Case: You are a dental hygiene instructor in your local community college dental hygiene program teaching the community oral health course. The dean of the health sciences division would like to implement a trial run of an interprofessional education (IPE) initiative involving dental hygiene and the other healthcare professions education programs in the college. You are asked to coordinate the development and administration of dental hygiene’s involvement through your community course and other community experiences in clinical and other courses. The intent is to place a group of dental hygiene students in the incoming class in the IPE program and use questionnaires, interviews, and examinations to collect and analyze process and outcomes data over their 2 years in the program to determine outcomes. Outcomes data will include students’ learning of the required community oral health content in addition to their understanding, perceptions, attitudes, and future interest in relation to interprofessional collaborative practice (ICP). The data will be analyzed to evaluate the value and success of the program and to determine if it should be continued and expanded or discontinued after the initial 2 years.

Question: The group of students in the IPE program represents a sample. What type of sample is best to use to achieve the highest level of external validity in the evaluation of this trial-run IPE program?

Question

Case:  You are a dental hygiene instructor in your local community college dental hygiene program teaching the community oral health course. The dean of the health sciences division would like to implement a trial run of an interprofessional education (IPE) initiative involving dental hygiene and the other healthcare professions education programs in the college. You are asked to coordinate the development and administration of dental hygiene’s involvement through your community course and other community experiences in clinical and other courses. The intent is to place a group of dental hygiene students in the incoming class in the IPE program and use questionnaires, interviews, and examinations to collect and analyze process and outcomes data over their 2 years in the program to determine outcomes. Outcomes data will include students’ learning of the required community oral health content in addition to their understanding, perceptions, attitudes, and future interest in relation to interprofessional collaborative practice (ICP). The data will be analyzed to evaluate the value and success of the program and to determine if it should be continued and expanded or discontinued after the initial 2 years.

Question: The group of students in the IPE program represents a sample. What type of sample is best to use to achieve the highest level of external validity in the evaluation of this trial-run IPE program?

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

In evaluating how to maximize external validity for a trial-run IPE program, the sampling method matters for generalizability across populations and settings.
Option 1: Convenience. This approach selects participants who are easiest to access. While practical, it introduces selection bias and limits the ability to generalize findings to other students or programs, reducing external validity.
Option 2: Random. Random sampling gives each member of the target population an equal chance of selection, which helps balance known and unknown confounders across groups and supports generalization beyond the study sample. This approach is the strongest for enhancing external validity in many evaluation designs.
Option 3: Purposive or judgmental. This method intentionally selects participants based on specific characteristics or expertise. Although it can ensure relevance or depth of information, it narrows representativeness and hinders broad applicability of results to the wider student body or other institutions.
Option 4: Systematic. Systematic sampling selects members at regular intervals from a list. If the sampling frame is unbiased and the list isn’t carrying hidden patterns, it can be efficient and reasonably representative, but it may still fall short of the randomness of true simple random sampling and could introduce bias if periodicity aligns with underlying differences.
Overall, to achieve the highest external validity for evaluating how well the IPE program would generalize to other cohorts and contexts, random sampling is preferred, followed by systematic approaches as a secondary option if randomization is impractical.

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