For my sampling method, I will be utilizing interpretive content analyses on the 25 stories per era that I will be sampling from. This will allow me to be able to identify themes within stories about suicide before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. I will be utilizing both qualitative and quantitative approaches to my sampling. In the qualitative approach, I will gain insight into how themes change over the different eras before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. In the quantitative approach to my sampling, I will measure the number of times each theme is mentioned within the stories about suicide in each era before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. I utilized a code book to easily analyze my data sample.
For my research, I will be sampling from the website The Mighty. The Mighty is a platform that allows people to share their experiences and connect with others about mental health, chronic illness, rare diseases, disability, and more. The Mighty’s goal is to help people with health challenges and their loved ones better manage their condition. The Mighty has over 3.5 million registered users and is sharing more than 50,000 personal health stories. (The Mighty 2023).
The Mighty allows users to view stories, posts, and videos, however, in 2018 The Mighty allowed users to view stories, thoughts, and questions. My sampling frame will consist only of stories, to focus on one consistent medium. The Mighty also allows users to filter their content by topic. My sampling frame will consist only of stories that The Mighty has placed on the topic “suicide”. Additionally. the sampling frame that I will be looking at is the time period of 2018 to 2023. I will group 2018-2019 as my pre-COVID-19 pandemic era, 2020-2021 as my during the COVID-19 pandemic era, and 2022-2023 as my post-COVID-19 pandemic era.
To gather my sample, I used The Mighty to gather blog posts about suicide. I searched the blogs by the topic “Suicide” and then filtered my search to just stories and sorted the results by the latest. I then scrolled through stories and pasted all of the stories under the topic of suicide into an Excel file. I scrolled through the stories until I reached 2017. I created three columns of sample data one for 2018-2019, one for 2020-2021, and one for 2022-2023. Each column contained links to all the respective years’ blog posts. I then used a random number generator to generate a list of 25 items ranging from the number of story links I had for each column. This allowed me to collect a simple random sample of 25 blog posts from 2018-2019, 25 blog posts from 2020-2021, and 25 blog posts from 2022-2023. I utilized a simple random sample so that all of the blog posts had an equal chance of being selected, and to eliminate bias in my selection of blog posts. I concluded with an Excel file with 25 stories per time period.