Case study of program determinants

What is a program determinants case study?

This analysis aids in understanding what has happened in a specific context and what factors have played an important role in the implementation or maintenance of a Ciclovía Recreativa program. The methodology presented below permits a deep understanding of a phenomenon or series of situations in their context.

What is its purpose?

To understand retrospectively what has made the development of the program possible. Its goals are: 1) to generate recommendations for Ciclovías Recreativas being developed in other places, 2) to identify factors that are key to its maintenance and 3) to understand the specific conditions of each context.

Requirements

Before starting, you should have personnel with the capacity to carry out semi-structured interviews, which is this study's primary research method. You should try to have individuals with training in psychology, social sciences or public health.

What steps should be followed?

Step 1: Literature Review
You should first carry out a search and review of sources, with the goal of having an overview of the program, its history and identifying who has been or are the key actors involved in the process. These sources vary from program to program and include a wide range of documents such as: laws, decrees, plans, regulations, magazine or newspaper articles, radio or television programs, academic studies.

Step 2: Development of Interview Guides
Below you will find some examples of interview guides to be used with different actors. Guide No 1 was adapted from the guide developed by the Physical Activity Policy Analysis Network (PARPN) and the other guides were used for the case study of the Ciclovía of Bogotá.

Guide 1: Policy makers, government representatives, program administrators.

Guide 2: Users.

Guide 3: Operations Personnel: guides, community service workers.

Guide 4: Vendors.

Step 3: Informant Contact
It is recommended to select what are known as 'key informants'. These informants are people that can provide detailed information as they possess knowledge and/or experience with the topics. In this case, the informants can be users, representatives of different sectors of the government, program administrators, activists, operations personnel or volunteers.  Likewise, it is recommend that you make use of the 'snowball technique,' which consists of asking each informant for the names of other individuals that may be able to provide information on the program and, in this way, continue the recruitment of informants.

How many people should be interviewed? For the purposes of this study your goal should be to achieve 'information saturation.' This means to continue interviewing informants until you obtain no new information or categories of analysis.

Step 4: Conducting Interviews
The interviews should be recorded and later transcribed.  It is important to guarantee confidentiality and respect the privacy of the informant.

Step 5: Analysis of the Information
You should carry out a 'Framework Analysis.'

For more information, contact Adriana Díaz del Castillo: addiaz@uniandes.edu.co

Additional References can be found in the complete version of the manual (download)