Data Collection
Qualitative data were collected through audio-recorded, semi-structured interviews with 15 participants (10 women; 5 men) after they completed the SHARP-PWP program. Participant ages ranged from 48 - 81 (M = 65.1; SD = 9.5) with all but one participant identifying as white (White = 14; Other=1), and all but two participants indicating they were married (Married = 13; Widowed = 2). In terms of the number of years since diagnosis, the sample ranged from 0 - 5 (M = 2.2; SD = 1.21). On the last day of the group, all participants were given a volunteer form. Participants were free to volunteer their name to participate in an interview with no guarantee that their name would be selected. To select a representative and diverse pool of participants from the volunteers, the researchers utilized maximum variation sampling (Creswell, 2013) based upon diversity of age, gender, and PD severity (as assessed by the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale; Goetz et al., 2008). From those who volunteered, 15 were selected based upon these predetermined criteria and only these participants were contacted for an interview based upon the following further criteria: (a) the participant could articulate their experience in the group and (b) they had missed no more than one session. The first criterion was particularly important to obtaining a nuanced understanding of process as some participants tend to be more “articulate, thoughtful, and eager to share their abstractions and analyses of a situation, while others tend to be more concrete and more comfortable with events than interpretations” (Thorne et al., 1997, p. 174).