Addressing Methodological Challenges in Large Communication Datasets: Collecting and Coding Longitudinal Interactions in Home Hospice Cancer Care

摘要

In this paper, we present strategies for collecting and coding a large longitudinal communication dataset collected across multiple sites, consisting of over 2000 hours of digital audio recordings from approximately 300 families. We describe our methods within the context of implementing a large-scale study of communication during cancer home hospice nurse visits, but this procedure could be adapted to communication datasets across a wide variety of settings. This research is the first study designed to capture home hospice nurse-caregiver communication, a highly understudied location and type of communication event. We present a detailed example protocol encompassing data collection in the home environment, large-scale, multi-site secure data management, the development of theoretically-based communication coding, and strategies for preventing coder drift and ensuring reliability of analyses. Although each of these challenges have the potential to undermine the utility of the data, reliability between coders is often the only issue consistently reported and addressed in the literature. Overall, our approach demonstrates rigor and provides a “how-to” example for managing large, digitally-recorded data sets from collection through analysis. These strategies can inform other large-scale health communication research.