| Course | HLTH 8551 Preparing for Dissertation |
|---|---|
| Week | Week 11 |
| Paper type | Planning document |
| Length | About 1,130 words, 7 pages |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | Walden University |
| Program | PhD in Public Health |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for HLTH 8551 Week 11
Planning Document: A Qualitative Descriptive Study of How Adults Who Stopped Attending a Hospital's Group Diabetes Education Series Describe Stopping, With Community Recruitment Held in Reserve
Student Name
Walden University
HLTH 8551: Preparing for Dissertation
Instructor Name
Month Day, Year
Planning Document: A Qualitative Descriptive Study of How Adults Who Stopped Attending a Hospital's Group Diabetes Education Series Describe Stopping, With Community Recruitment Held in Reserve
1. Decision Summary
I will proceed with a qualitative descriptive study of adults who attended at least one session of a weekly six-part group class on diabetes self-management at the main hospital of a regional health system, a composite, and then stopped before the last session. Program staff will contact eligible adults identified from attendance records, and I will conduct semi-structured interviews about how they came to stop. If the hospital's research office says no, or has not decided within four months, recruitment shifts to the wider county through pharmacies and a library health program, and the findings will then speak to group diabetes classes broadly instead of to one series.
2. The Problem
The series meets weekly for six sessions and was planned as a whole: the final pair teaches people how to hold on to new habits at home, what to do on sick days and how to arrange follow-up, and those lessons assume the earlier ones. A sizable share of adults come once or more and then drop off before reaching them. Because a review linked longer contact time in diabetes education with bigger drops in A1C (Chrvala et al., 2016), the adults who drop off are getting a smaller dose of the intended program. Staff cannot say why this happens; everything they hear comes from people still in the room. The unknown is how the adults who stopped attending describe stopping.
3. The Gap in the Literature
Studies of diabetes education attendance have mostly observed people present at sessions, analyzed program records or surveyed enrollees, whose replies come mostly from completers. Studies of people who declined education entirely are well summarized in a systematic review of twelve studies (Horigan et al., 2017), and fifteen interviews with referred nonattenders found both personal and organizational reasons (Schwennesen et al., 2016). The nearest study to this one reached 118 adults who had withdrawn from a diabetes education program and put a single open-ended question to each by telephone (Gucciardi et al., 2008). No study on my list has asked adults who attended a group series and then stopped to describe, at length and in their own words, how they came to stop.
A second point follows Alvesson and Sandberg (2011), who distinguish finding gaps from questioning assumptions. Most of this literature treats finishing as the goal. Some people may stop because they got what they needed. The interviews will leave room for that possibility rather than assume every departure is a failure.
4. The Research Question
How do adults who attended at least one session of a hospital-based group diabetes education series and stopped before its last session describe stopping?
The question changed after peer feedback in Week 10. The earlier version asked participants to describe "their decision to stop attending," which assumed every departure was a decision. Some people may drift away without ever deciding. "Describe stopping" leaves room for both.
5. Alignment
Table 1
Alignment of the Study's Core Statements After Revision
| Core statement | Group it names | Verb | Check | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Problem | adults who stopped attending | stop | Aligned | |
| Purpose: to describe how adults who stopped attending the series account for stopping | adults who stopped attending | describe | Aligned | |
| Question | adults who stopped attending | describe | Aligned | |
| Method: interviews with adults identified from attendance records | adults who stopped attending, from records | recruit | Aligned | |
The Week 7 drifts, a purpose promising better retention and recruitment through current class rosters, were repaired before this version.
6. Method
The design is qualitative description, which Sandelowski (2000) defended as a design that reports what happened in the ordinary words of the people involved, with little interpretive distance. That closeness fits a question asking people to describe stopping. A systematic review of 55 qualitative descriptive studies found that few explained why the design suited their question (Kim et al., 2017); this section exists to supply that reason.
Each interview will run under an hour, held by telephone or in a library meeting room as the participant prefers. The guide will move from enrollment through each session attended to the period before the first missed session. Analysis will use qualitative content analysis. A retrospective chart review, a mailed survey and phenomenology were considered and rejected because they would, respectively, show patterns without accounts, impose my categories on people unlikely to reply, and seek an essence when the question seeks accounts of a sequence.
