Nominal Group Technique: An accessible and interactive method for conceptualizing the sexual self-advocacy of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities

Abstract

People with intellectual and developmental disabilities must often advocate for themselves in many facets of life, including sexuality. Because of this, sexual self-advocacy is an important concept to develop and apply to policy and practice. This paper provides a conceptualization of sexual self-advocacy, a view of sexuality formulated by adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities that is closely tied to the values of the SelfAdvocacy Movement. In describing the study process, this paper also puts forth the Participatory Action Research method, Nominal Group Technique, as an accessible method for gaining insight from adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The choice of Nominal Group Technique as a research method was motivated by several factors. Nominal Group Technique served to counterbalance many of the potential research difficulties when working with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, including the need for understandable, inclusive, and participatory ways to access data from people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and addressed the topic of sexual self-advocacy that is important to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

The Nominal Group Technique (NGT) as a Tool for Facilitating Pan-Disability Focus Groups and as a New Method for Quantifying Changes in Qualitative Data

“…The approach taken to ranking topics in this project verified that the similarity to real-world discussions and conversations found in the NGT does indeed provide an accessible method of participation for those with cognitive disabilities (Owen et al, 2016). However, it also revealed that it does so for those with other impairments too.…”

“…More recently, one of the areas where the NGTs' flexibility has proven to be of great value is as an accessible group research method involving people with cognitive disabilities. This included those with mild IDs (Bekkema, de Veer, Hertogh, & Francke, 2016;Roeden, Maaskant, & Curfs, 2011), those with ID and developmental disability (Friedman, Arnold, Owen, & Sandmanet, 2014;Owen et al, 2016), and those with aphasia (Garcia, Barrette, & Laroche, 2000;Hinckley, Boyle, Lombard, & Bartels-Tobin, 2014;Wallace et al, 2017). Although, "to date, NGTs have only been employed for people with ID and aphasia, a fraction of the spectrum of disabilities," and "more research is required to develop a greater understanding of additional NGT method considerations for other disabilities" (Lakhani, Watling, Zeeman, Wright, & Bishara, 2018, p. 2113 The project cited in this article sought to fill this void.…”

“…In previous QFGs, which contained only participants with cognitive disabilities, support individuals were included to assist participants (Lakhani et al, 2018) as a nonreasonable adjustment. Prior to their participation, these support individuals are always instructed that they are present to help participants but not to influence their responses (Owen et al, 2016). This approach was included in this project's QFG as well.…”

Nominal group technique for individuals with cognitive disability: a systematic review

“…Of the eight included studies, the majority (n = 6; 75%) were published in the previous two years The purpose of each NGT varied across the included studies. For studies including people with ID, the research questions focused on sexual self-advocacy [28,29], relationships with carers [19], end of life care [18,25], and participants' evaluation of healthcare tools available to them. [30] For studies including people with aphasia, the research questions centred on participants' impressions of the future of research in aphasia [27], perceptions of barriers to work reintegration [26], and what healthcare domains (e.g., communication; participation) were important to them.…”

Stakeholders’ engagement in co-producing policy-relevant knowledge to facilitate employment for persons with developmental disabilities

“…The facilitated discussions and voting process of the NGT minimised typical power dynamics of diverse stakeholder groups and allowed varied stakeholders to contribute equally to group discussions [48]. Five key advantages of NGT include (1) discouraging idea domination by more vocal or powerful members of the group [49], (2) group members' satisfaction as it requires little preparation and allows for immediate dissemination of results [50], 3limiting possible researchers' biases as data are interpreted by participants [51,52], (4) giving participants a sense of achievement as, by using this method, participants are more likely to reach clear outcomes [45], and (5) a money-, time-and resource-efficient technique as it generates a sizable amount of information within a short time frame using little resources in a single occasion [43,48]. We employed an adapted version of the NGT that entails five steps (see Additional file 1 for a detailed description of each step taken during our first event), as follows: (1) silent generation, (2) round robin engagement, (3) clarification, (4) categorisation and (5) ranking [50].…”