Table 1 Project's timeline
Step | Activities | Duration (month) |
|---|---|---|
Social assessment: Identifying the factors affecting the patients' quality of life | -Conducting 2 focus groups with the participation of patients, their caregivers and officials of MS Association | 5Â months |
Epidemiological assessment: Prioritizing the identified factors based on the importance level and variability | -Prioritizing the factors affecting the QOL in terms of importance and variability -Identifying the behavioral and environmental factors of the identified priority (the health problem) -Prioritizing each of these factors in terms of importance and variability | 1Â month |
Educational and ecological assessment: Identifying the predisposing, enabling and reinforcing factors | -Doing individual interviews with patients | 5Â months |
Instrument design and psychometrics | -Designing the basic draft of the questionnaire based on the data gathered through individual interviews in the last step -Removing the duplicate items and merging and modifying the other items -Examining the face validity and content validity of the initial proposed questionnaire -Examining the construct validity (performing exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis) -Examining the reliability | 3Â months |
Administrative and policy assessment and intervention alignment | -Conducting a pre-test survey -Conducting the educational needs assessment based on the information obtained from the pre-test results -Designing the educational intervention (determining the number of sessions, time duration of each session, resources, human resources, budget, educational materials, …) | 1 month |
Program implementation | -Conducting the intervention sessions based on the intervention plan designed in the previous step | 2Â months |
Waiting time to make behavioral changes | Â | 6Â months |
Evaluation | -Conducting process evaluation (assessing the learners' progress and their temporary achievement in the program goals, assessing training and trainer qualities, training contents, …) -Conduction impact evaluation (assessing the predisposing, enabling and reinforcing factors) -Conducting outcome evaluation (conducting post-test survey 6 months after the intervention) | 1 month |