached

Recruitment is where plans like this usually fail, so each route is described concretely.

Operators would be contacted by letter, using addresses from the clerks' license lists, followed by a phone call two weeks later. The request would be for a 30-minute conversation at a time the operator chooses, usually a weekday afternoon before evening business. The letter would state that the interviewer is not an inspector and that no questions will be asked about specific customers or incidents.

Event organizers would be reached through the fair board and through the published contacts of event committees, after the event season rather than during it.

Officers and emergency crews would be reached through their chiefs or directors, who would be asked for permission first and then for names of staff willing to talk. The interviews would happen off shift and would be scheduled around rotating schedules.

Clinicians would be reached through clinic managers, with a request for 20 minutes rather than 30, since a clinician's time is the scarcest in the plan.

Survey respondents who agreed to contact would be called and offered a phone or video conversation in the evening, with a modest gift card as thanks.

The plan aims for 12 to 16 conversations across the categories, at least two in each. A widely cited study of interview data found that most of the themes that eventually appeared had emerged within the first 12 interviews in a fairly homogeneous group (Guest et al., 2006). Because these informants are not homogeneous, the plan treats 12 as a minimum, not a goal, and would stop adding conversations in a category when new interviews stopped adding new settings or occasions.

What Would Be Asked

The interview guide would be organized around occasions, not people. Informants would be asked to describe a typical heavy drinking occasion they have seen in the past year, where it happened, how it started, how long it lasted and how people left. They would be asked which times of year and which events produce the most such occasions. They would not be asked to name anyone or to describe any incident in which a specific person was harmed.

For licensed operators, one more boundary matters. Questions about whether staff ever serve visibly intoxicated patrons could expose an operator to legal risk, so the guide would ask about patterns in general terms and would tell informants at the start that they may decline any question.

Protections and Approvals Required First

No conversation would happen before three conditions were met. First, the plan would be reviewed by an institutional review board, with the guide, consent script and recruitment letters attached. Second, every informant would give informed consent at the start of the conversation, with a plain explanation of the purpose, the voluntary nature of participation, the right to stop at any time and how the information would be used. Third, the plan would specify how confidentiality is protected: no names on notes or transcripts, audio recordings deleted after transcription, transcripts stored on an encrypted drive and quotations in any report attributed by category only, such as "a supper club owner," and only where the category is large enough that the person cannot be identified. In a county of this size, some categories, such as the director of the only ambulance service in a town, would be too small for attributed quotations at all.

Survey respondents recruited for interviews present an extra concern: their survey answers might reveal heavy drinking, and the interview must not be linked back to their survey record in a way that could identify them.

What Interviews Cannot Establish

The conversations would describe settings, occasions and patterns as informants see them. They would not establish how common any setting is across the county's adults, how many drinks an occasion typically involves or whether binge drinking is rising or falling. Those are questions of magnitude, and they belong to the household survey and the published estimates. National data show why that matters: young adults were the most likely to binge drink, yet half of all binge drinks were downed by people 35 or older (Kanny et al., 2018), a pattern that only counts of frequency and quantity reveal, and interviews cannot supply those counts.

The plan's informants are also skewed toward occasions that are visible: in public venues, at events or in emergencies. Drinking at home, which may account for many occasions, would be seen mainly through the survey respondents who agree to talk, a small and self-selected group.

References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2025). PLACES: Local data for better health, county data, 2025 release [Data set]. https://data.cdc.gov/d/swc5-untb

Esser, M. B., Hedden, S. L., Kanny, D., Brewer, R. D., Gfroerer, J. C., & Naimi, T. S. (2014). Prevalence of alcohol dependence among US adult drinkers, 2009-2011. Preventing Chronic Disease, 11, Article E206. https://doi.org/10.5888/pcd11.140329

Guest, G., Bunce, A., & Johnson, L. (2006). How many interviews are enough? An experiment with data saturation and variability. Field Methods, 18(1), 59-82. https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822X05279903

Kanny, D., Naimi, T. S., Liu, Y., Lu, H., & Brewer, R. D. (2018). Annual total binge drinks consumed by U.S. adults, 2015. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 54(4), 486-496. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2017.12.021