The Qualitative Research Interest Group (QRIG) is an interprofessional group united by an interest in qualitative approaches to health research. Qualitative researchers at MaineHealth Institute for Research and the Center for Health Research, Kaiser Permanente Northwest co-host the group. All are welcome.
The group meets through Microsoft Teams on the fourth Thursday of every month at 4:00PM-5:00PM EDT.
The next Qualitative Research Interest Group Meeting will take place Thursday, September 25 at 4:00PM EDT (1:00PM PST).
Please feel free to forward this invite to anyone you believe will have interest. If you would like to be added to our mailing list and receive future emails, please email carmit.mcmullen@kpchr.org.
September 2025 Meeting Information
At the 2025 QRIG meeting, we’ll hear from MaineHealth’s own Research Nurse Specialist Zoe Samson RN, PhD, CDCES. She will present, “Exploring Patient and Family Perceptions of Nursing through DAISY Award Nominations and Natural Language Processing”
Because hospital performance metrics often emphasize deficits in care, recent efforts have aimed to better represent the full scope of nursing practice. For instance, Curley et al. (2024) identified nine domains encompassing physical, psychosocial, and interdisciplinary aspects of inpatient and critical care nursing. Using free-text data from ~41,000 DAISY Award nominations—an international program recognizing exemplary nursing care as described by patients and families—our team is exploring what patients and families value in nursing and whether these domains are reflected in their narratives. We will begin with a priori coding of a subset of nominations to inform a natural language processing model, which will then be applied across the full dataset to identify evidence of the nine domains.
We believe this meeting will be of interest to anyone curious about using NLP and machine learning approaches to analyze massive sets of qualitative data.