CONNECT

(PI: YAEL SCHENKER)

Care Management by Oncology Nurses to Address Supportive Care Needs

USING QUALITATIVE CODING OF PROVIDER ENCOUNTERS TO CREATE A QUALITATIVE DATABASE FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

Website: A Cluster Randomized Trial of a Primary Palliative Care Intervention (CONNECT) for Patients with Advanced Cancer

CONNECT is a cluster-randomized controlled trial of the CONNECT (Care Management by Oncology Nurses to Address Supportive Care Needs) intervention. In the intervention, oncology nurses were in a care management approach to providing palliative care to patients with advanced cancer in Western Pennsylvania. As part of the intervention, encounters between the oncology nurses and patients were recorded, and later transcribed (with all identifying information redacted). Qual EASE is coding these interviews for topics and conversation elements occurring in the transcripts, such that the more than 200 transcripts generated by the study are pre-coded, or pre-organized, for future researchers who would like to use this data set to conduct qualitative inquiries.

Qualitative Coding to Organize Complex Textual Data

In order to organize the large and complex data generated by transcripts of nurse-patient encounters, Qual EASE has developed a codebook encompassing elements of nurse-patient communication and the topics of discussion in the transcribed encounters. This will allow future researchers who want to study these encounters to more easily find the topics they want to analyze qualitatively within the data set. For example, researchers who want to study how oncology nurses and patients discuss pain management will be able to locate all such discussions in the pre-coded data set, instead of having to start at square one with finding those discussions in thousands of pages of textual data.

Qual EASE will Develop a Project Codebook and Apply it to Over 200 Transcripts

Qualitative, Evaluation And Stakeholder Engagement (Qual EASE) will aid the project investigators in the coding of more than 200 patient encounters.

Codebook Development and Coding

While Qual EASE frequently handles qualitative analyses from start to finish (i.e., data collection, transcription, codebook development, coding, and analysis), in this project we welcome the opportunity to create a unique, topic-based codebook for this data set, and to “pre-code” the data using that codebook in order to facilitate future analyses.