Project Overview
This project focused on identification and enhanced understanding of the specific needs and potential barriers and facilitators for successful implementation of mindfulness-based programming for firefighters and emergency medical service providers through qualitative study design of semi-structured interviews. This research was funded by the Ohio Occupational Safety and Health Research Program of the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation (OBWC), project # WSIC23-220513-011.
Data and Data Collection Overview
A phenomenological qualitative study design with semi-structured interviews of 45-60 minutes was used to gain insights into the lived experiences of firefighters and emergency medical service providers and to elicit their perceptions regarding barriers and facilitators for engaging in mindfulness activities. Eleven career firefighters and emergency medical providers (EMS) of different ranks, ranging from front-line firefighters to fire chiefs, were recruited based on their ability to take part in an in-depth interview to discuss stress points related to their work as first responders from fire stations across the state of Ohio.
The interview guide questions were designed to specifically consider the unique context of the workplace environments, where the uncertainty of an emergency call can limit how trainings or interventions are planned and delivered. Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study and no records of personal information were kept. This study protocol was approved by The Ohio State University Institutional Review Board (Project Number #2022B0254, Date of approval: September 8, 2022). The respondents offered their thoughts and feedback related to mindfulness training, mindfulness practices, and the use of a stress reduction smartphone application that would incorporate mindfulness activities during work.
The Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) was used to guide the analysis and categorize themes relative to barriers and facilitators of implementation success and sustainability. Data analysis consisted of two coding phases applied to the interview transcripts. The first phase entailed open coding completed by two study team members who independently coded each interview using NVivo R1 (2020) software to identify general concepts, patterns, or potential phenomena identified through transcript review. The second phase entailed two coders working together to deductively code the data from the transcripts related to the domains in the CFIR that included intervention characteristics, outer setting, inner setting, characteristics of the involved individuals, and the implementation process. Upon completion of the two coding phases, the results were discussed as a team to support a comprehensive thematic analysis. Conflicting perspectives and results were resolved through iterative discussions with the final thematic structure and presentation of results representing a consensus across the entire research team.
Selection and Organization of Shared Data
The data files shared here encompass the 11 de-identified interview transcripts with firefighters. The file names contain a number which represents the order in which a participant entered the study. The initial set of participants recruited also contained police officers, but the researchers determined that the workflows, work practices, and department protocols between these agencies differ in ways that made a unified project infeasible. Subsequently, the researchers focused on firefighters/EMS as they worked more as a team and the fire departments were ready and willing to support the study intervention. The skipped numbers in the file sequence represent the few interviews conducted with police officers and not included in this deposit.
The project also included an online survey, which only dealt with the intervention part of the study, not the initial qualitative information gathering of which the manuscript is focused on and hence not shared to QDR as part of this deposit either.
The documentation files shared consist of the original informed consent used, the interview questionnaire, the NVivo codebook developed during analysis, this Data Narrative and an administrative README file. |
