Valentina Petrova has an MA from the Jackson School of International Studies and an MPA from the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance at the University of Washington. Since 2019, she works as a Qualitative Team Lead at VA Puget Sound Health Care System where she leads qualitative teams through research cycles including proposal writing, data collection, coding, analysis, and findings dissemination. Her work also includes training primary investigators and other research staff on data collection (grounded interviewing style) and analysis. Additionally, she teaches qualitative data analysis (QDA) software through her own entity, QDA Consulting.
Talk
May 16, 2023
12:30-2:00p.m.
Thomson Hall, Room 317
In this interactive presentation, Ms. Petrova will examine how qualitative research is conducted at VA Puget Sound’s Health Services Research & Development (HSR&D). She will illustrate how staying flexible in every stage of a project – from planning, through methods selection, data collection, and even analysis – is key to addressing real-life obstacles in health services projects. Ms. Petrova will walk through some of the challenges faced by the team conducting a Virtual Care Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (VC QUERI) project which sought to compare VA’s tele-mental health offering to community care mental health services – and for which interview data collection coincided with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. From a complicated sampling and recruitment strategy, to a surprising pattern in the quantitative data, the qualitative team remained responsive to the changing context and needs of the project. The qualitative work offers VA operational partners valuable insights on Veterans’ lived experiences with mental health services at the VA and in the community; the findings can inform future decisions on investment in each option.
About the series
Join the UW-QUAL program for quarterly From Data to Decision-Making events, a speaker series that follows the qualitative research process from data collection to data analysis to policy-relevant impacts of research findings across a variety of fields.
