PUBH 6036 Week 9 Qualitative Design Example

Listening for a Child's Breathing Through the Night: A Qualitative Design Piece Choosing Descriptive Phenomenology Over Grounded Theory and Ethnography for Caregivers Living With Bed Bugs in a Composite Housing Authority

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Walden University

PUBH 6036: Public Health Research Methods

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Listening for a Child's Breathing Through the Night: A Qualitative Design Piece Choosing Descriptive Phenomenology Over Grounded Theory and Ethnography for Caregivers Living With Bed Bugs in a Composite Housing Authority

What Counting Cannot Reach

The cohort designed in earlier weeks can estimate whether children in infested apartments miss more school. It cannot say what an infestation does to a household's nights: the caregiver who checks a child's arms at 2 a.m., the child who will not sleep in her own bed, the family that stops inviting relatives over. Tenants living with bed bugs in one Montreal survey reported worse sleep and more anxiety than their neighbors (Susser et al., 2012), but a questionnaire score cannot show how the disturbance unfolds or why it might keep a child home on a school morning. This piece argues that a qualitative study is a design choice in its own right for that question, not a garnish on the cohort, and weighs three traditions before choosing one.

The Qualitative Question

"How do caregivers of school-age children in the Cedar Hollow family buildings experience a bed bug infestation in the home, particularly at night and on school mornings?"

The question asks about experience and meaning, uses no causal verb and leaves room for answers the team has not anticipated, such as shame, conflict with neighbors or relief when treatment ends.

Tradition 1: Grounded Theory

Grounded theory works toward an explanation of how a social process unfolds, built from the data themselves, sampling participants as the developing theory requires. It would suit a question such as "How do families decide whether to report an infestation to their landlord?", which is a process with stages and decisions. For the question here, it is a poor fit. The team does not need a theory of a process; it needs a faithful account of what living with the insects is like. Theoretical sampling would also require repeated recruitment rounds, and each round inside a housing authority adds exposure risk for families.

Tradition 2: Ethnography

Ethnography studies a group's shared practices and meanings through extended observation, often over months, in the setting itself. It could illuminate how a building's social life responds to an infestation: hallway gossip, who is blamed, how maintenance crews are received. But extended presence in the buildings by researchers known to work with the landlord would be intrusive and could look like surveillance. Night is also the time the question cares about most, and it is a time no observer can share without crossing lines the protocol forbids.

Tradition 3: Phenomenology

Phenomenology seeks to describe the essence of a lived experience as the people living it understand it. Neubauer et al. (2019) distinguish descriptive phenomenology, which tries to set aside the researcher's assumptions and describe the experience as it appears, from interpretive or hermeneutic phenomenology, which treats the researcher's understanding as part of the interpretation. Sundler et al. (2019) set out a practical form of thematic analysis built on descriptive phenomenology, moving from open reading of whole interviews to meanings and then to themes, while staying close to participants' own words.

The Choice: Descriptive Phenomenology

Descriptive phenomenology fits best for three reasons. First, the question is about experience itself. Second, the team includes members who have worked with the housing authority and hold views about how families should respond to pests; the descriptive tradition's discipline of setting those views aside, recorded in a reflexive journal before and during analysis, protects caregivers' accounts from being bent toward the team's expectations. Third, the method requires only in-depth interviews, one or two per caregiver, held where the caregiver chooses, which keeps intrusion low.

Table 1

The Three Traditions Against This Question

Note. Comparison prepared for this course.

Participants and Data

Participants will be 12 to 15 caregivers drawn from cohort households with a confirmed infestation in the past year, chosen to vary by building, household size and whether treatment has ended. The number is not fixed in advance; interviewing stops when new interviews no longer add meanings, which the team will judge and document. Interviews open with one broad prompt, "Tell me about a night when you knew there were bed bugs in your home," followed only by prompts that ask the caregiver to say more. Interviews are held in the caregiver's preferred language, recorded with permission and transcribed without names or building identifiers.

Analysis

Two analysts, using the steps set out by Sundler et al. (2019), will read each transcript whole, then mark meaning units, group them into patterns across caregivers and describe themes in the caregivers' words. Disagreements are resolved by returning to the transcripts. A short summary of themes will be shared with willing participants to ask whether it matches their experience.

The Interview Guide

The guide is short on purpose. After the opening request to describe a night when the caregiver knew there were bed bugs in the home, the interviewer uses only follow-up prompts that stay inside the caregiver's account: "What happened next?", "How did that feel?", "What did your child tell you?" and "How did the morning go?" The guide holds two topic reminders, school mornings and talking with others about the insects, to be raised only if the caregiver has not reached them alone. There are no questions about cleaning, landlord response or treatment, because asking about them would steer caregivers toward the housing authority's concerns and away from their own experience. Interviews are expected to last 45 to 75 minutes. If a caregiver becomes upset, the interviewer pauses, offers to stop and gives a sheet listing free counseling and tenant advocacy services, whatever the caregiver decides about continuing.

The Researcher's Position

The interviewers will include one team member who has worked in resident services. That background helps with trust and with understanding the buildings, but it also carries assumptions, such as the belief that families delay reporting out of embarrassment. Before the first interview, each interviewer will write down what they expect to hear. During analysis those notes are read against the themes, and any theme that simply repeats an expectation must be supported by several caregivers' own words before it is kept. This is how the descriptive tradition's call to set assumptions aside is made practical rather than left as a promise.

Trustworthiness and Limits

Credibility rests on rich quotation, the reflexive journal and participant review of themes. Transferability is limited: these are caregivers in one authority's family buildings who agreed to join a cohort, and families who left because of infestation may have the most severe experiences and be the hardest to reach. The study will not estimate how common any experience is; that remains the cohort's job.

References

Neubauer, B. E., Witkop, C. T., & Varpio, L. (2019). How phenomenology can help us learn from the experiences of others. Perspectives on Medical Education, 8(2), 90-97. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40037-019-0509-2

Sundler, A. J., Lindberg, E., Nilsson, C., & Palmér, L. (2019). Qualitative thematic analysis based on descriptive phenomenology. Nursing Open, 6(3), 733-739. https://doi.org/10.1002/nop2.275

Susser, S. R., Perron, S., Fournier, M., Jacques, L., Denis, G., Tessier, F., & Roberge, P. (2012). Mental health effects from urban bed bug infestation (Cimex lectularius L.): A cross-sectional study. BMJ Open, 2(5), Article e000838. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2012-000838