Berapa Jumlah Informan Riset Kualitatif?

by Adi Susilo Jahja · 30 October 2017

Berbagai jawaban.

Jika saturated level (tingkat kejenuhan) telah dicapai, boleh berhenti. Disebut jenuh yaitu bila informan berikutnya telah memberikan informasi yang sama dengan informan sebelumnya, tidak ada informasi baru yang diperoleh.

“Guest, Bunce, and Johnson (2006) propose that saturation often occurs around 12 participants in homogeneous groups. This is consistent with my own experience during a recent CEO study where saturation occurred around 11 participants (Latham, 2013). To ensure that you have saturation you have to go beyond the point of saturation to make sure no new major concepts emerge in the next few interviews or observations. Consequently, 15 as a minimum for most qualitative interview studies works very well when the participants are homogeneous. Homogeneous means a particular “position” or level (e.g., top level executives) in the organization, a particular type of employee (e.g., customer service representatives), so on and so forth. For a particular group, saturation often occurs between 12 and 15. However, if you are interviewing different types of participants then you may need 12 to 15 of each type in order to reach saturation.”

John Latam. Qualitative Sample Size – How Many Participants is Enough?

http://johnlatham.me/many-participants-enough/

Kurang lebih 10 orangpun sudah mencapai kejenuhan data (saturated level). Ada yang dengan 5 informan, justifikasinya diterima oleh para penguji disertasi. Yang penting wawancara dengan informan dilakukan sekurang-kurangnya dua kali. Tidak cukup dengan sekali saja, karena mungkin saja ada pertanyaan-pertanyaan yang tertinggal atau ada informasi yang diperlukan, belum diperoleh. Biasanya pertemuan pertama kali ada hal yang tertinggal, atau orang yang diwawancarai belum bersedia berbagi, masih malu-malu, tidak ada waktu, atau hambatan lain. Maka pertemuan kedua perlu diatur, dan setelah wawancara agar membuat transkripnya.

-the range of 6-8 informants was satisfies the requirements (Smith, 2003).
-data becomes saturated after the first twelve informants, and even the basic themes were proposed after as early 6 informants (Guest et al, 2008)
-Lincoln & Guba (1985) recommend sampling until a point of saturation or redundancy is reached.

It seems the common agreement is stopped once data is saturated! But as a quali reseacher, it is critical to “un blackbox” the be-all-end-all saturation. Personally, between the common thematic analysis and the grounded theory approach ( GT as method, not theory), GT approach which involves open coding then axial coding, and constant comparison is more robust and transparent in illustrating the elusive “saturation point”. Need to be cautious that the quality of saturation is contingency of one’s skills/experience/etc, thus the ever popular and confusing question of sample size