The number of interviews will be guided by information power rather than a fixed figure. Malterud et al. (2016) explain that a study needs fewer participants when its aim is narrow, its participants hold specific knowledge and its dialogue is strong. My aim is narrow and every participant has left the same series, so I expect to need a modest number, reviewed against the quality of the interviews as they accumulate.
7. Feasibility and the Fallback
Access is the condition most likely to fail. The study needs the research office and the program manager to approve contact with former attendees through program staff, and the office could refuse because these adults are no longer active in the program. Refusal, or a delay past four months, triggers the fallback: recruiting by flyer through local pharmacies and a library-based health program, open to any adult who began and then left a group diabetes class. That route preserves the question but widens the group the findings speak for, a shift the limitations section will name.
The schedule runs roughly a year from approval to completed analysis. Data depend on attendance records that may be sign-in sheets by session, which may limit recruitment to the two most recent series.
Ethics centers on my role. I taught the series these adults left. Dwyer and Buckle (2009) describe how the researcher's position inside or outside a group shapes what participants share. Program staff will make first contact, consent will state my role, participants may choose a second interviewer from outside the program, and I will keep a reflexive journal, following McDermid et al. (2014), who reviewed studies done among coworkers and called for any dual role to be stated openly.
8. Toward the Prospectus
The plan is ready to become a prospectus, not to begin data collection. Four items remain open. The site agreement with the hospital's research office has not been requested. Ethics review cannot begin until it is. The interview guide is outlined but not drafted or piloted. And I have not yet checked whether attendance records for the two most recent series are complete enough to identify everyone who stopped. Each of these could change the plan; the fallback covers the first, and the others will be settled in the prospectus stage.
References
Alvesson, M., & Sandberg, J. (2011). Generating research questions through problematization. Academy of Management Review, 36(2), 247-271. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2009.0188
Chrvala, C. A., Sherr, D., & Lipman, R. D. (2016). Diabetes self-management education for adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus: A systematic review of the effect on glycemic control. Patient Education and Counseling, 99(6), 926-943. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2015.11.003
Dwyer, S. C., & Buckle, J. L. (2009). The space between: On being an insider-outsider in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 8(1), 54-63. https://doi.org/10.1177/160940690900800105
Gucciardi, E., DeMelo, M., Offenheim, A., & Stewart, D. E. (2008). Factors contributing to attrition behavior in diabetes self-management programs: A mixed method approach. BMC Health Services Research, 8, Article 33. https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-8-33
Horigan, G., Davies, M., Findlay-White, F., Chaney, D., & Coates, V. (2017). Reasons why patients referred to diabetes education programmes choose not to attend: A systematic review. Diabetic Medicine, 34(1), 14-26. https://doi.org/10.1111/dme.13120
Kim, H., Sefcik, J. S., & Bradway, C. (2017). Characteristics of qualitative descriptive studies: A systematic review. Research in Nursing & Health, 40(1), 23-42. https://doi.org/10.1002/nur.21768
Malterud, K., Siersma, V. D., & Guassora, A. D. (2016). Sample size in qualitative interview studies: Guided by information power. Qualitative Health Research, 26(13), 1753-1760. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732315617444
McDermid, F., Peters, K., Jackson, D., & Daly, J. (2014). Conducting qualitative research in the context of pre-existing peer and collegial relationships. Nurse Researcher, 21(5), 28-33. https://doi.org/10.7748/nr.21.5.28.e1232
Sandelowski, M. (2000). Whatever happened to qualitative description? Research in Nursing & Health, 23(4), 334-340. https://doi.org/10.1002/1098-240X(200008)23:4<334::AID-NUR9>3.0.CO;2-G
Schwennesen, N., Henriksen, J. E., & Willaing, I. (2016). Patient explanations for non-attendance at type 2 diabetes self-management education: A qualitative study. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 30(1), 187-192. https://doi.org/10.1111/scs.12245
HLTH 8551 Week 11 instructions, in plain terms
Week 11 closes the course by having students gather their earlier work into a coherent plan for the dissertation study. Faculty expect each component, from problem to feasibility, to be revised so all use consistent wording and point to the same study. A summary of the plan and its key condition at the start is common. The document should show how peer and faculty feedback changed the plan, keep honest failure cases rather than smoothing them away and list what remains open before the prospectus. It should not claim readiness for data collection, since site agreements and ethics review normally come later.
How this HLTH 8551 Week 11 example is built
The decision summary states the study, recruitment route and fallback trigger in one paragraph. The problem section keeps its Week 4 structure and cites Chrvala and colleagues on contact hours. The gap section condenses the Week 5 memo, citing Horigan, Schwennesen and Gucciardi and their colleagues, and adds Alvesson and Sandberg's point about assumptions. The question section explains the revision from decision to stopping. Table 1 shows all four core statements aligned. The method section cites Sandelowski, Kim and colleagues, and the information power argument of Malterud and colleagues. The feasibility section keeps the access failure case and cites Dwyer and Buckle and McDermid and colleagues on dual roles. The closing section lists four open items.
Where the marks sit in the HLTH 8551 Week 11 rubric
The final document is judged on coherence, and faculty test it by looking for sections that still use the language of an earlier draft. Credit goes to documents where the revised question's wording runs through every section, including the problem and the alignment table. A decision summary that states the whole plan and its condition in one paragraph earns weight. Faculty value an honest list of open items; a document claiming readiness for data collection at this stage suggests a misunderstanding of what comes next. Keeping failure cases intact shows integrity. Explaining how feedback changed the plan demonstrates that the course's peer review did real work. Faculty also notice when a fallback from the feasibility memo quietly disappears from the final plan.
HLTH 8551 Week 11 help: mistakes that cost marks
Final planning documents often paste earlier assignments together, so the problem uses one version of the question and the method another. To write a stronger document, decide the study first and write a one-paragraph summary of it. Then revise each earlier piece so it uses the final wording. Check your alignment table again. Keep your failure cases and fallback. Explain what changed after feedback and why. End with what is still open before the prospectus. A planning document that pulls your earlier pieces into one argument can be written for you. Before submitting, search the document for any phrase from an older version of your question and replace each one you find.
Get a HLTH 8551 Week 11 example written to your instructions
Your term's own pieces are the raw material: send the interest statement through the feasibility memo with the Week 11 planning prompt and rubric. They are condensed into one document that opens on your decision and carries your final wording throughout. Back in 24 to 48 hours, free for a first request; the hospital and diabetes series exist only in this example.
More HLTH 8551 papers and PhD in Public Health samples
- HLTH 8551 Week 1: Dissertation Interest Statement
- HLTH 8551 Week 2: Topic Exclusions Post
- HLTH 8551 Week 3: Topic Narrowing Memo
- HLTH 8551 Week 4: Problem Statement Two Drafts
- HLTH 8551 Week 5: Literature Gap Memo
- HLTH 8551 Week 6: Research Question Draft
- HLTH 8551 Week 7: Study Alignment Table
- HLTH 8551 Week 8: Qualitative Method Rationale
- HLTH 8551 Week 9: Dissertation Feasibility Memo
- HLTH 8551 Week 10: Research Question Peer Replies
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HLTH 8551 Week 11 questions, answered
How is a planning document different from a prospectus?
A planning document at this stage argues that a study is worth pursuing and could be done; a prospectus, in the program's later stage, formalizes that plan for committee approval with a fuller literature base and firmer procedures. The example ends by listing exactly what the prospectus will still need. Your program's own templates set the prospectus requirements, and those govern whenever they differ from this sample.
What if my feasibility check says the study cannot be done?
Then the planning document should say so and choose. The example is conditional: it proceeds with the hospital route and switches to community recruitment if approval has not arrived by a stated date, accepting the change in population that brings. If neither route works for your study, retiring the question now, with reasons written down, costs far less than discovering the same thing after the prospectus.
Where can I find a free HLTH 8551 Week 11 sample paper?
The complete Week 11 planning document for HLTH 8551 appears above, assembling a qualitative study of adults who stopped attending a diabetes series into one plan with a fallback and open items, citing ten references.
Why did the research question change from decision to stopping?
Because a classmate pointed out that some people may drift away from a class without ever experiencing leaving as a decision; asking how adults describe stopping leaves room for both drifting and choosing.
What remains open before the prospectus?
The site agreement with the hospital's research office, ethics review, a drafted and piloted interview guide, and a check that attendance records can identify everyone who stopped.