IDENTIFYING THE POPULATION OF HEALTH MANAGERS IN ONE CANADIAN PROVINCE - A 2-STAGE APPROACH

This paper describes a two-stage approach suitable for identifying, an d taking inventory of a population of interest which does not have a r egulatory body complete with a central registry of personnel employed in the field. The paper discusses the process of developing a conceptu al and an operational definition of the population of interest as part of the overall methodology. Our population of interest was health man agers and our definition included ''those who manage the system'' as w ell as ''those who administer facilities''. A two-stage mail survey wa s then designed first, to identify the individuals, and second, to sur vey at a later date the individuals thus identified The second stage, in turn, was done at two levels. The first was a census survey to prov ide a socio-demographic profile of health managers; and the second mov e in-depth level was a random sample survey to provide additional info rmation on management roles and competency requirements. The methodolo gy is quite simple and can be generalized to other settings where the population frame for conducting a survey is necessary but not availabl e. Recommendations on how and where to improve this methodology are di scussed. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd