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).