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Table 1 Strategies adopted to ensure quality in the present HIVOST acceptability study

From: Acceptability of HIV oral self-test among truck drivers and youths: a qualitative investigation from Pune, Maharashtra

Rigour Criteriaa

Purpose

Original Strategies

Strategies applied in our study to achieve rigour

Credibility

To establish confidence that the results (from the perspective of the participants) are true, credible and believable.

• Field assistants chosen from the local community played a crucial role in engaging the participants for the IDIs and FGDs

• Prior experience of the field assistant in working with truckers and self-help groups helped us in conducting quality IDIs and FGDs against a backdrop of trust and rapport.

• Interviewing process and techniques

• Research team members conversant with the local socio-cultural context used the guides and probes in mock sessions and received inputs for modifications as needed. Place of interactions between the researchers and participants were also chosen as per participants’ convenience ensuring privacy and confidentiality

• Establishing investigators’ authority

• The research team received multiple exposures on research methodology during the study period. Orientation programs were also conducted by experts from social science background so that everyone was well versed with the methodology applied

• Collection of referential adequacy materials

• The field assistant and interviewers filled the field notes and debriefing forms at the end of each session. This helped the entire team to conduct ongoing and final analysis, and adopt inductive investigation approach.

• Peer debriefing

• Debriefing sessions were held with the research supervisor and colleagues; which helped in clarifying doubts and resolving conflicts around coding (if any)

Dependability

To ensure the findings of this qualitative inquiry are repeatable if the inquiry occurred within the same cohort of participants, coders and context.

• Rich description of the study methods

• Detailed draft of the implementation plan is available.

• Establishing an audit trail

• Information obtained from earlier cohorts of participants (truckers in particular) were contrasted against the latter cohorts to examine if saturation point was being reached through repeatability and also to record rare points of views.

• Stepwise replication of the data

• While truckers were recruited from three different halt points, responses were contrasted to examine replication. Youths recruited from different clubs or locations similarity offered opportunity for such comparisons.

Confirmability

To extend the confidence that the results would be confirmed or corroborated by other researchers.

• Reflexivity

• We implemented reflexive notes and also held weekly investigators’ meetings.

• Triangulation

• Several triangulation techniques (IDIs vs GDs, data sources such as transcript, field notes and debriefing notes) were used in the current investigation to obtain comprehensive views around the domains explored

Transferability

To extend the degree to which the results can be generalized or transferred to other contexts or settings.

• Purposeful and convenient sampling to form a nominated sample

• We used different data collection approaches to capture voices from the communities including common and rare point of views, with potential for their transferability to similar socio-cultural settings

• Data saturation

•In order to identify if data saturation was reached, we carried out 8 to 10 or more interactions and also had on-going analysis.

  1. aCriteria proposed by Guba and Lincoln were used [23]