These 21 managers come from 13 care agencies in Shanghai. These care agencies vary in size and geographical coverage of service provision. As Figure 1 shows, 3 of them only provide services in one sub-district, 7 agencies have care stations over several districts in Shanghai, and 3 agencies provide care services in several cities in China (e.g. Shanghai, Beijing, and Chengdu). The sizes of recruited agencies vary from small local station to big chain companies, which represent different models of care agencies in urban China as well as different relationships between agencies and local governments.
Figure 1. Geographical coverage of care agencies
The public officials are recruited from four sub-districts (jiedao) in Shanghai (two sub-districts …show more content…
However, it was difficult to get in touch with care agencies and governments at the first stage. I did not recruit enough interviewees through the introduction of my personal contacts, which pushed me to change the recruitment schedule by applying snowballing sampling earlier. In the second stage, the snowballing sampling was applied to expand the variety of means to approach participants. In this case, I asked participants to introduce potential interviewees in my target sampling criteria. After getting the contact information of potential participants, I recruited interviewees via phone calls, personal visits, and emails. The following recruitment procedure was getting productive after I reached 15 interviewees. The 13 care agencies getting involved in this fieldwork is impressive for exploring the care market in Shanghai. At later stage of my fieldwork, it was very common that different interviewees introduce the same agencies that they think are very representative ones in the care market, but those agencies had been recruited already. In this situation, I was very satisfied that I could reach these representative agencies, but I still asked them to introduce other agencies to …show more content…
The topics include experiences on home care policy and practice, reasons and motivations for entering the care market (only for home care managers), views on the changing role of the market in home care and elder care, recognized impacts on service providers and the care system, challenges in delivering home care services, comments on the shifting balance of the care model, and expectations of the marketization of home care in
Figure 1. Geographical coverage of care agencies
The public officials are recruited from four sub-districts (jiedao) in Shanghai (two sub-districts …show more content…
However, it was difficult to get in touch with care agencies and governments at the first stage. I did not recruit enough interviewees through the introduction of my personal contacts, which pushed me to change the recruitment schedule by applying snowballing sampling earlier. In the second stage, the snowballing sampling was applied to expand the variety of means to approach participants. In this case, I asked participants to introduce potential interviewees in my target sampling criteria. After getting the contact information of potential participants, I recruited interviewees via phone calls, personal visits, and emails. The following recruitment procedure was getting productive after I reached 15 interviewees. The 13 care agencies getting involved in this fieldwork is impressive for exploring the care market in Shanghai. At later stage of my fieldwork, it was very common that different interviewees introduce the same agencies that they think are very representative ones in the care market, but those agencies had been recruited already. In this situation, I was very satisfied that I could reach these representative agencies, but I still asked them to introduce other agencies to …show more content…
The topics include experiences on home care policy and practice, reasons and motivations for entering the care market (only for home care managers), views on the changing role of the market in home care and elder care, recognized impacts on service providers and the care system, challenges in delivering home care services, comments on the shifting balance of the care model, and expectations of the marketization of home care in