Recruitment & Data Collection

All UCalgary faculty, staff, and students have free access to the Qualtrics online survey platform.

There are a variety of digital recorders that you can use for quality recording of interviews and focus groups. The Nursing Research Office recommends Olympus recorders

If you want to record an interview over a landline telephone you will need an adapter that hooks into the telephone and plugs into your audio recorder. 

If you want to record an interview via Zoom, there are recording options available for audio and video recording (note that you must follow the procedure described in your approved ethics application). See below for more information on Zoom settings for audio recording.

 

Faculty members may request access to our list of recommended transcriptionists.

Determining the sample size for a particular qualitative study will depend on the methodology, conceptual framework, sample, etc. If you’re a student, discussing this issue with your supervisor and committee would be a good idea as they will have experience with this.

See below for some articles to get you thinking about your sample size for a qualitative research project:

Electronic data should be both encrypted and password protected, and stored on a secure UCalgary or AHS server, and not on an individual computer. 

The different options and their associated classification levels are listed on the ‘Collaboration, Storage, and File Share’ section of the IT Service Now website.

For students, you may use OneDrive for Business.

  • Go to the website listed above.
  • Scroll down and click on ‘OneDrive for Business’ for access and use instructions.

For faculty and staff, you have access to OneDrive for Business as well, along with Sharepoint, network file shares, etc. All of these allow you to share files with team members. Please visit the website above for more information about each option; ordering information is found at the bottom of the page.

If you require assistance with data storage, please contact support@hpc.ucalgary.ca.

Be sure to include all these details in your ethics application so that the ethics board is aware of the security measures you are taking.

We recommend going to the Zoom recording settings section and disabling “local recording” and turning OFF Cloud recording sharing. This means that the Zoom session will be recorded to the Zoom platform in your account. You can then download using the “audio only” button in the “Recordings” menu. You should download to a secure UCalgary server/platform (e.g., Research Team SharePoint, a student’s OneDrive for Business account, etc).

Be sure to include all these details in your ethics application so that the ethics board is aware of the security measures you are taking.